Spotlight on CLAL Archive

CLAL Quarterly Report

Spring, 2001

Dear Friends,

As we move into 2001, we want to offer you a more in-depth view of CLAL’s new and exciting work. Starting with this issue, each CLAL update will be devoted to a different part of CLAL’s program. Here we feature the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL (JPF). The founding and ongoing work of the Jewish Public Forum has been made possible through the generosity and vision of the Eleanor M. and Herbert D. Katz Family Foundation.

Established in 1998, the JPF is a think tank that convenes interdisciplinary groups of academics, business leaders, cultural figures and policymakers to broaden the conversation about the Jewish and American futures. It generates fresh thinking about how community, civic engagement, religion, spirituality, ethnicity, and other forms of “meaning-making” are changing in the face of broad societal and technological shifts.

At the same time, participants imagine new Jewish contributions to the wider public conversation on such diverse issues as leadership, ethics, the environment and technology. CLAL's connections to extensive networks of established and emerging Jewish leaders make it possible for the Jewish Public Forum to disseminate proceedings, publications and methods to a broad and influential audience of analysts, policymakers, practitioners and community leaders. This project reflects CLAL’s unique commitment to include important new voices in the conversation about American Jewish life, voices that are rarely heard within Jewish institutions. Your partnership in supporting this endeavor is vital.

MEETINGS AND METHODS

Central to the Jewish Public Forum's mission is the creation of imaginative, provocative conversations in a variety of formats, including conferences, meetings, articles and face-to-face discussions. Participants in these conversations bring to the table ideas and insights from a wide spectrum of professional fields and academic disciplines. The mode of discussion in JPF meetings is open and intellectually playful on the one hand, and thoughtful and rigorous on the other. Participants are encouraged to ask big questions. At each of its events, the JPF experiments with new methods for sparking productive, cross-boundary discussions.

“The Virtual, the Real, and the Not-Yet-Imagined” (June 4-6, 2000)

Thirty influential thinkers from an array of fields--including religion, technology, business, architecture, media, and anthropology--joined members of the CLAL faculty for a seminar focusing on how new technologies and the “new economy” are changing how people create meaning in their lives. Participants engaged in a collaborative research process called “learning journeys,” visits to sites around New York City where people are learning, praying, shopping, playing, and making sense of their world in new ways. (For more, see “Focus” below.)

“New Media, New Bodies, New Institutions” (November 15, 2000)

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Professor of Performance Studies and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU, folklorist, museum theorist, and author of Destination Culture, was the featured guest at the first of a series of Jewish Public Forum informal dinner conversations. The conversation explored how new media and an “experience” economy are reshaping institutions from museums to synagogues to schools.

For more, click here to read Libby Garland's Art, Performance and the Sacred: A Curriculum for the Senses

“Playing the Jewish Futures: Scenarios on Religion, Ethnicity and Civic Engagement in the Year 2015” (January 14-16, 2001) Fifty leading figures from diverse professional worlds came together to think in broad terms about possible Jewish futures. Participants in the conference used “scenario planning,” a creative method pioneered by the consulting firm Global Business Network to help businesses, non-profits and governments plan for the future in a period of uncertainty. (For more, see “Focus” below.)

A GROWING NETWORK

The Jewish Public Forum continues to build ties among people who might otherwise never have come into contact with each other. It forges connections across the boundaries that separate academics and other professionals and people in different academic disciplines. The JPF also links people inside Jewish communal institutions to those outside, and brings together members of diverse religious and ethnic groups. Participants report that the stimulating conversations they engage in with fellow network participants and CLAL faculty contributes to the development of their own work in unexpected ways.

Participants from wide range of fields: Among the people who participated in the work of the JPF over the past twelve months are: Tom Beaudoin, author, Virtual Faith; Shoshana Cardin, President of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and former Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations; Anne Foerst, Research Scientist, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Research Associate, Center of the Studies of Values in Public Life, Harvard Divinity School; Norman Kleeblatt, Curator of Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum; Mort Meyerson, Chairman and CEO, 2M Companies, Inc.; Saul Perlmutter, astrophysicist and staff scientist, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist and author of several books including Playing the Future: What Can We Learn from Digital Kids?; Peter Schwartz, Chairman and co-founder, Global Business Network and author, The Art of the Long View; Robert Scott, Editor-in-Chief, Spirituality and Health; Anne Simon, Professor of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, University of Maryland; Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Sociology of Science, MIT and author, Life on the Screen; Steven Weber, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley and Consultant, Global Business Network.

