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For Immediate Release

CLAL LAUNCHES INITIATIVE TO FOSTER DIALOGUE AMONG JEWISH "INSIDERS" AND "OUTSIDERS"

NEW YORK - CLAL is proud to announce its newest component: the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL, "an open conversation on Jewish possibilities."

Leaders and thinkers from an array of professions and academic disciplines gathered in New York recently to launch the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL, which is intended to identify fresh voices and generate innovative approaches to issues of Jewish identity and affiliation. Participants were also encouraged to imagine new Jewish contributions to the general public debate on public policy, ethics, leadership and culture.

Forum events will include seminars and intimate face-to-face meetings among influential Jewish Americans.

The hallmark of these events will be an inter-disciplinary approach that dissolves the usual boundaries dividing professions, academic disciplines and schools of thought. Most significantly, the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL will create a dialogue process between leaders and thinkers already well-connected to Jewish communal concerns and those accomplished Jewish "outsiders" who have so far been unable or unwilling to engage with organized Jewish life.

"Jewish institutions and professionals often talk about upgrading Jewish life and increasing our commitment to Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. And yet we have engaged only a fraction of the potential intellectual, artistic, entrepreneurial and spiritual resources available to us," said Dr. David Elcott, Academic Vice President of CLAL. "If we are serious then we must locate and engage not only thoughtful lay leaders, communal professionals and rabbis, but the wide array of influentials who are not yet invested in the Jewish community."

"Leadership in a Time of Great Change" is the topic of the first year of the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL. At the opening seminar, held at New York's Harmonie Club, faculty members facilitated conversations on the challenges of leadership at a time of vast global transformations in politics, economics and civic life.

Participants in the seminar on leadership included Adrianne Bank, an independent management consultant associated with the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles; Shepard Forman, Director of the Center of International Cooperation at New York University; Barbara Kellerman, Director of the Center for Advanced Study of Leadership at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, University of Maryland; Marty Linsky, lecturer in the Program on Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; Esther Perel, an organizational consultant affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry at New York University Medical School; Jay Rosen, press critic, former Director of the Project on Public Life and the Press at N.Y.U. and author of the forthcoming book, What Are Journalists For? (Yale, 1999); Jonathan Sarna, Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University; Steven Weber, a consultant with Global Business Network and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley; and Philip Wexler, Dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Rochester.

Topics for future seminars will include the impact of new media technologies, the decline of civic involvement, globalization, and the end of the Cold War.

Thomas O. Katz will serve as chair of the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL. Dr. Elcott will serve as academic director of the Jewish Public Forum, along with Dr. Shari Cohen, a Research Fellow at CLAL. Like Dr. Elcott, Dr. Cohen is a political scientist who has studied leadership issues and ideological transformations.

"The Jewish Public Forum is a project in keeping with CLAL's pluralistic vision of Jewish life, and our dedication to enhancing Jewish participation in the civic and spiritual concerns of North America," said Rabbi Irwin Kula, President of CLAL

CLAL received significant funding from the Eleanor M. and Herbert D. Katz Family Foundation to create the Jewish Public Forum