Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 1 September 2024. Ah, Jew-spotting!—a pastime beloved equally to antisemites and Jews. If you see someone constantly updating their social media feed with lists of famous or influential people that you might not have known are Jewish, then that someone could be the late and infamous Holocaust denier David Irving,…
Tag: community
Should We Put Out a Statement?
Thinking strategically about how nonprofits should respond to potentially polarizing world events. Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 27, 2024. For nonprofit communications professionals (and nonprofit executives), the very worst time to talk about public advocacy around divisive issues is when you most urgently need to talk about them. This is especially true when there are…
A Moonshot for American Judaism: Help Revitalize American Christianity
eJewish Philanthropy, December 29, 2020. You know what the biggest problem is with Jewish engagement efforts? The problem is that we only focus on Jews. I’m not kidding. In this country, if we want to get more Jews to shul, we need to get more Christians to church. To revitalize American Judaism, we need to…
Towards Shared Identities
Originally published in Quillette. November 12, 2020. Excerpts: When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, many Jews in the Russian Empire hoped for a French victory. Napoleon had eliminated barriers to Jewish integration and advancement in France; the Russian regime and its policies, by contrast, were thoroughly infused with anti-Jewish discrimination and hostility. But one prominent…
Just Jew It: Against Giving Reasons for Living a Jewish Life
eJewish Philanthropy. July 23, 2019. It’s not uncommon, in Jewish communal circles, to hear it claimed that the central question for our profession today is, “Why be Jewish?” In an age of free choice and self-constructed identities, this argument goes, the Jewish community can no longer count on individuals to affiliate themselves and participate, so…
Religious ‘neutrality’ is a myth.
LA Times. December 23 (online) / December 25 (print), 2016 In 2003, at age 21, I wrote an op-ed for my hometown paper arguing that the Montpelier, Vt., City Hall should remove its Christmas tree. I argued that Christmas decorations symbolically told Jews like me, and other non-Christians, that city government stood more for the…
Nonprofits Still Seen Struggling Long After Recession
The Jewish Week. (Dec 31, 2014.) One billion dollars lost. With the U.S. economy digging itself out of a deep hole, the $1 billion figure represents the collective revenue loss to Jewish nonprofits from 2007, the start of the Great Recession, to 2012, according to a new study. That’s an 11 percent drop in money…
The Next Pope and the Jews
First Things. (March 11, 2013.) When the next pope is elected, pronouncements from major Jewish organizations will follow this basic script: Mazel tov. Your recent predecessors did many good things for the Jews; please expand them. Your predecessors also did many bad things for the Jews; please admit this and do better. Mazel tov again,…
Can’t Buy Me Judaism
eJewish Philanthropy. (August 2012.) “The day is not far off,” wrote John Meynard Keynes, “when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation…
Seth Chalmer 