The Organized Jewish World's Failure to Effectively Collaborate

October 7th exposed a harsh reality: We need a significant culture shift across Jewish organizations of all kinds.

Then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett addresses the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in 2022. (photo: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

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This is a guest essay written by Gary Wexler, the Chair of the Global Jewish Communication Alliance.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Two roads have diverged in the communication war between the Jews and our enemies. And I am no longer certain which should be the road less traveled.

Should we aim for unity or diversity?

In the beginning of August, I fell into this conundrum at a workshop organized by the Jewish National Fund for Jewish organizations to collaborate on strategies for the next semester’s actions across college campuses. While observing the sentiments of the participants in this meeting, the importance of the community choosing which road they will pursue emerged with what I now believe is urgency.

Road One: Can Jews create a wide extensive, seriously collaborative culture, coordinating with one another, believing it is the only way to win this communication battle?

Or, Road Two: Do we assume or, even better, do we know that the Jewish world is too fragmented to ever create a wide, extensive collaboration? Instead, do we just evolve this communication effort with smaller funding coalitions, leaving the battle up to individual organizations, each one acting on its own creative spirit? Competing with one another through a Startup Nation entrepreneurial culture?

In attendance were leaders of major national organizations and smaller campus groups. The issue at hand is among our most important. Knowing how the organized Jewish world functions (and dysfunctions), I told Jewish National Fund that I intended to conduct a Zoom interview with every participant prior to the event. I wanted to get to know them personally and learn firsthand what they think is happening on campuses.

It was quite an education.

The interviewees first told me the valiant efforts they are struggling to implement in this fraught environment, the countless hours and weekends required, the volunteer recruitment needs, and their interactions with administrations.

But then the conversations veered off into a topic I hoped would not come up during a time that I believe demands unity and participation at the highest levels, as well as the grassroots. I found that many organizations would not be sending their top people.

Why? They had some concerns.

“Who is Jewish National Fund to be doing this?” they asked. “Why are they jumping in to organize this collaboration?” “We’re the ones who organize collaborations. It’s our role.” “We’re the central organization in this effort, not Jewish National Fund.” “We’ve already held a collaboration. What will be different about this one?”

Here we are in an existential Jewish battle, and we are concerning ourselves with who is cooking the kugel and couscous that bring everyone to the table.

And it is not as if Jewish National Fund — one of the largest, most highly funded and extensive Jewish organizations in America — lacks the credentials.

But I expected all this.

My strategy was to allow the participants to get out all their resistances, so they could enter the retreat with an open mind. I explained the reasoning behind Jewish National Fund’s plan and emphasized that they understand this was an urgent issue demanding a wide collaboration. And no one else had stepped forward to do it in a strategic and creative way, focused on communication ideas.

Isn’t this what a good Jewish organization should be doing?

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The day of the retreat arrived. About 15 organizations showed up, some represented by several people. There were maybe two CEOs among them. There were a few students and some Jewish National Fund staff members. There were also 10 Jewish National Fund donors. Having planned breakout groups, I brought in five facilitators, all communication professionals, each one a serious Jew and Zionist, from the Global Jewish Communication Alliance, which I helped to form shortly after October 7th. Altogether, there were about 45 people in the room.

Some organizational participants came in very open. Others were not so open. It was clear from their body language and the looks on their faces. We are a very transparent people.

Day One, a day of collaborative strategy and idea creation, went very well. Jews are excellent at strategy and creativity. I believe it is in our genes and something we all share. Having taught university classes on team creativity, I knew I could bring them together to collaborate on idea creation.

It was Day Two when our non-collaborative natures surfaced: Implementation Day. This was planned to bring us all together, to begin collaborating on how we would work as a team, a coordinated army to defeat our communication war enemies. This was a challenge.

Several of the organizations again insisted that this was their “territory.” Also, the legitimate confessions of how overwhelmed the staff members of many of these organizations are and their inability to take on yet another responsibility — collaboration — surfaced.

Each was focused on their organization’s individual missions and actions and had little time or energy to see a bigger collaborative picture. Several thought collaboration meant a WhatsApp group, keeping each other informed of what they are doing, and asking for best-practices help when needed.

Hearing all this first-hand raised several questions. Can we win if we are not all coordinated on this battlefield, like any “army” should be? Are we carrying out this critical communication mission — that we are currently losing — like kids playing video games? Working individually, were the participants missing the forest for the trees? Or, is non-collaboration the only realistic and perhaps even the more vibrant strategy?

Should we accept our balkanization, unleash it to create a thousand different initiatives, and watch many of them fail while the best rise to the top? Would the best rise to the top, or would the best-funded ones — and maybe not the most excellent ones — take the lead?

These questions beg a bigger, underlying, unstated issue that has dogged Jews since biblical times: unity. Is there such a thing as Jewish unity in the first place?

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Maybe we do not need unity in normal times — whatever those are — but one can argue that it is necessary during periods of crisis, such as all we have been facing since October 7th. The present is not like thousands of years ago, or even like the Holocaust. Technology has presented us with a new, more challenging landscape where information, if you can call it that, spreads in minutes, gathering believers.

Without unity, can we fight to win in this new environment? And with such a fragmented digital landscape, is unity just a pipedream? Does this inability, or difficulty to ally with one another, extend beyond our political, ideological, and religious differences?

