At the Jewish Funders Network International Conference this week, the word “innovation” was notably absent from the program compared to previous years. I get it — the conference agenda reflected an inescapable reality: Actual enemies. Imminent dangers. A  Jewish world under threat. The philanthropists in San Diego have spent 2 1/2 years vigorously responding to a post-Oct. 7 paradigm that still has all of us reeling. 

But the i-word’s absence got me thinking — not about the conference, but about what’s missing from the communal conversation and how we might want to think about navigating this complex moment in the shadow of a very understandable institutional defensive retrenchment. 

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I think we are seeing a new phase of the Jewish innovation arc, one where the investment made by funders over the past three decades is paying dividends: there is a capable Jewish workforce with a baked-in innovation instinct. To understand that we need to understand the very real differences between the context that permitted the innovation boom and the environment we now find ourselves in.

Specific conditions made the innovation explosion of the early 21st century possible. The organized Jewish community was back on its heels. The 1990 NJPS demographic bombshell had detonated, institutions built for a world that no longer existed were straining to serve one that had moved on, and a generation was bowling alone while quietly hungry for something more. Against that backdrop, the generative tailwinds for change were real: decades of investment in Jewish education, technology lowering the cost of entry and communication, a cosmopolitan identity that was both particular and universal, and a Gen-X DIY ethos that made starting something feel more natural than waiting for permission.

Phase I: Ideation and invention. Social entrepreneurs, largely dissatisfied with the institutions of their youth made Jewish life in their own image: new communities, new programs, new entry points into Jewish life for people legacy organizations don’t always reach. Founders and funders took risks. Change was in the air. The water was warm and inviting. We built what we dreamed should exist. Turns out many people had similar dreams.

Phase 2: Dissemination and disruption. The field is recognized. Networks became more robust. Legacy organizations took notice. Some with genuine desire to transform, others buzzword-hopping without grokking the zeitgeist. Innovation became everybody’s agenda. The infrastructure needed to sustain it never caught up with the demand created.

Then the field matured. Consolidations and attrition happened — some helpful, some costly. Funder attention drifted. Younger innovators aged into more complicated adult lives with mortgages, tuitions, and aging parents; often accompanied by an ironic realization that those old-school organizations are just what we needed in this next stage of life. The overt investment in innovation infrastructure thinned. The innovation mindset and connective tissue of its practitioners do not.

Then the world turns upside down. First gradually, then all at once on Oct. 7. Here comes Phase 3.

The conditions now are qualitatively different. Post-Oct. 7, philanthropy is fortified and consumed by crisis. Innovation is no longer a distinct sector or core focus of funders. A participation surge is driving engagement that doesn’t always translate into belonging. And there’s a dissonance — between the Jewish future people were actually living before Oct. 7 and the Jewish present that now dominates the headlines. The headwinds are daunting: algorithmic tribalism that rewards outrage over nuance, Jew hatred en vogue, the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the collapse of liberal confidence and connections to allies, and an Israel increasingly at odds with the values of the people who built emergent communities.

Phase 3: Permeation and persistence. Innovation propagation through program slows. Innovation conveyed as culture takes root. Rabbis training at a new profusion of pluralist seminaries bring a different set of assumptions to their work, frequently outside traditional roles. Leaders who once built startups now have senior roles in established institutions, builder instincts intact. Some Jewish startups become pillars. The innovation approach becomes embedded. The innovators persist. And the communities they founded produced a generation that won’t settle for less and don’t stand idly by.

What does innovation look like in the current era? Phase 3 innovation doesn’t announce itself. It just gets to work.

My Jumpstart co-conspirator Shawn Landres founded UAST (UA Support Teams), which he described in eJewishPhilanthropy last month. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a network mobilized within days: no institution, no federation, no emergency board meeting. Just relationships based on shared values forged over two decades, not all Jewish, not all formal. Nearly 400 volunteers, from 20 countries. More than 4,600 people evacuated. When Oct. 7 happened 18 months later, they pivoted within 48 hours to an Israeli-focused response. UAST had become something no large-scale NGO could or would attempt: a lightweight adaptable humanitarian rescue operation, built on peer-to-peer communication and deployed at the speed of trust.

Nobody planned for this. Nobody could have. Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies invested in ROI for 20 years and helped spark something powerful that couldn’t show up in a logic model. Phase 3 in action.

For the past 30 years, Jewish social innovators, community builders and entrepreneurial rabbis have been instantiating a vibrant Jewish future, one that arose out of a belief that 20th-century concerns of the Jewish community were in the rear-view mirror. Now that metastatic antisemitism, Zionism-in-crisis, and even democracy-imperiled America dominate the discourse, we need to look differently at Jewish innovation — where it lives now and how it moves.

The people who powered the revolution weren’t working a strategy: they were animating a mindset — and because it’s a mindset, it’s highly transmissible and particularly contagious when it generates results. Mindsets travel through people, through communities, through the expectations of everyone raised inside them. The leaders cultivated by ROI and UpStart. The rabbis in pulpits and living rooms, on Substacks and soapboxes. The kids who grew up in IKAR and Mishkan and The Kitchen and just assumed that’s what Jewish life looks like. Organizations might grow, evolve, merge or sunset. But mindsets persist.

This is what a rooted renaissance looks like. Not a launch but a landing. We all inhabit that Jewish future, even while the world is on fire outside. Inside, the work continues — quiet, creative and enduring.

Joshua Avedon is an executive coach and practitioner-theorist who works with social innovators, community-builders and entrepreneurial rabbis at every career stage, with a particular focus on leaders building and sustaining Jewish life while navigating the complexity of the current moment. He co-founded Jumpstart Labs and has been thinking, writing and building in the Jewish community for 25 years.