Rise of the Meta-

As the internet started proliferating, a number of sites developed to try to make sense of the chaos.  Yahoo gained pre-eminence by warehousing links to all sorts of sites, and starting to group them together.  Webcrawler and other early search engines allowed you to go beyond browsing links and start finding specific content.  Google introduced advanced algorithms to refine those search results and help you find what you wanted faster and more precisely.  None of these technologies actually created content, they merely provided tools to help the average user to make sense and navigate the vast information already available.

This rise of the meta-, that is, not providing the direct content but cataloging it, reorganizing it, and synthesizing it, has bled over into many other facets of society.  And it has real consequences. Take media for example.  With the proliferation of share-able news via twitter, facebook, and other platforms, people are far less interested in the original source of the content, and are likely instead to find the content through an intermediary, either a friend or account they follow, or a news aggregator like Google News.  Sites like the Huffington Post, which creates only a fraction of the content it lists, have found popularity in instead curating the content that is most visible. Because each news site has its own webpage, facebook, and twitter accounts, the information is easily accessible, but the channel is increasingly saturated.  As such, the power has moved away from those who actually create the content to those who aggregate it and curate it, in other words, those functioning at the meta level.

In the Jewish organizational world, we seem to be seeing this trend as well.  As organizations like Moishe House proliferate, and as philanthropists and communities continue to put more resources behind young adult engagement, the amount of content (in this case, programming or events), has generally risen.  Many communities now have professionals working exclusively on engaging young adults, fully outside of a development context.  That is to say that communities are starting to try to connect to young adults without the immediate goal of asking them for money.  In major markets like Chicago, where the organizational landscape is quite robust, there are often several nights a week in which more than one young adult group is hosting something.  But even in Chicago, there are large numbers of young adults, even those who express interest in community involvement, who know little about the actual events and opportunities taking place.  This discovery gap creates a market opportunity for an organization to play the meta role, amassing the information and categorizing and curating it in a useful and share-able manner.

At a time with more and more consultants, and fewer and fewer people actually doing the work, those in the meta role are crucial for the discovery process, but also risk diverting resources from the work that must actually be done on the ground.

The danger in playing in the meta field is relatively simple:  If you rely totally on others to create the information you re-purpose, you have to be sure that there is sufficient high quality content to pull from.  As more Jewish organizations seek to play at the meta level, it is crucial that the landscape not become top heavy.  In other words, if we imagine the relationship between content (or program) providers and aggregators to be such that there must be many providers to one aggregator, we should be wary that there aren't more aggregators to the detriment of fewer providers.




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On the Importance of Partnerships

The Jewish communal world, which started to bring together and find synergies amongst the many Jewish non profit agencies often has a hard time collaborating with new comers. Organizations have staked out their funders, their niche, and working with others might be seen as acknowledging that they are less than perfect. Sure, we've covered this before, but it is worth repeating, particularly in regards to some new developments.

Good partnerships allow organizations to supplement their effectiveness by taking advantage of the strengths of one another.

Recently, Next Dor and the Jewish Federation of St. Louis have begun testing a partnership with Birthright Israel NEXT. Birthright NEXT has a presence in a number of major American cities, with staff and program budgets that have proved effective in reaching out to past Birthright participants and helping them engage in Jewish life and community. In cities like St. Louis, NEXT has not had the staff to support its program, and has been looking for partnerships to extend its impact.

Locally, the Jewish Federation has made young adult engagement a top priority and has put money behind it by funding a position to do Birthright follow-up. Next Dor, as a local conduit for young adults and activities is always looking to expend the number of people connected to it.

As you can see, there is a lot to work with.

One of the tangible results is this page, on Birthright NEXT's site, listing young adult focused events in St. Louis.

By focusing on what each organization brings to the table, each organization is able to be more effective with minimum additional spend.

Partnerships like this will be crucial to the next chapter in the Jewish communal world in which dollars are tighter, resources are stretched, and collaboration is essential Read More......

Raising a Jewish Family

Talk about life-cycle events... just after writing about the Jewish Wedding Network, I had the opportunity to spend a Shabbat with cousins in Denver. Their 2-year-old, Micah, is beyond adorable. He is also learning, from a very young age, what it means to be Jewish.

While walking to the park, my cousin and Micah’s mother, Kareen, was telling me about a book they read to him at night entitled, “Let’s Go to Israel.”

The book is short and sweet, and describes a few of the things you can do in each city. It is hard to describe, but when Kareen asked Micah where he could go sailing, and he said, “Eilat” (well it sounded more like, A-wot, but we knew what he meant), I was struck by what I was witnessing. Combine this with Micah getting excited for Challah time as we sat down for Shabbat, and him repeating the Sh’mah along with us as we tucked him in, and I realized that I was getting to witness the birth of a Jewish identity.

Its not just that it is unbelievably cute to hear him grapple with Hebrew, or jump in while a book is being read to him and say the word, “Matzah,” at the end of a sentence, it is that I was granted the opportunity to play voyeur into a piece of my cousin’s identity formation.

Jews seem to spend a lot of time discussing the woes of assimilation, unaffiliation, and inter-marriage, but rarely do we seem to focus on what is probably the strongest protection against all three; a strong and positive Jewish identity that is reinforced within the family environment from an early age.

For Micah, Judaism is filled with positive experiences, sweet grape-juice, tasty Challah, and most importantly, time spent with family.

It is often said that Jewish parents can measure their success by whether their grandchildren proudly consider themselves to be Jewish. This outcome seems very likely in Micah’s case.

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