It is time that we American Jewish liberals who have been left leaning about our politics regarding Israel begin to review the support we give to the organizations that have been leading us. They are proving themselves obsolete, outdated and out-of-touch.
I was an advertising agency copywriter and creative director. I was trained to be one of the manufacturers of hip. I would sit in offices and create hip, and then watch all those people lust after the creations. I reveled in hip.
Now that it has been \”formally put to death and buried,\” as one of its grantees told me, I feel free to speak out about the Joshua Venture, a supposed breakthrough organization, subsidizing the ideas of nonprofit professionals who will be leading the next generation of Jewish life.
Jews know well how to create an idea and implement it. In the world at large, we do it all the time in the arts, business, government or academia.
It\’s time we stop kidding ourselves that Israel has survived well through the last three years. The country is unraveling at the seams.
I was in Washington, D.C., this week and had a meeting with a senior officer of the World Bank, who is from Bombay. As we ate our dinner, the conversation turned to ethnicity.
Now that our youngest is a freshman in college, and most of our friends\’ kids are well-beyond bar and bat mitzvah age, I feel liberated to speak out: our bar mitzvah culture is out of control. It is an unnecessary, extravagant, showy, inappropriate expenditure, which is done under peer expectation and pressure. It is an embarrassment to the Jewish people.
What does this bar mitzvah overkill say about us? What are our children learning from the bar and bat mitzvah experience? What are they ingesting about the values of Judaism and the Jewish people?
When people query me as to who our clients are, if the person is Jewish, I often answer, \”Half our clients are Jewish organizations. And the other half are people who treat us really nicely.\”
This has been my third trip to Israel in the last several months on behalf of the Ford Foundation, gathering information for the building of a marketing institute which will service grantees in Israel, mainly Jewish organizations.
Now I understood why Reuven was able to bring me into the neighborhood, into his home, into his shul, invite people to meet me, and then into his yeshiva. No one would question the actions of an ilui. I further understood his ability to teach me, to move so adroitly into the issues of my world and professional endeavors while we were in London.
My relationship with Reuven has continued to grow through further visits, meals with my wife and his wife, and through study. He has brought me as his study partner into all the great yeshivas of Jerusalem. He wants me to see them all.
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