Gary Rosenblatt has a piece this week in the New York Jewish Week about the war in Chicago between the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and the University of Chicago’s Hillel.   Click here to get caught up on the back-story.

I highlight this piece because, in essence, it is the first concrete example of conflict between pre-radical-break Jews and Next Jews.  And I am loathe to portray it as a “conflict”, except that it is.

As Rosenblatt reported:

The Hillel board, in a March 28 letter to the federation, sought to restructure its relationship with federation and make the Hillel an “independent entity,” asserting that federation left it “in the position of either having a building without a program or a program without a building.”

The Hillel folks clearly preferred the latter while the Federation, it seemed, advocated firmly the former.   And when I say “advocated firmly”, I mean “forcibly enforced” as in, the federation fired the University of Chicago Hillel board and executive director Daniel Libenson on March 30 for their insistence on preferring programming over infrastructure.

That's me in the back...

Was preferring programs to buildings a misguided position?  After all, what is Hillel (or the Federation or Temple Beth…) without its building?

Libenson disagrees.  His greatest campus success – Shabbat dinners – is but one example as to why he prefers programs.  It also intimates to where Next Jews are going – and it’s definitely not into establishment edifices.

When Shabbat dinners happened in the Hillel building, Libenson pointed out, 30 students would come. However, when Shabbat was welcomed in a regular dining hall rented by Hillel, 200 would take part.   (That’s a 566% increase in attendance in case you were wondering.)

I will be talking more about this developing story at the May 10 book launch.  And I will be blogging here about the others that will inevitably follow as Next Jews begin to assert their own needs and, sadly, their predecessors ignore them.

Your attitudes toward Israel - and your clothes... give them to me, now.

Let us try a time-travelling experiment without need for any elaborate mechanisms or recourse to nudity (ala The Terminator).

Read this piece by Gil Troy first.

Then (re-)read the earlier piece by Jesse Lieberfeld here.

True, Gil Troy’s piece comes in response and reaction to Lieberfeld’s MLK Day essay, but in a sense, one could read Lieberfeld’s piece as if he time-travelled into the future and read Troy’s piece before JPost ran the McGill professor’s take-down (of a American high school student, well-played, sir!) … and then returned to his own timeline to write his essay.

But consider this…

Does it really matter in which order one reads these kinds of pieces any more?

And, more sadly, is it so difficult to appreciate and understand why the authors (spokespeople in a way, for their respective generations) feel as betrayed and distanced as they do by each other?

I am sure you do.

Folks have been sending me links and clips of folks that might fit the profile.  (I am also trying to find some folks to sit on a panel about this for my book launch at the MNJCC in May… details to follow!)

By the time I'm out the door, you tear men down like Roger Moore...

Here are two.  The first comes from Andrew Lustig, whose “I am a Jew” def-jew-poetry-slamfest has been lauded by some (see the comment section for the love) and dismissed by Rabbi Andy Bachman (among many) as “wrong on many levels”  … I was mildly entertained with an emphasis on mildly, though somewhat offended by Andrew’s dig at gefilte fish… and definitely taken aback by his Amy Winehouse-ish ‘do.  I also had the sense that, though culturally literate in Jewishness, Judaism was something he could refer to but not necessarily do.  Check it out here.  (I would have embedded it for your viewing pleasure, but the neveilehs who made the clip disabled the feature!  View-mongers!)

The second example comes from a Martin Luther King Day essay contest about race and difference.  Written by 17 year old Jesse Lieberfeld, his piece entitled “Fighting a Forbidden Battle: How I Stopped Covering Up for a Hidden Wrong” pulls no punches about confronting one of the more vexing moral dilemmas facing his generation of North American Jews…

Whether you regard these texts as simplistic, fey, or naive, they are representative of where a substantial tranche of the North American Jewish community is headed…

Does that make you nervous?

A must read about the unfolding events at #OccupyWallStreet.

First, a Kol Nidre service.  Then, a Sukkah.  Next, the Occupiers down at Wall Street are calling for an occupation of organized Judaism itself.

Read on.  The original is here.

October 14, 2011 / 8:31am

Occupy Judaism: A “Turning Point” in American Judaism

Post by SARAH POSNERAn editorial in the Forward calls it a “turning point” in American Judaism. The Kol Nidre service at Occupy Wall Street has blossomed into something bigger: Occupy Judaism.

Jane Eisner, the Forward editor, writes that what is “novel” about Occupy Judaism “is that it challenges the establishment on several fronts,” not just a “direct affront” to party politics, but an “audacious display of empowered Judaism, conducted without the authorization of Jewish officialdom.”

Daniel Sieradski, the organizer of the Kol Nidre service, says the movement is “tapping into something that people haven’t had access to other than through marginal Jewish social justice organizations that don’t get attention or support they deserve because people are too busy sending 18 year-olds to Israel to be indoctrinated with hedge fund managers’ money.”

Sieradski is referring to Birthright, which, according to Kiera Feldman’s investigation for the Nation, has spent “$600 million to send more than 260,000 young diaspora Jews on free vacations to the Holy Land,” a journey that was conceived as “the selling of Jewishness to Jews” and which whitewashes the Israeli occupation. It was co-founded by hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt and is funded by, among others, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. “Those are two people who have made their living by putting other people in the poor house,” Sieradski added.

Sieradksi likens this moment of the emergence of Occupy Judaism to the one created when Peter Beinart issued his own indictment of the Jewish establishment, charging that it asked American Jews to “check their liberalism at Zionism’s door.”

“We’ve been asked,” said Sieradski, “to check our social justice values at the establishment’s door.

Sieradski emphasized how many establishment Jewish organizations “do great and important things, like putting food on people’s tables and taking care of the needy,” and advocate for entitlement programs. But, he insisted, that’s not enough. “At the end of the day,” he said, “all major Jewish organizations take their money from the same Wall Street bankers who put us in this economic situation.

The focus of the Kol Nidre service Sieradski organized was on our collective role in the financial system, and “focused on our responsibilities as Jews,” he said. He admires Jewish social justice organizations of which he’s “very, very, very supportive, I’m here because I want to bring more people to be connected to the Jewish community and to organziations in the Jewish community. But I want hold the leadership of the mainstream Jewish institutions that are taking money hand over fist from Wall Street.”

The “Jewish establishment,” Sieradksi charged, “is subject to oligarchs who dictate the terms of our communal relationship.”

“I don’t want to be a schlepper for Jewish oligarchs,” he said, who “propagandize Jewish children about their Jewish values and conservative Zionism.”

Eisner writes that Occupy Judaism presents an opening for Jewish activism in an age in which religious political advocacy has been dominated by conservative evangelicals, eclipsing, for younger Jews, a time “when rabbis like Abraham Joshua Heschel marched for civil rights, and Arthur Waskow created a Freedom Seder, and Catholic priests and nuns were instrumental in anti-war agitation, their actions propelled by a fervent religiosity and expressed in liturgical terms.”

So far word of Occupy Judaism has spread by word of mouth and by social media. Sieradski says people responded to the Kol Nidre service with statements like “this was the most meaningful Jewish experience of my life.”