Even as debates rage on social media, with each side slinging invective at the other, in-person conversations about political issues are growing increasingly rare. A recent survey of American workplaces found that people are nearly twice as likely to deliberately avoid discussing controversial topics than they are to engage in civil discourse about them.

With more than $900,000 in new funding to support its activities for the next two years, the nonprofit For the Sake of Argument (FSA) hopes to change that, training Jewish educators and leaders how to conduct civil, productive arguments about controversial topics, primarily those related to Israel and Zionism. 

Launched in 2022 as a pilot program with funding from the Jim Joseph Foundation, FSA is now expanding its efforts both in the United States, where it has operated until now, and in Israel, where the organization’s co-founders — Abi Dauber Sterne and Robbie Gringras — live.

“We were in pilot mode for about two and a half years,” Dauber Sterne told eJewishPhilanthropy. “And we’re now moving into the phase of, ‘We exist. This is a growing concern. This isn’t some pilot that may or may not work. This is something that has legs.’ And so that’s really exciting.”

In addition to the Jim Joseph Foundation, the new funding for the organization comes from Crown Family Philanthropies, the Aviv Foundation and the Natan Fund. FSA also brings in $150,000 in annual revenue from providing its services to other groups, Dauber Sterne said.

She credited this latest fundraising milestone to both the relationships that she and Gringras have cultivated over the years and to the strategic plan that they produced at the insistence of the Jim Joseph Foundation.

“The Jim Joseph Foundation, thankfully, in their first tranche of funding, pushed us toward the end to write a strategic plan, and they actually gave us a bit of extra funding to make sure that we could write a strategic plan,” Dauber Sterne said. “So the strategic plan then helped us raise money by allowing us to say, ‘We have very clear goals. We have a clear theory.’ And that helped us in a really deep way.”

The new funding will allow the organization to train some 2,000 educators directly, Dauber Sterne said, though its reach is “far greater” as those educators then run FSA’s programming for groups of people. Dauber Sterne and Gringras have also sold some 4,000 copies of their book, Stories for the Sake of Argument, which allows the reader to hold discussions about different topics.

Until now, Dauber Sterne and Gringras have been the only educators training people in FSA’s methodology and the only full-time employees. They’ve also had two part-time workers in Israel, one in charge of operations and another who does marketing. The plan is to turn those into full-time positions and then add a U.S.-based full-time employee. 

In the meantime, FSA is training faculty in the U.S. who serve as consultants to conduct workshops and spread the group’s methodology. “Now we’ve started to train faculty in the U.S., so we’ll be able to spread much more, and the financial support certainly enables that,” Dauber Sterne said.

FSA generally uses two- to three-page stories to focus discussions on a given topic. This is both to keep the debate centered around a specific issue and makes it easier to train people how to lead the discussions in a short time. “Bad arguments are often about many different things, right? We think we’re talking about one thing, but you’re saying this and I’m saying that and we throw in all the different, often unrelated topics, and then it’s one big mess. So what the short stories do is boil down very complicated issues into their different parts,” Dauber Sterne said.

Despite dealing with controversial issues, FSA discussions generally do not devolve into screaming matches, despite rising divisions within the Jewish community, Dauber Sterne said.

“We know there’s polarization, we know there are people who scream and yell at each other,” she said. “What we believe is happening is the people who are willing to come to our sessions… [are coming from the same] organization, where there is general agreement within that organization, and so there aren’t the poles or the extremes in the room.”

In addition, Dauber Sterne said that people on the extremes are often explicitly not looking to debate those who hold opposing positions. “They’re often actually not willing to be in a room where they’re speaking and listening and learning from somebody with a different opinion,” she said. “One of the great challenges in the world today is that people have created all sorts of red lines for themselves or for their communities. So Jewish communities won’t talk to anti-Zionists and anti-Zionists often won’t come to a Jewish communal space. It goes in both directions. … They might post things on social media, they might be at protests yelling at each other, but they are almost never in a room having a real conversation, because neither side is willing.” 

Going forward, FSA is going to work to find those extremes, having so far focused on “the middle,” Dauber Sterne said. “One of the things that we’re working on and we hope to do with this next phase of funding with Natan [Fund] is actually to reach out more widely, to figure out how we can just speak to those extremes and see how we can bring them together.”

She said the decision to expand FSA’s operations to Israel was not necessarily made because it was a key focus of the organization’s mission but because she and Gringras felt deeply that they could not ignore the arguments happening in their home country. 

“If you read our strategic plan, you’ll see that our expansion in Israel shows up in very, very few lines, and that’s because there have been questions from the American side of, ‘Can you really take on both at the same time?’ Because we’re very small. And it’s a fair question and a good question,” Dauber Sterne said. “And Robbie and I both feel that on one hand we can, and on the other hand, we also really need to. We live here, we breathe here, we feel here, we see what’s going on in the education system. And we’re incredibly concerned that we have something to offer and we don’t want to ignore where things seem to be going in this country.”

She noted that the funding from the Aviv Foundation is specifically earmarked for this Israel expansion. 

“In schools and also in [informal education], there’s a very clear avoidance of political discussions and not just political, but of contentious topics… and for good reason,” she said. 

These topics can include the burning issues of the day, such as Haredi enlistment in the military, conscientious objection, public transportation on Shabbat, the status of Arabs and other minorities in Israeli society. 

“They’re scared that their students are going to yell and scream, and it’s going to be terrible. They’re scared that a parent might hear. They’re scared a principal might get the wrong idea. And so they just don’t talk about it,” Dauber Sterne said. “And then what happens? Our students, our kids grow up not knowing any of these issues. They only hear the opinion that maybe they heard at home, if they have parents who talk about it, but they’ve never had an intelligent conversation about it. They’ve never been taught about how to have an intelligent conversation about it.”

Dauber Sterne said that in Israel FSA is looking to not only train teachers in schools but also staff in pre-army programs, known as mechinot, as well as youth group leaders. 

In general, she said, FSA hopes that Israelis and Americans can learn from one another about how to hold civil but serious discussions. “Americans are really good at listening and not so good at speaking,” Dauber Sterne said. “In Israel, we’re usually better at speaking and not so good at listening, which then ends up with the loud [arguments] in Israel and the quiet in the U.S. And what we’re trying to do on some level is to bring a little bit of each culture across.”

Dauber Sterne said that FSA is — at least for now — looking to preserve its independence and is not looking to be absorbed by another, larger education nonprofit. “We certainly have thought about it,” she said. “There are always benefits and drawbacks to being part of a larger organization or to being a small startup initiative. We ultimately decided, at least at this stage and for the next few years, that we would rather be partners… rather than being swallowed up.” 

She said this was for several reasons. One is that FSA addresses contentious materials that larger groups may be wary of addressing. Another is that there are not many organizations operating in both the United States and Israel, as FSA looks to do. “There are a few organizations that split both, Hartman and M² are two examples that have presence in both, but they’re about it,” she said. 

“The third reason is that we feel like we have a split personality, and we’re very aware of it,” she said. “What I mean by that is, ‘Are we a bridge-building, civil dialogue organization? Are we an Israel education organization? Or are we something different? Neither of those things or some hybrid of those things plus other things. And so it also feels like putting us into any other box would make that even more complicated than it already is.”