Times are a-changin’, Mobius tells Jewish establishment

. . . Closing the plenary was JTA’s director of digital media, Dan Sieradski, a Jewish Web maven. Known outside JTA as Mobius, the Orthodox Anarchist, Sieradski started the influential and iconoclastic blog Jewschool, and is prone to post-Zionist outbursts.

The speakers offered some critical advice. Sieradski scolded the established Jewish community as too parochial in its funding, and he called grant makers “disconnected” and “soul crushing.”

The next big Jewish idea, in fact, “has probably already come and gone, and been shot down by no less than a dozen Jewish grant-making organizations,” he said. “And because the innovator will have no resources at his or her disposal with which to continue his project, he will probably walk away from it crushed and discouraged. And a revolutionary idea that could have transformed American Jewry forever will never come to be.”

Still, Sieradski envisioned a future federation system much like the one described by Kanfer, in which the federation is not the seed bearer for new Jewish initiatives but the system that nurtures those ideas by accepting and funding them.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.