The Jewish world is changing. Our organizations and institutions are not.
Jews still want Judaism, but many of us no longer want the institutions and organizations offering it — and that distinction will determine the Jewish future.
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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
For most of Jewish history, Judaism was not something Jews had to be persuaded to participate in. It was simply the world our ancestors inhabited.
The synagogue was not one option among many for finding community. It was the center of communal life.
Jewish education was not an extracurricular activity competing with soccer, piano lessons, and YouTube. It was how knowledge, memory, language, and identity passed from one generation to the next.
The Jewish calendar did not have to fight its way onto a family’s schedule. It organized the schedule.
It did not mean that every Jew was observant, learned, or enthusiastic. Jews have been arguing with Judaism for as long as there has been Judaism.
But even rebellion usually occurred inside a recognizably Jewish world. A Jew might refuse to attend synagogue, mock the rabbi, eat what his parents considered forbidden, or abandon religious belief altogether. Yet the community, the customs, the language, and the rhythms of Jewish life still surrounded him.
Judaism did not need a “marketing strategy” because Judaism had something far more powerful: spiritual, ethical, historical, philosophical, and social gravity.
Modernity weakened that gravity. Emancipation opened the doors of European society. Migration scattered families across continents. Secularism offered identities unconnected to religion as we know it. Jews moved out of dense Jewish neighborhoods and into broader national cultures. The old world of embedded Judaism began to dissolve.
Then came the Holocaust.
After the destruction of European Jewry, Jewish participation acquired a different meaning. Judaism was no longer merely inherited. It became an obligation.
You joined the synagogue because Jews had to rebuild. You sent your children to Jewish school because Jewish children had been murdered. You donated to Jewish institutions because the Jewish People had nearly been destroyed. You supported Israel because Jews could never again be left defenseless. You married Jewish because continuity itself had become a form of resistance.
This was, in a sense, obligatory Judaism: Judaism sustained not only by faith, learning, joy, or community, but by a profound sense of duty.
Its emotional force is understandable. In many ways, it was necessary. The generation that survived the Holocaust and the generations immediately after it faced an extraordinary task: They had to rebuild shattered communities, restore institutions, rescue Jews in danger, establish schools, fund synagogues, support Israel, and prove that the Jewish story had not ended in the death camps.
They succeeded, and we must acknowledge that.
Across the Jewish world, synagogues were built, federations expanded, day schools opened, summer camps flourished, community centers appeared, and Israel grew from a vulnerable new state into the center of Jewish national life. “Obligatory Judaism” helped mobilize people and money on a scale that would have been difficult to achieve through inspiration alone.
But a strategy that works in one era can become an obstacle in the next. As I learned from one of my entrepreneur friends, “What got you here won’t necessarily get you there.”
Many Jewish institutions never noticed that the emotional contract had changed. They continued speaking to Jews as though participation itself were a duty and the institution’s existence were enough to justify support.
Pay your membership dues because Jews belong to synagogues. Send your children to day school because Jewish parents support Jewish education. Donate because the community needs you. Attend because your parents and grandparents did. Join because there are fewer of us than there used to be. Show up because antisemitism is rising.
The underlying message is rarely stated openly, but it is felt: A “good Jew” participates, and if you do not participate, you are in essence helping Judaism disappear.
That is obligatory marketing. And in 2026, it is failing. In fact, it has been failing for quite some time, and it is the kind of failing that does not come in the form of a sudden powerful earthquake, but through death by a thousand cuts.
The problem is not that Jews suddenly stopped caring about Judaism. The problem is that Jewish institutions are operating as though Jews have no alternatives.
Jews no longer need to join the synagogue nearest to their home merely because it is the synagogue nearest to their home. They can watch services streamed from Jerusalem, New York, London, Sydney, or Buenos Aires. They can attend one congregation for the High Holy Days, another for Friday-night dinner, and an independent gathering when they want music, learning, community, or people closer to their own age.
They can listen to a Torah class while driving to work. They can study Jewish history through a podcast. They can join a virtual Hebrew course taught from Israel. They can follow rabbis, scholars, historians, and educators without ever entering the institutions that once provided exclusive access to them.
The pandemic accelerated this change, but it did not create it. COVID taught millions of people that physical institutions were not the only places where meaningful participation could occur. Once people became comfortable learning, praying, meeting, and organizing online, the local institution lost its monopoly.
The same is true of Jewish social life.
In major cities, Jews can choose among independent Shabbat dinners, cultural salons, young-professional gatherings, holiday parties, political organizations, learning groups, Israel-related events, volunteer projects, and informal communities built through social media and group chats.
Many of these gatherings have no permanent building, no large administrative staff, no annual membership fee, and no expectation that attendees will commit to one institution for life. They simply create an experience people want to attend.
Jewish education has changed as well. Parents no longer face a choice between an expensive Jewish day school and complete Jewish ignorance. There are online courses, children’s videos, Hebrew apps, digital libraries, family programs, tutors, camps, after-school initiatives, and educational channels devoted to Jewish stories, holidays, history, and tradition.
None of these is necessarily a complete replacement for day school. A YouTube channel cannot replicate the immersive environment of a serious Jewish education. A streaming service cannot visit you in the hospital. A WhatsApp group cannot always sustain a family through bereavement. An independent dinner series may disappear when its organizer becomes busy or moves away.
Institutions and organizations with physical addresses still matter, but they are no longer entitled to participation merely because they are institutions and organizations.
That distinction is everything.
Too many Jewish leaders interpret declining membership as proof that younger Jews are apathetic, selfish, assimilated, or insufficiently committed. This explanation is emotionally convenient because it protects the leaders and their organizations from scrutiny. If Jews are the problem, the leaders and organizations do not have to change.
