The following piece by Ari Y. Kelman, Professor of American Studies and Director of the Graduate Group in the Study of Religion at UC Davis, is an excerpt from a soon to be published study entitled “Reality of the Virtual: Looking for Jewish Leadership Online” that Jack Wertheimer introduced here.

While this particular segment is focused on our friends at MyJewishLearning, we asked to post it because not only do we get name-dropped in section 4, but we just read the whopping 74 page study and it says some nice things about us.  Things like: “Jewcy is among the most significant websites in the online Jewish world, outpacing traditional news sources and the establishment of Jewish organizations.”  We also think about this shtuff all day long.  Mapping (and measurement in general) is a necessary, but tough task.  We surely want to have an impact on others, but no matter what anyone says, the dashboard of analytics, survey results, and studies is tough to read.  Moreover, who cares about measurement?  Do you as a reader?  Does your mother?

Jacob Harris, Jewcy’s Publisher, discusses this a bit more in his response to this excerpt.  But don’t skip ahead – check this out and let us know what you think.

If you want to understand the Jewish internet, don’t look at the Facebook Hagaddah or the YouTube video of a youthful Paul Rudd as a Bar Mitzvah DJ, or even the successes of JDate.  You’ll have to look past the MASA advertising flare-up from September 2009, and beyond the hype that surrounds the blog-two-point-oh-Facebook-Tweet-YouTube-podcast-live-stream-flash-animation-social-media-wikification of virtually every part of Jewish life.   Really, if you want to understand the Jewish internet, look at MyJewishLearning.com.

MyJewishLearning is a project of the Samuel Bronfman Philanthropies and several other foundations, and it serves as an outlet for information, commentary and opinions by authors from across the Jewish world, covering topics from the silly to the holy.  It is a robust multi-media site that is basically a broadly constructed resource for information about things Jewish.

Although its content tells us something, the site is important for reasons other than its content.  It is the most valuable site in the network of Jewish websites, and if we are going to understand the generational and cultural shifts in our Jewish communities, we had best take a good, close look at what is happening online because that is where those changes are most pronounced.

Within the network of Jewish websites (which, for this study included the 150 most popular sites, along with 279 blogs (the sites and blogs had to promote themselves as Jewish)), MyJewishLearning plays a powerful role.  Highlighting its place in the network allows us to measure four ways in which the network online reveals patterns that are shaping Jewish life offline.

1. Links are the Currency of a Network.

For all the talk about The Jewish Community and membership or peoplehood or klal Yisrael, a community is still built out of relationships.  Online, those relationships are built out of links.  At the time of this study, MyJewishLearning had 752 links to its site; the UJC had 714.  It’s not much of a difference, especially when we consider that Jewschool had just over 4,000 and FrumSatire had over 1700. Nevertheless, comparing links in reveals a leveling of the playing field when it comes to evaluating the role of an organization, or website, in the larger community.

Looking online reveals that one of the most powerful institutions in Jewish communal life offline — the Federation system — does not exert a similar force online.  In terms of links, in fact, it is dwarfed by websites that hardly have an offline presence.  As increasing numbers of people turn to the internet as the first source of information about Jewish life, the relative popularity of a site as measured by links suggests that power online may translate into power offline, but not necessarily vice versa.

2. Powerful websites broker relationships between other websites.

To be sure, measuring importance is not just about the gross number of links, but it can be measured in the quality of links, as well; it really is about who you know, not just how many people you know.  When accounting for what social network analysis call the “prestige” of one’s neighbors (and calculating what is known as the Bonacich Power Measure), we find that MyJewishLearning is nearly four times as “powerful” as the UJC’s website.  Despite the relative parity in links between the two sites, MyJewishLearning is linked to sites with greater “prestige,” and thus it plays a role not only in brokering relationships between sites in the network, but in brokering significant relationships, as well.

MyJewishLearning looks even better when we account for links to it from less “prestigious” websites, retaining connections to less powerful sites who would otherwise find themselves further on the margin of the network.  Accounting for this finds the UJC further marginalized and MyJewishLearning increasingly important.  In other words, MyJewishLearning is more valuable to a greater diversity of sites than is the UJC website, and thus comes to occupy a far more important role in the network.

3.  Transgression Creates Community.

MyJewishLearning is powerful because it has succeeded in attracting links from across the Jewish world, crossing social barriers online where doing so offline would have proven too difficult.  Transgressing geographic, political, religious and social barriers has resulted in MyJewishLearning becoming as central as it has.  Building links online is, of course, easier than building coalitions offline, but symbolically, the ability to navigate through religious and secular, Israeli and American, Ashkenazi and Sepharadi and Mizrachi websites suggests both a greater fluidity and a stronger unity to “the Jewish Community” than has been evidenced elsewhere.