Network participants at CLAL: JPF participants come regularly to CLAL to exchange ideas with members of the faculty.

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff spent an afternoon at CLAL in July 2000 discussing his book Playing the Future: What Can We Learn from Digital Kids?, and exploring the affinity between Judaism's traditional emphasis on “media literacy”-- on reading and deconstructing texts -- and the capabilities offered by new media.

In the fall of 2000, astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter participated in a CLAL faculty discussion of Talmud led by CLAL Senior Associate Dr. David Kraemer.

Steve Elkin, Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland, joined CLAL faculty on March 2, 2001 to talk about democratic participation and the public responsibility of social scientists.

On March 21, writer Bruce Feiler met with CLAL faculty to discuss his new book, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses.

Sustainable Wealth Creation project: CLAL Senior Fellow Dr. Robert Rabinowitz held the inital meetings of a project that engages environmentalists, business people, academics and Jewish educators in discussion about corporate social responsibility and the environment.

Silicon Alley/Valley project: CLAL Senior Fellow Rabbi Jennifer Krause has begun to engage leading figures in New York's “Silicon Alley” and California's “Silicon Valley” in conversations on the halachot (laws) of the emerging information technology world.

DISSEMINATING NEW IDEAS

Through publications (both on the Web and in print), consultations with other organizations, and CLAL’s work in communities nationwide, the Jewish Public Forum’s ideas and methods reach a broad audience of influential leaders, scholars and policymakers.

“How is Leadership Changing?” Based on the JPF's conversations with leaders in a broad range of fields and edited by Dr. Shari Cohen, Director of the Jewish Public Forum, this article, which is available on the CLAL Web site and in print from CLAL, was broadly distributed to rabbis, philanthropists, organizational heads and leadership experts. The piece has generated an enthusiastic response. It is a unique multi-vocal discussion of how leadership is being transformed by the emergence of new information technologies, an increasing emphasis on decentralization, and the younger generation’s suspicion of institutional authority. “How Is Leadership Changing?” was also posted in the first issue of The Difference, the new webzine of the executive search firm, Development Resources Group, available at www.e-TheDifference.com.

Interviews with Jewish Public Forum Participants on Identity, Work, and Ideas: As part of its project to document the wide variety of ways people experience and understand Jewishness, the JPF is conducting a series of interviews with its participants. Those who have already been interviewed include Dr. Nancy Abelmann, Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign; Dr. Shepard Forman, Director of the Center on International Cooperation, New York University; Dr. Jay Rosen, Chair of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, New York University; and media theorist and writer Douglas Rushkoff. Already published on CLAL's webzine, these interviews have been released as a JPF original publication.

To access the JPF interview series, click here.

Conference presentations:

At the International Leadership Association Conference in Toronto, Canada (November 3-5, 2000), Dr. Shari Cohen, Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard (CLAL's Director of Organizational Development), and Dr. Robert Rabinowitz presented a workshop, together with David Chrislip, independent consultant and author of Collaborative Leadership, called “Creating New Languages for Leadership Across Boundaries.” They used a Talmudic text to demonstrate a text-based method for facilitating conversation among participants in organizations trapped in unproductive modes of problem solving. The session notes will be available along with other selections from the conference proceedings at the ILA's Website: www.academy.umd.edu/ila/index.htm.

CLAL's President Rabbi Irwin Kula spoke on “Globalization and the Human Condition”at the Aspen Institute’s fiftieth anniversary program (August 2000). His talk focused on how new technologies are reshaping religious identities, a theme the JPF has been exploring.

Rabbi Kula was a panelist in a public forum entitled “Is Nothing Sacred?” hosted by WNYC, New York City's National Public Radio affiliate (January 25, 2001). The panel explored the impact of new media on conceptions of “the sacred.” The event was subsequently webcast on the station's Web site.