But Jews are not withdrawing from every form of Jewish life. Many are withdrawing from forms that are overly expensive (and even unaffordable), impersonal, bureaucratic, uninspiring, or built around guilt.
A synagogue that charges thousands of dollars a year cannot simply insist that synagogue membership is important. It has to demonstrate why membership in that particular synagogue is worth the cost, why the juice is worth the squeeze.
A day school cannot rely indefinitely on the argument that Jewish continuity requires Jewish education. Parents may agree with the principle while still concluding that the school is too expensive, academically weak, socially narrow, or unresponsive to their child’s needs.
A federation cannot assume that donors will give simply because previous generations gave. It has to explain what it accomplishes, where the money goes, and why it is better positioned than the dozens of organizations donors can now support directly.
An organization that responds to competition by demanding greater loyalty has misunderstood the market. Loyalty is usually the result of value, not a substitute for it.
This does not mean Jewish life should become nothing more than a collection of consumer experiences. Judaism asks things of us. Community requires commitment. Serious learning requires interest, engagement, discipline. Synagogues, schools, camps, charities, and communal organizations cannot survive if everyone participates only when it is effortless or entertaining.
But obligation cannot be the opening offer anymore. Organizations must first create belonging, meaning, trust, and value. Only then can they ask for commitment.
That requires a shift from “you owe us” to “here is what we can build together.” It means treating a first-time attendee not as a future dues payment, but as a person whose presence matters. It means designing services people can understand and participate in, rather than assuming they will tolerate boredom because boredom is traditional. It means providing transparent pricing instead of making people feel ashamed for asking what membership costs.
It means creating entry points for Jews who are single, intermarried, politically homeless, religiously uncertain, newly curious, or unable to afford the standard package. It means recognizing that Jews who participate in several different communities are not necessarily disloyal. They may be assembling a Jewish life that no single organization is capable of providing at a high level across the board.
Above all, it means giving Jews a positive reason to be Jewish.
For decades, much of Jewish organizational messaging has been built around fear: fear of assimilation, fear of intermarriage, fear of demographic decline, fear of antisemitism, fear pertaining to Israel, fear that the next generation will disappear.
Some of those fears are legitimate. Jewish history provides no shortage of reasons to remain vigilant. But fear is a poor foundation for a flourishing civilization.
People may respond to a threat by showing up once. They build their lives around places that offer meaning, friendship, beauty, pride, depth, and purpose.
The Holocaust can explain why Jewish survival matters. It cannot, by itself, explain what Jewish survival is for. Antisemitism can remind Jews that much of the world still sees us as Jews, no matter how assimilated or helpful we are to non-Jewish communities and causes. It cannot teach us why we should love being Jewish, just like the murder of millions of Jews cannot be the primary argument for Jewish life.
The age of “obligatory Judaism” is ending because obligation has lost its power to compel participation. But that does not have to mean the end of Jewish commitment. It can mark the beginning of something more demanding and more durable: chosen Judaism.
Chosen Judaism is not casual Judaism. It is not Judaism emptied of responsibility. It is Judaism in which responsibility follows attachment rather than being used as a substitute for it. It is the Judaism of people who attend because they are moved, learn because they are curious, contribute because they deeply identify with the mission, and remain because they have found a community they cannot imagine losing.
This new era will be harder for institutions and organizations and donors who are used to supporting them. They will have to compete. They will have to listen. They will have to justify their costs, improve their programs, welcome outsiders, abandon ineffective traditions, and distinguish between what is timeless and what is merely familiar.
Some institutions will not survive, and that is not necessarily a Jewish tragedy. Preserving every Jewish organization is not the same as preserving Judaism. Institutions are tools. When they serve Jewish life, they should be strengthened. When they exist mainly to perpetuate themselves, their Jewish name does not make them sacred.
The institutions and organizations that thrive will be those that understand that Jews still want what Jewish life has always offered: faith and spirituality, community, memory, wisdom, ritual, identity, argument, transcendence, and a place within a story larger than themselves.
Current Jewish leadership (speaking broadly) was created during a time of peace and optimism, where (excepting Israel) the biggest issues involved political alliances, funding streams and the occasional battle against Jew-hating Aryan rednecks who lacked institutional power and were never taken too seriously.
But the current cohort are too old, cossetted and deluded to realize what they're up against and imagine that with a few well-written editorials and election wins, we (Jews and other Americans) can return to the safe and sane 1990s. All these people are far too comfortable (both in thought and social position) and too tolerant and forgiving for our current moment.
Also, I think few of us modern Americans are aware of the totalizing and shape-shifting nature of Jew hate and how it spreads like a wildfire (through single brains, groups and societies) and quickly turns conspiratorial then eliminationist, where all Jews become posited as enemies against some bright, utopian future. I always thought being anti-Jewish was in the same family as other forms of bigotry, but the past 2ish years have proved me very wrong. Ginning up a mob to attack, injure and ostracise Jews seems to get groups to cohere and get their blood flowing like no other hatred or cause. It stands in a class by itself when it comes to mass manias and other forms of mental derangement.
Peacetime leaders rarely make good wartime leaders. The Tikkum Olam consensus needs to be abandoned (you can't revive a corpse) and the New York Times "As A Jew" anti-Israel Jews need to named and shamed. Future Jewish leaders will need to get as angry about professsional Judas goats like Peter Beinart and Masha Gessen and their ilk or Ezra Klein whitewashing both Mahmoud Khalil and Hasan Piker (and never once challenging them) as the older leaders did about Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell.
The 20th century consensus is dead. The 21st century will need young, savvy fighters who are immune to all the slanders that will be hurled at them. But Jews and other supporters of Israel will have one important weapon on their side: the truth.
Institutions are tools. And as we are witnessing in the recent decades far too many of them are giving in to the outside pressures to work against their own people.