4.  Players are changing the game.

One of the most obvious and well-documented facts about the internet is that it provides massive broadcast outlets for people who would otherwise not have access to them.  In the network online, those examples include FrumSatire, Jewcy, Tablet, and MyJewishLearning, all of which vie with the traditional Jewish news outlets for traffic, stories and attention.  And the presence of these alternative outlets is changing the shape of the community.

There’s no longer a newspaper of Jewish record.  Instead we have a host of bloggers, journalists, editors, writers, curators who are all helping shape the broader Jewish communal conversation.  It’s not that traditional news outlets have given way to alternatives; they have not.  But the chorus of voices speaking to and speaking for the larger community has expanded as a result of these changes in communication.

Mapping the Jewish internet provides a greater depth to our understanding of just how communications are changing the community.  Alternative sites like MyJewishLearning and FrumSatire have emerged as credible forces in the network of Jewish websites and they are challenging the inherited claims of established organizations to leadership.  The questions we ought to be asking at this point should no longer focus on how the internet is changing our community, but what we ought to do now that the changes are already well underway.

Research for this article was conducted under the auspices of the Avi Chai Foundation’s project on young Jewish leaders directed by Jack Wertheimer.

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At the first planning meeting for a new project examining Jewish leaders in their twenties and thirties, Shaul Kelner, himself a young-ish  sociologist, threw down the gauntlet: “Maybe we ought to study older leaders to find out why they are so worried about Jewish youth. What might explain the hand-wringing of the baby-boomers?”Shaul, of course, had a point:  it had become a commonplace to bemoan “helicopter” parents who continually hover over their college-aged children.  Perhaps, a study of younger Jews would merely perpetuate an irrational anxiety.

Nonetheless, the project to study younger Jewish leaders proceeded. Some of the impetus for the research did come from worries. Like quite a few earlier generations, today’s older leaders are concerned about their successors. Are enough younger people sufficiently dedicated to Jewish life to invest themselves in professional and volunteer work in behalf of Jewish causes? And will those who choose to get involved be up to the job?

Our research was primarily motivated, though, by sheer curiosity about three big questions: How do younger leaders think about Jewish issues? What have been the formative experiences shaping these leaders? And where do they seem to be leading their followers?

These are not hysterical questions, but rather stem from a number of new realties.  Just before we launched the project, Robert Wuthnow, one of the leading sociologists of religious life in America, had published his study, After the Boomers: How Twenty and Thirty-Somethings are Reshaping American Religion. Wuthnow argued that large numbers of college grads defer the large questions of career and family formation until they are well into their thirties, with the result that when they make life-course decisions, they do so without benefitting from strong connections with their parental home and house of worship. The social settings that in the past had helped shape decisions no longer have nearly the same influence.

As ever larger numbers of younger Jews live their twenties and part of their thirties as odyssey years, they too are disengaged from Jewish institutional life, with many not setting foot in a synagogue from the time of their Bar/Bat Mitzvah to well into their late thirties or early forties. This reality renders the panoply of start-ups, initiatives and programs created by and for Jews in their twenties and thirties all the more important. Our project wanted to learn where younger Jews do connect with some form of organized Jewish life and who the leaders are who develop programs for their peers.

It is also no secret that major shifts in technology and communication are reshaping how younger Jews find means to connect.  Organizations no longer require a large infrastructure and budget to engage younger people. This has opened up new opportunities for start-ups operating on modest budgets. It also has created opportunities for creative people to rise rapidly by sheer dint of their smarts and energy.  Conventional Jewish institutions have been slow to come to grips with the fact that their expectations no longer work for younger people: Why bother with the laborious process of moving up step-by-step in a large bureaucracy like a Federation when start-ups offer fast track opportunities? Our project wanted to understand how younger Jews are adapting to the new realities.

The extent to which a generational divide is opening has also preoccupied us. Is it true, we wondered, that Jews in their twenties and thirties share a fairly uniform set of views on Jewish issues? And is a rift opening in the community between younger and older leaders on core questions of Jewish policy?

Once our research commenced, it became dramatically evident that younger leaders are not a monolithic  population. In fact, a great many of them move easily between long-established institutions and recent start-ups. Some, in fact, play leadership roles in both types of organizations. One of the founders of E-3, a social and cultural program in Denver, which reaches hundreds of young people, also happens to hold a professional leadership position in the local federation. A woman in Chicago who founded Club 1948, an Israel-oriented cultural start-up, also works for the American Zionist Movement. In some localities, to be sure, lines between mainstream and non-conventional organizations are quite rigid, but in others there is open collaboration, so that social events will be co-sponsored by a range of organizations whose leaders fan out to recruit attendees sympathetic with their own particular cause.

This suggests that attitudes toward establishment institutions vary greatly. True, significant percentages of younger leaders express distant and critical views of the mainstream organizations and synagogues. But other younger people work for these institutions, often trying to reshape them as more hospitable places for their peers.  The more honest non-establishment leaders will also concede that they depend heavily on financial support from organizations and foundations run by older leaders.

