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New Media, Fast Companies and Old-Time Religion: CLAL Assembles Experts for Seminar on Jewish Future

By Andrew Silow-Carroll, Communications Director

Is the office supplanting the family as the place where people seek love, companionship, history and a sense of belonging? What's lost, and what's gained, in a world in which the average person can identify only 10 kinds of flowers, but over 1,000 corporate logos? What happens to a religious community when its members move from the synagogue and church to an on-line chat room?

How vast changes in technology and economy are shaping religion, identity and community was the topic of a three-day CLAL seminar, "The Virtual, the Real and the Not-Yet-Imagined: Meaning, Identity and Community in a Networked World." Held June 4-6 and sponsored by CLAL's Jewish Public Forum, the seminar brought together 30 influential thinkers from an array of fields, including religion, technology, business consulting, architecture, new media, artificial intelligence and anthropology.

Each of the participants was invited to discuss how the Internet and related technologies, along with accelerating economic trends like globalization and the "information society," are affecting their work as "meaning-makers," i.e., those who create the ways in which and places where people connect to others, to institutions and to a purpose greater than themselves. What will religious leaders, educators, scholars, commentators and counselors need to know to remain relevant in a world being transformed by the rapid pace of technological and economic change?

To get a first-hand look at the very changes on the conference agenda, participants fanned out on on-site "learning journeys" to cutting-edge businesses, on-line communities, public spaces and cultural venues. The learning journey sites were chosen to reflect new settings where people learn, pray, shop, celebrate, play and make sense of their world.

"Learning journey" sites included the new Times Square, the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History, the downtown arts space The Knitting Factory, the on-line religion magazine Beliefnet.com, the technology and new media labs at Manhattan's Beacon High School, and the African-American community Web site Blackplanet.com.

The June seminar was part of a larger multi-dimensional project on the Jewish future, to culminate in January 2001. Now in its second year, the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL brings together leaders and thinkers-most unaffiliated with Jewish organizations-in order to generate fresh thinking about the social, political and cultural trends affecting Jewish and other religious and ethnic communities. The Jewish Public Forum network now includes nearly 100 business, policy and academic leaders. Its ideas and publications are widely disseminated to an influential audience of analysts, policy makers and practitioners.

Above all, the Jewish Public Forum is about starting new conversations, with new participants, in settings that are rarely found within organized Jewish community.

"As our discussions and learning journeys demonstrated, recent and coming changes are blurring the boundaries that were once taken for granted in ordering society: public vs. private, religious vs. secular, and work vs. home," said Dr. Shari Cohen, director of the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL. "To understand how these changes will shape the Jewish future, we invited thinkers from a wide variety of fields to engage in similarly boundary-crossing conversations."

Among those participating in the June seminar were Anne Foerst, Research Scientist, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Research Associate, Center of the Studies of Values in Public Life, Harvard Divinity School; Saul Perlmutter, cosmologist and staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; Douglas Rushkoff, Professor of Media Culture at New York University and author of Coercion and Playing the Future; Norman Kleeblatt, Curator of Fine Arts at The Jewish Museum; Rabbi Irwin Kula, President of CLAL; David Shenk, author of Data Smog; Michael J. Weiss, author of The Clustered World; Nicola Phillips, organizational psychologist and author of Reality Hacking; and Lynda Sexson, Professor of Humanities at Montana State University and author of Ordinarily Sacred.

The Jewish Public Forum at CLAL is made possible through the generosity of the Eleanor M. and Herbert D. Katz Family Foundation.