by Russel Neiss
In an evocative Eli talk, Sam Glassenberg suggests that by ignoring global Jewish problems and focusing on market based solutions to meet the needs of individual Jews we’ll sell a lot of things and as a side effect we might do some good too.
As evidence, he sites JDate’s success at building ‘Jewish continuity,’ paying particular attention to the amount of users and money that the site generates. I’m not going to spend much time quibbling with Sam’s statistics, (despite the fact that there have been countless articles about gentiles on JDate), but instead I want to get right to the heart of the issue.
Sam’s argument demonstrates the same quintessential flaw that all of our multi-million dollar population surveys do. They conflate in-marriage or inter-mariage as the sole measure and worth of one’s Jewish connections. Under this flawed logic, we build policy and programs around the idea that if we can just get more Jews to marry Jews we’ll be able to fill all of our synagogue pews, or increase donations to the federation 8-gagillion percent. But the truth is intermarriage is not the cause of slipping synagogue attendance. It’s not the cause of decreasing federation donations. It’s not why fewer Jews are lighting shabbat candles, or attending Passover Seders or not doing anything of the the myriad of things that we think are important to measure. Intermarriage is simply a symptom of a broader lack of engagement of these people.
So while JDate has been successful as a business, and probably even at fostering an endogamous lifestyle for many Jews, it hasn’t done anything to address the core feelings of engagement or disengagement with the Jewish community. That is, the people who wanted to date and marry Jews were already predisposed to sign up for JDate, and those who didn’t care saved themselves $20 a month and signed up for OKCupid or Match.com.
Put another way, JDate’s emphasis on generating profit instead of focusing on solving a global Jewish problem has been incredibly successful at raising capital for JDate’s investors, but has done bubkes on the Jewish continuity front… But that’s ok – it wasn’t their goal.
And therein lies the big problem with Sam’s pivot from JDate to harnessing games to fix Jewish education. Our Jewish educational goal can’t simply be to provide entertainment value to kids and hope that along the way they’ll learn something valuable. Instead we need to craft specific, measurable and attainable educational goals that we expect Jews to learn over their educational career, and then we need to figure out the best way of implementing those. Personally, I think digital gaming has a large role to play in that endeavor, and there’s a good deal of data to support that assertion. But this same research, along with decades and decades of other educational data emphasizes the need for these educational initiatives to be grounded in solid pedagogy first.
Getting excited by a Jewish character on the Simpsons, seeing Jerusalem in Assassins Creed, or simply knowing that there is a Golem character in Pokeman or WoWC in it of itself is useless in fostering a well-rounded Jewish education, and less than useless in helping to craft a coherent Jewish identity. Yes, we can use video games to fill student’s heads with all the back-story and facts that we want – and I assure you that we’ll enrich a number of coders, programmers and technology consultants while we’re at it (this author included). But unless we actually apply a laser like focus on the big problem of helping students gain and apply Judaic knowledge to make sense of the world in which they live to help them live a Jewish life, we’ll be no closer to solving the big Jewish education problems that we face as a community.
Russel Neiss is a Jewish educator, technologist and activist, and the coding monkey behind PocketTorah, The AlephBet App and other Jewish educational technology initiatives.
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I enjoyed Sam’s talk and I agree with what you write. What the Eli talk made pointedly clear is that the Jewish community’s obsession with continuity (as defined by marriage) has been misguided all along. As a member of the ROI community, I have now been to Israel and Berlin in rooms full of passionate and connected young Jewish adults – I heard the same question asked everywhere. Why is all the focus on who is NOT in the room? The people IN the room are looking for more- more engagement, more knowledge, more community. I think it is time that we begin to focus on increasing deep connection among those in the room.
re: Andrea — “I heard the same question asked everywhere. Why is all the focus on who is NOT in the room?”
Because not everybody (this author included [rejected from ROI twice thank you very much]) gets to make it to the room.
Outreach should be an important focus of all initiatives. It’s not enough to simply preach to the converted.
Russell has clearly articulated the approach to gaming that is endorsed by The Covenant Foundation. Thank you Russell!
I agree that our engagement of learners needs to be done with thoughtful goals in mind and that the learning needs to be high level integrative learning not just facts to get one through a game.
Yet, for all of this to suceed we need to invest in the “people.” We need to be sure that those who develop games and those who share them with learners have the depth of knowledge, pedagogic skills and understanding of the 21st Century Jewish family (and when I say family I mean individuals, couples, with/without children, etc.) necessary to guide learners to integrate and apply the content.
Quality games, textbooks, videos and applications can certainly engage and enhance, but they cannot replace quality educators or the social experience of learning in community.
But, we only can reap what we sow; we must support, in significant ways, our educators’ aquisition of 21st century skills and ongoing learning opportunities so that they can guide the co-created learning explorations with their students.