Nor is it true that younger leaders share the same perspectives on Jewish issues. Israeli policies toward the Palestinians are perhaps the most contentious question–so contentious, in fact, that some groups explicitly shy away from discussions about those policies, lest the event implode. But that does not mean younger Jews do not enjoy programs about other aspects of Israeli life, such as its cinema, foods, and environmentally-conscious efforts.

It is also evident that social position is an important variable when considering the attitudes of younger leaders: non-establishment leaders in their twenties do not hold the same views as their thirty-something counterparts, and young leaders who work in the not-for-profit sectors tend to think differently from their peers who work as lawyers and business people.  Rather than think about the entire mass of younger Jewish leaders, the project scrutinized trends within sub-populations.  How do younger leaders working in establishment organizations differ from those in non-establishment groups? Where are the fault lines? And which leaders are most influential?

On this last question, the six members of the research team draw different conclusions.  Some regard the non-establishment types as the leading edge. Everyone wants to know where they are headed, which suggests that they are the most influential. Others, and I am party to this perspective, see far more interplay between younger leaders who are involved in establishment and non-establishment organizations, with reciprocal influences and changing family and economic circumstances likely to modify views.

Over the coming weeks, readers of Jewcy will have the opportunity to examine first-hand some of the rich findings of this project and the range of perspectives it has generated among the research team.  An article at this site by Ari Y. Kelman, of UC Davis, will argue that based on a new map of Jewish sites on the internet, the time has come to reconsider the nature of Jewish community.  A second article by Sylvia Barack Fishman of Brandeis University looks at how younger Jewish leaders think about family formation. Like much else about this project, both are likely to provoke strong responses.

Jack Wertheimer, a professor at JTS, directed the project on Young Jewish Leaders under the auspices of the Avi Chai Foundation.  His Jewcy dialogue with Joey Kurtzman on “The End of the Jewish People” can be found here. His report, Generation of Change: How Leaders in their Twenties and Thirties are Reshaping American Jewish Life, is available here.

The post Why Study Young Jewish Leaders? An Introduction. appeared first on Jewcy.

From: Joey Kurtzman To: Jack Wertheimer Subject: The End of The Jewish People

Jack,

In a recent Ha’aretz interview, Jewcy editor in chief Tahl Raz was asked about the meaning of Jewish peoplehood. Tahl caused a bit of a kerfuffle with his answer. Was he right? Is it true that “American life has annihilated Jewish peoplehood”? It seems plain to me that the answer is yes. Modern American life is the most corrosive acid ever to hit the ghetto walls. Young American Jews are whoring after Moab so fervently that the boundaries between Israel and Moab are being washed away. We‘re not merely influenced by the non-Jewish world—we‘re inseparable from it. Judaism and Jewishness have never had so limited a claim on the identity of young Jews. At Jewcy we‘ve half-jokingly referred to ourselves as part of the first generation of Jewish-American mongrels, or Frankenjews. The majority of Jewcy‘s staff is the product of intermarriage. To a one, we regard the traditional Jewish revulsion toward exogamy as an anachronistic holdover from premodern life. Needless to say, we are of dubious halakhic Jewishness. This will be truer of our children than it is of us. Our cultural influences are more polluted than our bloodlines, and that is the important part of our mongrelization. We‘re evolving new ideas and new forms of religious expression informed by non-Jewish traditions. This is not because we have poached from alien traditions, but because those traditions, too, are our patrimony. I believe that Conservative Jews say that tradition has a vote, not a veto. For most young Jewish-Americans, it would be truer to say that Jewishness has a vote, not a veto. For most of Jewish history, peoplehood was straightforward. In most places and most times, Jews retained their separateness in every respect: Economically, linguistically, and socially, they were a distinct people in lands not their own. And this separateness was reinforced by a religion that instructed them that they possessed an exclusive covenant with a deity who favored them above all others. Their nationhood was both sacred and real. Today, all of this is go
ne. What capacious definition of peoplehood could possibly include a population such as the generation of Frankenjews I‘ve described? It seems to me that if Jewish-American leaders wish for Judaism to survive, they‘ll have to acknowledge that the era of peoplehood has ended, and help reinvent Judaism for modern life.

Yochanan ben Zakkai prepared Judaism for a new world rather than let it be destroyed in hopeless defense against a siege that couldn’t be denied. America’s siege is as undeniable as Rome’s. Yet when I read your writings about the dangers of universalism, the threat to Jewish peoplehood, the details of Jewish demography, I see a Zealot who‘s choosing to stay behind and continue fighting when the city walls have already been irreparably breached. How am I wrong about any of this? Joey

NEXT: Pick One People, One Religion

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