Rabbi Irwin Kula and Dr. Shari Cohen spoke in Moscow at “Sefer,” a multi-disciplinary conference on all aspects of Jewish studies (January 30, 2001). Their panel, called “Jews and Judaism in the 21st Century,” brought some of the insights from the Jewish Public Forum to academics from the former Soviet Union, the United States and Israel. Rabbi Kula and Dr. Cohen attended the conference as part of a trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg at the invitation of the Joint Distribution Committee to explore how Jewish identity and community are being formed in post-communist Russia.

CLAL Senior Fellow, Dr. Michael Gottsegen, was a panelist at a discussion, hosted by the Freedom Forum, entitled “Faith and Freedom On Line: The Internet and the Democratization of Religion.” He spoke about the profound impact the Internet is having on religion and religious liberty in the U.S., focusing on how various new and established religious groups are using the Net to spread their message and influence public policy.

Religion and Politics: As part of the JPF's ongoing exploration of how new technologies and the new economy are affecting civic engagement and the ethical dimensions of public policy, CLAL faculty led a discussion forum last November for Jewish leaders and philanthropists. Participants used a Talmudic text to address contemporary controversies over religion in public life. Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard, Dr. Shari Cohen and Dr. Michael Gottsegen, editor of CLAL's on-line magazine e-CLAL, spoke on a panel devoted to the question: “Can religion save politics? Can politics save religion?” Their presentation appeared as a JPF publication this spring.

To access the JPF publication, "Can Religion Save Politics? Can Politics Save Religion?" click here.

FOCUS:

Jewish Public Forum Seminars Use Innovative Methods to Envision Challenges and Trends Shaping Jewish Life

What does a bioethicist, a philosopher of consciousness, or an astrophysicist have to say about the future of Jewish and other religious and ethnic communities? A great deal, the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL believes, which is why it sought out these people to participate in two interdisciplinary conferences it held over the past year, “The Virtual, the Real, and the Not-Yet-Imagined” (June 4-6, 2000) and “Playing the Jewish Futures: Scenarios on religion, ethnicity and civic engagement in the year 2015” (January 14-16, 2001).

Both events were part of the JPF's long-term project exploring, in the broadest possible terms, what may be in store for Jews and Jewish communities in the decades immediately ahead. “Religious and ethnic communities realize the world is changing,” observed Rabbi Irwin Kula, CLAL's President. “But these groups are usually limited in their ideas about how change will affect them.” He added, “We can't answer the question, ‘How will people experience and express Jewishness in North America in 2015?’ without thinking big. Thinking about the future of Jewishness, or of any religion or identity, is more than making projections about things like synagogue attendance or intermarriage; it's about asking what will be meaningful to people in the future.”

“We know that large-scale economic and technological shifts are changing the very experience of being human,” said Dr. Shari Cohen, Director of the Jewish Public Forum. “But how can we really begin to understand the implications of developments as different as the mapping of the human genome, advances in neuroscience, or the explosion of cyberculture? Will these fundamentally reshape our communities, our ideas about ourselves and the way we interact with the world?” Dr. Cohen pointed out that the Jewish Public Forum gives participants from a wide array of fields - including religion, technology, business consulting, architecture, new media, artificial intelligence and anthropology-- the opportunity to converse creatively but in a focused way about these issues across the boundaries of their professional languages and mindsets.

The JPF chooses formats that combine playfulness with discipline. At the June seminar, which explored how new technologies and the “new economy” are reshaping the ways people make meaning in their lives, thirty influential thinkers joined CLAL faculty in an experimental, collective research process of “learning journeys”- visits to cutting edge businesses, on-line communities, public spaces and cultural venues around New York City.

“Learning journeys” included on-site meetings with the editors of the on-line religion magazine Beliefnet.com, the founder of the African-American community Web site BlackPlanet.com, the CEO of the avant-garde downtown arts space The Knitting Factory, and ninth graders at a technology-centered high school. They also included explorations of the shopping emporiums DKNY and Niketown, as well as the “new” Times Square. During and after the learning journeys, participants debated what each site suggested about the speed, extent and durability of technological and economic changes. What, they asked, did the sites reveal about shifting boundaries between public and private, local and global, producer and consumer, marketplace and community?

