In a seemingly parallel world to the political messes of recent months, a new world is being born right before our eyes: a world born out of the visions of young Jewish social entrepreneurs around the world, over a hundred of which will be launching their ventures this June. So I hereby propose: let us declare June Jewish Innovation Month. If the upcoming events in the month of June go smoothly, the reports of a disconnected, past-tense Federation and JCC system will prove to be unfounded. Starting on May 31st in Boston, six communities across North America - and five others worldwide - will host a total of eleven Launch Nights to showcase the 117 new Jewish social ventures that PresenTense partners have catalyzed over the past year. These 117 social ventures, in fields as diverse as education, … Continue Reading
The Future of Judaism Begins Next Week
There is something to be said about recognizing a pattern when it emerges. Over the past few months, the Jewish People around the world were awoken to the challenges facing Judaism in Israel stemming from the toxic mixture of religion and politics that has pitted Jewish denomination against denomination in a race to control the gateways and passageways of the Jewish People in Israel. Due to the hateful actions of extremists in Beit Shemesh, the topic of institutional discrimination against women, against new immigrants, and against the non-Orthodox, rose to the top of the Jewish communal agenda. Article after article was written on the challenges facing Judaism and Jewish Unity in Israel. Foundations, Federations and the Knesset itself started an open process of deliberation highlighting the threat … Continue Reading
State of Her Own
by Erin Kopelow and Ariel Beery for Tablet Magazine If all goes according to plan, this March we’re going to bring a daughter into the world. Specifically, we’re going to bring her home to our apartment on Chen Boulevard, in the center of Tel Aviv, the city we’ve made our home, though we were born in the United States and Canada. Had you asked us six years ago where we dreamed of raising a family, we’d have answered “Israel” without hesitation. But recently we’ve begun to doubt whether we should raise her in the Jewish state. It’s not the escalating situation with Iran that gives us pause, or the fact that our daughter will one day serve in the army: We decided to live in Israel with full knowledge of the security threats it faces. The reason we are concerned about raising … Continue Reading
Five Years and Who Knows What’s Changed
In the summer of 2006, I was set on pitching a new magazine in what I was told would be a four-day global contest for funding held in Jerusalem. The magazine, of course, was PresenTense, an effort a few friends of mine and I started in December of 2005 in Morningside Heights of Manhattan. After months of unsuccessful attempts to raise $10,000 for the first print run and distribution, we ended up printing it ourselves. For $5,000 that a friend and mentor gave me, and around $5,000 that lived on as a (growing) debt on our credit cards, we printed 1000 copies of what we called 'Issue Zero' and tried to leverage these copies to gain subscribers and advertisers. We saw this conference as our chance to shine. It brought 120 innovators from around the world and was structured around a series of pitches and … Continue Reading
JPropel and Renewing the Jewish Communities of Europe
Over the past two weeks, Schusterman's @Roicommunity, Paideia and the Pears Foundation's JHub have run a series of activities in the classic Swedish university town of Uppsala under the banner of the Summer of Change. @aharonhorwitz and I were privileged to represent PresenTense there as 'staff,' Aharon as part of the incubator, and both of us together at JPropel teaching a few workshops over the course of a few days, from our PTSchool series, and leading a text-based learning on business model development for social enterprise. It was a fun affair. For a little under a week, approximately 50 individuals, the majority from the various countries of Europe, hung out, ate, drank and took boat rides whose main outcome was the bonding of young activist Jews across the world, and an understanding that … Continue Reading
May JDub Be a Call to Action
During the General Assembly of 2005, I heard a revolutionary idea during a panel discussion: that Jewish institutions should invest 10% of their annual budgets in new programs that can engage the younger set in their communities. The speaker: Aaron Bisman, founder of JDub records, and one of the brightest stars of my generation of committed community activists. Bisman's call made perfect sense to me: Jewish communal organizations are custodians of the Jewish People's organized interests. Along with short-term responsibilities of program provision, these organizations also needed to ensure their prospects for long-term viability, which means that they had to keep an eye on what in the general market would be called 'customer acquisition.' Since all the data I was privy to then and since pointed to … Continue Reading
How’re We Doing? PresenTense Year in Preview 5771
Community enterprises are interesting creatures. Driven by the collective efforts of individuals who rely on one another, sometimes without even knowing one another, community enterprises often are in a state of flux, and rarely take the time to plan and develop a coherent vision for the future. Not-for-profit organizations add to this confusion by employing staff who take upon themselves the responsibility for representing their communities - but often forget to go back to the community on a regular basis to renew the mandate they were given. PresenTense has tried to keep our mandate fresh by publishing quarterly reports on our operations, and last year we began what we hope to be an annual tradition of the Year in Preview - a transparency initiative whose goal is to reconnect, on a regular … Continue Reading
A New Year, a New Budget
Over the past few years, PresenTense has worked hard to provide full information on its operations for two main reasons: first, we are a community organization that grew from the grassroots up. For the first three years of our operations, from the founding of the magazine through the first round of the Institute, we were all volunteers - and it is only thanks to the energy and passion of our volunteers that we've been able to grow to where we are now. These volunteers deserve our full transparency - and we hope they'll trust us as custodians of their vision. Second, because we think it is just good practice. PresenTense is a nonprofit organization, and as such it exists solely to further the public's greater good. We believe that part of what we can provide the public is a model for operations, … Continue Reading
Is the Leadership Glass Half-Full?
Once a month, in three locations as of this day, young Jewish parents gather in neighborhood associations with their young children to play Hebrew games. One part educational opportunity for children, another part friend-making opportunity for parents, HebrewPlay - a new venture founded by Michael Goldstein (a CJP/PresenTense Fellow 2010) and now headed by Shirah Rubin - engages approximately a hundred Jewish couples in New England in the act of raising bilingual children with deep Hebrew language roots. Looking through the lens of a new study published by the AviChai Foundation called “Generation of Change,” Michael, Shirah and the hundreds of parents who join them are young Jewish leaders, staking out the terms of their engagement with the Jewish community and setting the tone for our … Continue Reading
A New Year’s Resolution from PresenTense
Our New Year Resolution - and our commitment to you PresenTense has always understood itself as an open-source movement. Not because we like the jargon, or because it's trendy to use the words 'open-source', or because it gives us good branding - but because that is what we literally have been since day one: a collection of individuals from around the world who are committed to contributing to the Jewish People in the here and now, to upgrade our community's Operating System so our programs, activities and ideas are up-to-date and actionable for these years and the years to come. When a few dozen of us started working on the magazine back in 2006, the concept of being an open organizing framework was core to how we envisioned our work in the time to come; when we developed the Institute in … Continue Reading
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