Eli Valley, the talented and provocative cartoonist who brought you an uncircumcised God raping the Israelites, aims his pen at the new generation of young Jewish social entrepreneurs and the clueless Jewish community who is in their thrall. You know the type – constantly flooding your mailbox with tweets and facebook updates about how cool and revolutionary twitter and facebook are. They’re the ones who attend like every single networking event ever and who describe themselves as Social Networking Consultants. I’m sure they do very cool stuff, but I’m not quite sure just what that actually entails. And I’m no luddite either. I use twitter, facebook, YouTube, Jewtube and flickr. I get all that. It’s just some people I don’t get.
At the last UJC General Assembly in Jerusalem, one of the big buzzwords that kept popping up was social entrepreneurialism. To me that meant that real Jewish innovators had to adopt traditional business oriented entrepreneurial skills to make their projects happen because the organized Jewish community that always talks about bringing more youth into their ranks, just doesn’t get what’s going on. Or is in some way threatened by it. However, to many of the GA attendees, it just meant young Jews and that crazy Internet they are always on.
Eli’s scope is somewhat broader than all that and when he says “..a “social entrepreneur” is someone with no discernible talents or skills beyond the ability to speak excitedly” I guess he’s speaking from some experience. He does work for one of the Jewish Community’s largest and best known philanthropies and more importantly, he’s an ROI alum.
Why is this important? Because the ROI Community is probably the largest community of actual social entrepreneurs who actually do stuff and are supported by a very establishment philanthropy – the Schusterman Foundation. The ROI Community is indeed a very diverse group of people which includes traditional social entrepreneur types, eager Hillel types and also musicians, artists, writers and the sorts of people you wouldn’t really expect to be at a big Jewy do.
So if you’re a little unconventional, a little off the beaten the path, it doesn’t matter! Apply to ROI today! The deadline is on Monday. And thanks for the good laughs Eli! Read his cartoon at The Forward. I colorized the header using actual samples of actual Jewish social entrepreneurs’ actual hair and skin. 10 points if you can tell me who they were!
Cross posted to Jewlicious.
updated March 23: ROI application deadline extended one week to March 31, 11:59 PM EDT.
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