To learn more about the Learning Journeys, click here.

Participant Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist and author of several books including Playing the Future: What Can We Learn from Digital Kids?, said enthusiastically that the group's exploration of the new Rose Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History had struck him as “a terrific way to discover what it means to be Jewish in a post-congregational era.” He explained, “Standing in the lobby of the planetarium, listening to a leading astrophysicist deconstruct the way in which the huge edifice both succeeded and failed in communicating the reality of the heavens as we currently understand them, I felt more Jewish than I had in years of worshipping in synagogue. Here was honest inquiry at its iconoclastic best. Nothing was sacred, except the approach itself.”

The JPF's January 2001 conference was its most ambitious meeting to date. The two-day event involved fifty participants in "scenario planning,” a method developed by the consulting firm Global Business Network, which has used scenarios to help the South African government envision the challenges of post-apartheid democracy, and to assist major corporations in rethinking their missions in a rapidly changing economy.

The aim of scenario planning is to undermine existing assumptions and mindsets. It does not aim to predict but instead to open possibilities that otherwise might not have been considered. In order to imagine how people might define, identify with, or adopt Jewish ideas and values a decade and a half down the road, participants began by debating which broad social, economic, and technological trends will prove most important over the next years. By the end of the second day, participants had collaborated in the creation of four alternative “scenarios”-creative but plausible stories about the vast range of challenges, choices and possibilities that by 2015 might face Jewish as well as other religious and ethnic communities.

Calling the event “both excellent and unsettling,” participant Robin Kramer, Senior Fellow at the California Community Foundation, explained what seemed different about this event. “Discussions about a Jewish future can feel old-fashioned and stuck,” she noted. “Even really good discussions tend to dig deep into the history of the Jewish people, but this discussion - even though it didn't ignore Jewish history - looked forward and out, without a lot of boundaries.”

CLAL plans to compile the ideas generated at the conference into polished, detailed scenarios, and then publish them in print and on line.

CLAL also intends to use the scenarios in its work with established and emerging Jewish leadership around the country, in order to help large and small Jewish communities think more flexibly and imaginatively about the future, and to assist them in rethinking priorities and transforming institutions. CLAL will make the scenarios available to a variety of other religious and ethnic communities facing similar challenges. JPF director Shari Cohen commented, “The scenarios are not set in stone. They are meant to be evolving texts that will change as different communities respond to them."

CLAL’S WORK BUILDS ON JPF METHODS AND THEMES

The Jewish Public Forum's investigations of how economic shifts and new technologies are transforming religious and other group identities shape the questions CLAL asks in its work with rabbis, in communities around the country, and in its webzine, e-CLAL. And the methods the JPF has used in its meetings have given CLAL faculty new tools for creating compelling programs with a variety of different constituencies.

CLAL webzine: CLAL's webzine e-CLAL (www.clal.org) serves as an important venue for faculty members to explore themes connected to the JPF's work, from the emergence of new forms of spirituality to the impact of technology on civic engagement. Among the many provocative articles that have appeared in e-CLAL were Michael Gottsegen’s “The Spirituality of Politics,” Tsvi Blanchard’s “The Episodic Nature of Contemporary American Spirituality,” Shari Cohen’s “Reality TV: But Who's Watching the Watchers?,” Robert Rabinowitz’s “Where is the Burning Man Fire

In Jewish Life?,” Vanessa Ochs’ “The Spiritual Embrace of the Cyber- Community”; Brad Hirschfield’s “Washington Is Our Shushan, Purim Is Our Day,” Libby Garland’s “The Future of the Cyber Commons: To What End and In Whose Interest?,” and Daniel Brenner’s “More Weird Religious Visions From Jersey.”

The Rabbinic Leadership Retreat: Held in Newport, RI, (March 12-15, 2001) CLAL's annual Rabbinic Leadership Retreat drew thirty-five rabbis from throughout North America and Israel, representing every Jewish movement, for four intensive days of study, debate and prayer. Drawing upon the work of the JPF, CLAL faculty framed the event around such questions as: Can religious leadership adapt to a consumer culture? Can rabbis operate effectively in a wired world?