It is possible we relish this internal disunity and feed it, because it gives us a more significant identity inside the segmented tribal box. It could be that we are at our best when we have an internal Jewish opposition to rally against. Maybe this disunity is slowly destroying us, or is it nourishing us in some strange way?

You could argue it is the silver lining that leads so many of us into Torah, looking for answers and then finding the different interpretations as our weapon to justify our very separate positions.

Is it fortunate or unfortunate that disunity has become as much a part of our culture as reciting “Next Year in Jerusalem” has been?

Maybe the joke “two Jews, three opinions” is not so funny anymore — or, is it an asset? Maybe the inability to collaborate in this communication war is about something else altogether. Maybe it is about the donors. Is it fueled by a donor-centric culture?

Donors make the existence of all these organizations and efforts possible. What is their role in whether we collaborate or do not? Were many of the organizations in the room that day ultimately playing to their donors — who were not even in that room?

Is the expectation of their donors that they are funding the ultimate organization for the ultimate victory in this Communication War? Do their professionals feel they have to deliver upon that expectation to their donors? Will an organization be able to raise more money if it is known to be the organization in the lead?

Or was it that the organizational CEOs were not present, and their representatives felt they could not make a collaborative move without the CEO’s approval?

More to consider: Can limited organizational coalitions, a few of which have formed, actually pull off this victory, with their bureaucratic, board member, benefactor and donor governance procedures?

In a communication war, where split-second timing is of the essence, can the hired professionals of these organizations make unilateral important decisions without an encumbered organizational process kicking in?

Or should we take a page from the startup world, filled with fast-moving, nimble, flexible, risk-taking younger people and headed by creative visionaries, rather than their investors? Will donors of the Jewish organizational world fund an entrepreneurial group with the tens of millions that are needed to begin competing against our opposition? And give them the freedom to make decisions and act?

Can foundations, who are already pumping millions of dollars into advertising agencies, win this communication war for us? Or are they trusting these agencies to apply their professional skills, when many of them have no knowledge or passion for Israel and Jewish life?

Perhaps the donors and the CEOs do not understand enough about communication and its importance to be making these decisions. They are not communication professionals. Communication has never been a funding priority in the Jewish world. Foundations always lumped communication training into a feckless bucket known as “capacity building.”

But since October 7th, we have realized how adept our enemies are at communication. They understand its power, and they are using it to win the sympathies of a young global population, including Jews (many of whom are graduates of Jewish day schools, Jewish camps, and Taglit-Birthright Israel programs). There is no denying its primacy.

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One thing the donors do understand is that they are the ones who have the power to make change, to create a direction. The donors are listened to at the highest professional levels. They are the ones who fund and make it happen — especially the mega-donors. They will make the decisions about which road we take.

If it is the road of wide collaboration, they are the only ones who can strong-arm the community into this. If it is the road of entrepreneurial startups, they will be its investors, giving it life. But as the enablers of the Jewish world, can enough of them find unity to forge a path?

The creation of the Taglit-Birthright Israel program 20 years ago happened because several mega-donors forced the decision to make it happen, leading to the largest and most successful initiative in Jewish life at the time.

Whichever road they choose to travel regarding the communication war, both roads will hold a lurking danger, ready to pounce: the bully, the bully participant, the bully executive, the bully donor. The bully is the one person or organization who believes they have the absolute answer to the communication challenge. There is no such thing as only one idea. So whether it is across the board collaboration or a coalition, there is always a need to think together, to explore, to question, to evolve an idea as a team.

Either way will require something difficult for the Jewish organizational world: culture change. Change the culture and elevate communication to a priority position. Consciously choose the path of either collaboration or individual entrepreneurship.

Culture change is difficult because it does exactly what it says; it is the way things are thought about and done. It is deep work. October 7th was the first of the harsh realities forcing the Jewish world to see itself differently, and create change. We can no longer thrive based on yesterday’s organizational culture. Again, the only ones who can force it are the donors, because they make Jewish organizational life possible.

Let’s look at an example. As of now, a slew of organizations have staked out their territories with high school students. If we aim for the first, collaborative road, it is worth asking: Are they coordinating with one another? Have they all sat in a room together? Are they duplicating services — and money expenditures? Are they all needed to do the job? Have they discussed what their bottom lines are to determine if they have been successful? Are they sharing information and data?

But if we aim for the entrepreneurial road, we must ask: Are they competing? Will their competition raise the level of service and create fewer, but more excellent, powerful organizations? Which ones will survive to do the real job? Will it be the excellent ones, or the ones that a donor favors for some reason and keeps going?

Hello, donors. Do you think this is a problem? Or is it just fine to continue this way? What, if anything, should happen here?

Either way, we need a culture shift. If it is collaboration, we need to make sure it happens. If it is the entrepreneurial direction, we need to make sure it is funded, so these organizations do not have to deplete their energies fundraising. And if it is a combination of both, that also must be put on the table.

The Jewish National Fund retreat woke me up to a reality beyond the binary of two roads. Previously, I thought that research, strategies, ideas, and plans were the whole communication battle against our enemies. Now I realize the other half is the culture change to understand the roads we Jews are traveling.

Without delving into these roads and assessing their potential for major communal impact, we will have no clarity of battlefield culture. And no matter what plans everyone is evolving, we will not see victory.

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A version of this essay also appeared in the Jewish Journal.