[eJP note] This post, originally published February 25, 2010, is part of the series 28 Days, 28 Ideas - a joint project of seven media partners, including eJewish Philanthropy, that ran during February 2010. Contributed by The Sisterhood Blog @ The Forward, it is republished today in recognition of International Women's Day. by Joanna Samuels The Jewish community rightly holds its leaders responsible for managing complex organizational tasks. Yet when it comes to creating workplaces that routinely hire, advance and retain women in positions of authority and visibility, many leaders throw up their hands. So here’s a thought: Let’s all of us, leaders and constituents, stop acting like the advancement of women in Jewish communal life is impossibly complicated. If communal leaders follow these … Continue Reading
Andrew Silow-Carroll on Tikun Olam and Peoplehood
by Andrew Silow-Carroll There are few things more satisfying than finding out that something you’ve been saying for years is actually true. In a number of columns, I’ve written about the rise of tikun olam as a Jewish way of saying “social justice.” Although the concept of “repairing the world” has been in the Jewish vocabulary for centuries - especially among kabalists - I’ve confidently asserted that hardly anyone talked about it before the early 1980s. Google’s nifty “Ngrams” tool confirms this. Plug in any word and Google will chart how often it appears among the millions of books in Google’s on-line database. I entered “tikkun” (the most common spelling). Google generated a hockey-stick shaped graph that shows few if any examples of the term before 1980, then … Continue Reading
Identity and Structure: The Delicate Balance in the Jewish Agenda
by Robert Hyfler, PhD. The identity advocate says: “Our goal is to promote 21st century options for Jewish living”. The structuralist replies: “Our challenge is to create a Jewish community worth living in”. Of course the two statements are not mutually exclusive and are indeed mutually reinforcing. A compelling vision of the joys of Jewish life must go hand in glove with a commitment to building those agencies and institutions that embody Jewish values and ensure an organizational framework for the future. Yet our communal and philanthropic world is seldom good at nuance. From generation to generation, decade to decade, one strategy over the other has often held sway. For the past two decades the identity advocates have been ascendant. The questions they ask and the … Continue Reading
AJWS Hosts Global Justice Conference For Rabbis and Rabbinical Students
More than 40 rabbis and rabbinical students, from across the denominational spectrum, will participate in a global justice leadership retreat in Reisterstown, Maryland from February 20 to 23. In its second year, the conference, called the Rabbinical Students Delegation Alumni Institute (RSD Alumni Institute), will focus on leveraging participants’ power to elevate global justice as a core expression of Jewish tradition, both locally and in the larger North American Jewish community. All RSD Alumni Institute participants have traveled with American Jewish World Service (AJWS), which sends two multi-denominational groups of rabbinical students and graduate students pursuing careers in Jewish communal leadership and one group of early-career rabbis to the developing world each year. During these … Continue Reading
Repair and Reflection: Service Learning and Our World
by Michelle Lackie The Jewish community has long understood that peer-group trips are an effective way to strengthen the Jewish identity of teens and young adults. The advent of Taglit-Birthright Israel in 1999 ushered in a revolutionary new era of intensive immersive programs in which Jewish organizations supported large-scale, short-term trips where micro-communities were created to undergo transformative Jewish experiences together. Birthright dwarfed previous efforts and changed the game. When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Hillel was well-positioned to harness its experience and infrastructure in providing Birthright trips to send large numbers of Jewish students on service-learning programs to the Gulf Coast. Until that time, local Hillels had operated such programs at a much smaller … Continue Reading
Short-Term Social-Justice Trips are Booming
Fueled by young Jews’ interest, short-term social-justice trips are booming, and becoming more professional. excerpted from Tamar Snyder in The Jewish Week: For years, the short-term service trip has been treated like the kid sister of the more established and professionalized yearlong Jewish service program. These short-term programs, which range from a week to 10 days, were often seen as more trouble than they were worth. A group of college students who had never touched a drill in their lives, but were inspired to do social justice work and live out the Jewish value of repairing the world, suddenly swooped into a downtrodden village in a Third World country and built a house - one that needed to be rebuilt by professionals after the well-meaning group had boarded their flight … Continue Reading
Peoplehood is With People
by Rachel Farbiarz and Ruth W. Messinger In parsing our Peoplehood along the axes of particularism and universalism, our thoughts inevitably turn to actual, real people: to our grandparents and great-grandparents and those unknown before them. Our people were not from around here and did not live as we are privileged to live. They made their way walking, carrying, sailing, stowing, clawing and running. They came hopeful and gutted; brave, determined and scared from Russia, Romania, Turkey, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Germany, Uzbekistan and Poland. In places often of poverty, hunger and slum; rail, jail and camp they paused to catch their breath. It is these people whom we encounter as we step through the abstract maze of our Peoplehood and look more deeply. Their thick voices ring in our ears: … Continue Reading
Volunteerism Comes in all Shapes, Sizes and Outcomes
Making Service Matter an editorial from the Jewish Daily Forward Volunteerism comes in all shapes, sizes and outcomes. There are the one-day service projects that can galvanize those who participate, but may not always have the kind of oomph that leads to lasting change. There are long-term commitments like Teach for America and the Peace Corps that are out of reach for most workaday people. Then there are the increasingly popular short-term programs: a week in New Orleans, a spring break in Nicaragua, a month in Ghana. Participants inevitably return from these experiences moved and even transformed, but do these quick interventions do anything for the communities they are supposed to serve? Well, if done right, they can. That’s the conclusion of a study commissioned by Repair the World, … Continue Reading
New Study: The Worth of What They Do
Repair the World Announces Results of a Study Examining the Effects of Alternative Breaks and Other Short-Term Volunteer Projects on Communities in Need in the U.S. and Abroad Repair the World today released The Worth of What They Do: The Impact of Short-Term Jewish Service-Learning on Host Communities. The study, prepared by BTW: Informing Change (BTW), examines the positive, long-term effects of short-term service projects - often called alternative breaks - on communities-in-need both in the United States and overseas. To date, a number of studies have been conducted on the impact of service projects on individual participants, such as a sense of accomplishment and first-hand experience of global problems such as poverty and food insecurity. However, relatively little research has … Continue Reading
Woman Philanthropist Looks to Fund Solutions
from The Wall Street Journal: Activist Pushes Social Change in Developing World Barbara Dobkin isn't looking to help individuals in need. Instead, the donor activist, with help from her husband Eric, a former Goldman Sachs partner, is looking to push through lasting social change via the New York-based American Jewish World Service organization. For the second year in a row, the couple is giving a $250,000 matching gift to support the charity's programs in women's empowerment and service in the developing world, enabling the group to raise $1 million for the programs. The gift comes on the heels of $1 million Ms. Dobkin gave through Women Moving Millions, a campaign she helped launch. Last year, the campaign raised $180 million from donors who gave $1 million or more. … Continue Reading
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