Lecture series: On April 2, Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard gave the first in a series of six lectures to take place this spring and summer in Miami, FL and Aspen, CO as part of a program called “A New Look At Old Assumptions: Six Perspectives on the Contemporary Jewish Experience.” The lecture series, which is co-sponsored by CLAL and the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies at the University of Miami, is the first such collaboration between CLAL and a major university. Thanks to the work of the JPF and its network of participants, which includes many highly acclaimed academics and thinkers, CLAL's profile has been enhanced on university campuses around North America.

In addition to Rabbi Blanchard's lecture on “Contemporary Jewish Thought,” the series includes Dr. Cohen on “New Views of the Jewish Future,” “Religion and Politics in Modernity: Good or Bad for the Jews?” taught by Dr. Michael Gottsegen, and “Jewish Power and Jewish Politics: Past, Present and Future” by Rabbi Brad Hirschfield. The series will conclude with lectures in Aspen on August 12 and August 14 by Rabbi Irwin Kula and Professor Haim Shaked, Director of the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies. Rabbi Kula will discuss “Creating Jewish Identity and Building Jewish Community in the Contemporary Jewish Situation,” while Dr. Shaked will speak on “The Jewish State: Israel in the 21st Century.”

“Learning Journeys”: CLAL has increasingly been using these onsite visits to cultural, educational, religious and business venues to explore broad questions about societal change. In February, the Ashdown Fellows, a group of senior Jewish educators from Britain who research trends affecting British Jewish life, came to CLAL for their annual week-long conference. As part of the intensive program developed by Dr. Robert Rabinowitz, the Fellows took “learning journeys” to two sites JPF participants had visited during the June conference: Beliefnet.com, the online religious magazine, and Trinity Church, which runs an interfaith cable network, magazine and website in addition to a traditional Episcopal parish.

Rabbinic interns: As part of their year-long program of study at CLAL, seventeen rabbinic interns spent an intensive day investigating a variety of New York City locations reflecting a spectrum of interests, ethnicities, and cultural identifications. From Chinatown and the Lower East Side to the New York University campus and Times Square, rabbis-to-be took their turn as cultural anthropologists, examining the ways that people construct and mark their identities. Students put their findings to work, charting trends and imagining how people will experience and express their Jewishness over the course of the next fifteen years.

Scenario planning in communities: CLAL brought scenario planning, a creative yet disciplined method that helps participants debate the different ways that technological, economic and cultural trends might shape the future, to a local Jewish community for the first time when Dr. Shari Cohen and Rabbi Brad Hirschfield led a symposium in Birmingham, Alabama called “Imagining Birmingham’s Jewish Futures.” Thirty of that community’s emerging Jewish leaders and community professionals participated in the workshop which was so well recieved that CLAL has begun discussions with other Jewish communities around the country about holding scenario planning sessions with them.

Incorporating JPF publications into CLAL programs: “How is Leadership Changing” is being used extensively in CLAL’s leadership training work. The article was a centerpiece of recent training sessions run by CLAL for the Joint Distribution Committee’s New York staff, with leadership groups in Philadelphia and at the CLAL Rabbinic Retreat. CLAL faculty members have also used the interviews with JPF participants in their teaching.

NEW at JPF

CLAL Spielberg Fellow: Libby Garland, doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Michigan, was appointed during the fall of 2000 as the CLAL Spielberg Fellow to work with Dr. Shari Cohen, Director of the JPF, on all aspects of the Forum’s activities. Ms. Garland’s academic work focuses on U.S. immigration history, diasporic and ethnic identities, and the construction of citizenship.

If you are interested in receiving additional information about the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL, please fill out this form and send it to:

Libby Garland
CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership
440 Park Avenue South
4th floor
New York, NY 10016-8012

Or send us your request, along with your name, profession/occupation, organization/affiliation, address, telephone and fax numbers and email address by e-mail to lgarland@clal.org.

Editor: Judy Epstein

(return to top)