The journal Sapir is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Published by Maimonides Fund (which is also a supporter of the Jewish Funders Network, the organization that I lead), this quarterly journal of ideas reports an estimated 40,000 readers. I only rarely comment on specific philanthropic initiatives, but I think this case warrants celebration because what we are seeing is not just the achievement of a particular publication, but something much deeper.

To understand what I mean by that, we need to go back in time.  

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In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville made the observation that American pragmatism and entrepreneurship were its biggest assets, but that they also came at a cost: a relative lack of interest in the world of ideas. “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States,” he wrote. When Americans got around to philosophy a few decades later, they perhaps unsurprisingly developed a school known as Pragmatism — the works of Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. To this day, that is the only philosophical movement that is both distinctly American in origin and universally recognized as a major contributor to the history of philosophy. Otherwise, by and large, the accepted dynamic is that Europe does philosophy, and America does technology. 

Something similar happened in classical antiquity. Greece focused on philosophy, basic science and the humanities; Rome took Greek intellectual development and applied it to practical ends. Greece produced Euclidean geometry, and the Romans used it to build aqueducts. The few Roman philosophers of note (such as Marcus Aurelius and Seneca) essentially created the self-help version of Greek Stoic philosophy. 

I’ve argued in the past that the Jewish community in America mirrors that dynamic. Most of the philosophical or ideological movements that shaped American Judaism were, directly or indirectly, products of Europe. European Jewry gave the ideas; American Jewry developed the programs. 

This is by no means criticism. American Jewry has created communal structures that are historically unique in their vibrancy and strength and produced frameworks for Jewish life that achieved great feats of both integration and identity development. 

And yet, we cannot continue growing as a community without new ideas. I’m not referring to ideas for more programs or for a new app — we have plenty of those — but rather deeper notions about who we are as a community and as a people. 

In this sense, the Jewish community can see itself in a critique that a growing chorus of American thinkers has advanced about America in general. Authors like Ross Douthat, Tyler Cowen and Yuval Levin claim that we don’t have a shortage of intelligence, information or expertise, but a shortage of ideas. We have become remarkably adept at management while losing confidence in imagination. In his book The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success, Douthat laments a wealthy, technologically advanced society that has quietly stopped advancing: a culture that stays busy and articulate while going in circles, flooded with commentary yet rarely producing a genuinely new vision. In The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream, Cowen similarly portrays a nation that optimizes, refines and administers, but takes fewer intellectual and social risks. In A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream, Levin’s concern is institutional: organizations once existed to form people and cultivate judgment, but today they increasingly function as platforms for performance and self-promotion. 

America does a lot of thinking, but has narrowed the scope of what it thinks about. We remain proficient at solving problems, measuring outcomes and improving processes, yet seem less willing to ask larger questions of purpose, meaning and direction. 

That was always a problem, as Tocqueville’s quote from almost 200 years ago shows, but it has become a critical one now. The world is changing in ways so dramatic that it has become impossible to wait for the ideological fumes of our cousins in Europe. The dilemmas we face today are not technical but essential: What does it mean to be human in the age of AI? What does it mean to be a people in the age of globalization? What is uniquely Jewish in the open marketplace of ideas? Does the Jewish People have a mission? What is Zionism for the 21st century? 

Naturally, the American Jewish philanthropic community has reflected its environment. It has funded structures, activism, frameworks and programs, but the world of ideas has always been the poor cousin of Jewish philanthropy. There are many reasons for that, including the fact that many funders were themselves entrepreneurs and “people of action” rather than “people of ideas.” A self-perpetuating vicious cycle developed: Ideas haven’t been funded because the community hasn’t valued them, and the less they’ve been funded, the less the community has come to value them. 

To this deep-seated cultural pattern, the last decade added social media, the degradation of discourse, the cancel culture of the left, the censorship of the right and the polarization of our political space. Deep discussions about ideas were scorned by those in power, submerged in crassness and algorithmically demoted by Twitter’s rage machine. 

And that is why Sapir, an initiative fully funded by philanthropy, is so important. It’s not just that the essays are good (which they are), but that the publication’s popularity signals a cultural shift in American Jewish philanthropy: a salutary move towards deeper thinking, an elevation of the conversation and a dignification of rational debate; a countercultural defense of discussion standards, and a statement that you can have both strongly held positions and openness to viewpoint diversity. 

Of course, some naysayers say that Sapir is trying to influence the communal conversation and agenda. Duh. Of course it is. That’s the goal of any publication. But why is that wrong? If anything, that should serve as an incentive for those who disagree with its editorial line to start their own journal. The more the merrier. 

It bears repeating that Sapir’s success reflects a broader trend: the revaluation of ideas in the Jewish community. Sources, the journal published by the Shalom Hartman Institute, released its first issue mere months after Sapir. It has a different style and feel than Sapir; more steeped in, well, sources. It’s thicker conceptually, but it’s an equally fascinating read and a key contribution to the elevation of communal debate. Paper Brigade, the literary journal of the Jewish Book Council, has been around even longer than Sapir and Sources and is a key outlet for Jewish writers of both fiction and ideas. Conversations are also underway to revive the Journal of Jewish Communal Work, a semi-academic publication that once elevated and conceptualized the conversation among communal professionals.  

My hope is that our community doesn’t feel the need to choose between ideas and practice, pragmatism and bold vision, breadth and depth. I’d love to see a community where thinkers are as valued as entrepreneurs, theologians are as important as CEOs and scholars as critical as fundraisers. 

Sapir, Sources, Paper Brigade and many others are early proof that the choice was always a false one. A community can build and think at once, and it seems as though ours is finally learning to do both.

Andrés Spokoiny is the president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network.