The U of C Hillel Debacle

This post will be of interest only to those aware of my long professional involvement with Hillel and the stops along the way. And also to those who just happen to be following a very public, and unspeakably sad, crisis in Chicago playing itself out in the American Jewish press. Chicago was my headquarters for 13 years, 1982-95. While there I was the head of an office which included concentric circles of responsibility and authority: the inner-most was as the exec of the Chicago based college service system; after that, an extended role as head of the Illinois system, regional director for Hillel for most of the mid-west, and as an officer of the international headquarters of Hillel with global and national responsibilities. In 1982, the Chicago federation system had just merged with the Midwest Hillel system. The challenge for the first several years was to execute the merger and develop credibility for a deeply wounded and profoundly underfunded system. In good days, it meant effective leveraging the strengths of the Chicago federation and the strengths of the larger global Hillel system. In the not so good days, it meant balancing competing claims on time and [rarely] loyalty. There were ups and downs over the 13 years I was there, but when I left, there were endowments, new buildings built or in planning, a stable staff, and credibility for volunteer and professional leadership. My successor, who retired this year, never had as many concentric circles of responsibility. It is probably true that I was spread too thin [job-wise, not waist-wise] and some adjustment was probably appropriate. I stayed with Hillel as its international VP for only a couple of years after I left Chicago, moving on to a wonderful new direction in the philanthropy world. Thus I have had only the most cursory knowledge of developments and trends in a place to which I had devoted those 13 years. As I read the many articles, it appears that things began to change about 5 years after I left, and continued to do so for several years thereafter. From the outside, it seems that the most underlying change was not the details listed in the press as much as the erosion of the dynamic relationship between the Chicago Federation and the larger Hillel system. I suspect that, more than anything else, that planted the seeds of the difficulties which are now so public. Of course, this public battle makes me sad. Change happens, but the Chicago Hillel operation was the state of the art, and, success always has more proud parents than nature can produce on its own. [failure has only orphans, we know]. 17 years later, it is sad to see it dragged through the mud, regardless of who is more correct. [I have my opinions on all of this but not relevant for me to weigh in from afar.] But in this case, the sadness goes deeper: the person now sitting in the seat derivative of the one I used to hold is the son-in-law of the late chair of the regional board in the early 80's. While she was a VP of the Federation, she was a strong and unrelenting force for Hillel's independence. I wonder what she would be saying were she still alive. More, the one who sits in that chair at the Federation is married to her daughter - I am the one who introduced them and even officiated at their wedding. So now it becomes persona and not simply of historic professional interest. There isn't much constructive I can add to this debacle. I am in the fortunate position of having no current inside information from anyone, and all of this seems to have occurred long after I left. But one does like to look back on the stages of ones life with pride, hope that those successes survive you. Every article I read only makes me less proud. As I said, sad indeed.

What I learned at the Council on Foundations annual meeeting

One might subtitle this post: "maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks" or "you should listen to your wife" or... The reason this is being posted on the Marker Musings blog and not Wise Philanthropy is that it really has nothing at all to do with the Council on Foundations annual meeting except that the incident occurred there. There I was, along with a host of others, kibitzing in the bar on the way to a reception. [a lot of kibitzing at that conference.] And EPIP founder and ceo Rusty Stahl introduced me to someone in this fashion: "this is Richard Marker - he is a kvetch but is a good guy." What? Me? I thought all I did was offer appropriate -and obviously probing and insightful - observations. Kvetch? What a way to be introduced to someone I never met before! And sort of like saying, if you put up with his style, you might even get to like him. Well, if you were me, what would you do? That is right, ask Mirele. And it turns out that she agreed with Rusty - "you do sometimes complain too much but I love you anyway". She reminded me that she often tells me not to respond in conversations with "but" or "no" but with "yes" and "and." Oh my. The way I see it, if Rusty said it aloud, others must think it or even say that about me. I never saw myself as a naysayer or a complainer - only one who wants to improve something or engage in a dialogue, but I guess this is the way some or even many others do perceive me. "kvetch?" The word itself isn't even mellifluous, and a personality which accompanies it cannot be much fun to hang with. What to do? One cannot go back and re-open old conversations and start them all anew; there are a lot of years. But maybe one - I - can be careful when I start new ones. Maybe I should restrict my judgmental opinions to more carefully selected moments. Maybe most people really don't care what those opinions are. Maybe one - I - should be more disciplined - take a breath before opining. Who knows what might happen? Might open social and even professional doors that aren't now. Minimally it should make for more cordial introductions. If one believes in "lifetime learning" it is never too late to learn, even if it is how one comes across to others. I meet lots of people - all the time. Just imagine if the next time someone introduces me they say "This is Richard Marker - a fun guy to be with." Thanks to Rusty and COF, a kvetch no more. Let the partying begin....

An Equinox Dilemma: What would you do? What should I do?

Here is my dilemma. When I am in town, I go to the Equinox in my neighborhood every morning. I am always there before it opens, along with a group of fellow insomniacs. The numbers vary but there is always a group waiting for the opening. This Equinox is certainly the nicer of the neighborhood health clubs and only one block from our home. I have been a “member” since it opened 3 years ago.

The fellow responsible for opening on weekdays sets a very welcoming tone and allows everyone to wait inside until time to go to the gyms. Everyone waits in an orderly line, patiently, fully aware of the procedure and the timing. All of this happens before 5:30 am. By the time we go to our respective workout locations, everything is on and ready to use.

The folks responsible for opening on weekends are invariably snarly and never open the doors until the minute the gyms are allowed to be used. Those who are waiting get cranky, impatient, and annoyed at the seemingly meaningfulness stringency. And all of this happens around 8:00 am. Even at that later hour, most of the time much of the gym is not quite ready.

I learned that a number of those who wait for the opening on weekends have written to the management to complain. The consistent response has been that the management of this Equinox location is not sympathetic at all. A number of regulars have quit because of their experiences. [I have since learned of more.]

Finally a couple of weeks ago, I too had reached the point where I was simply too annoyed with the rude manner, to say nothing of the silly procedural rigidity, so I wrote to the Equinox headquarters. In my note, I highly praised the week-day greeter and suggested that the weekend staff should take lessons from him. My feelings about this fellow are widely shared, especially contrasted with most of the other greeters. The headquarters folks did not respond at all but I did get an email from the manager of this Equinox. The manager told me that she appreciated the kind words about the staff and would make sure that he knew of them, but then went on to justify why the weekend procedure was the correct one. [That there were inconsistencies in her response only reinforced to me that she and thus the weekend group had simply decided to adopt a very stringent interpretation of how to open.]

A few days later, I asked the weekday greeter if the manager had passed along my good words. He assured me that she hadn’t. Two days later he told me that she never said a word to him but another supervisor criticized him for his lenient practice and was advised that the procedure should be to keep everyone locked out until the time to let people exercise.

So here is my dilemma: Instead of praising and giving a bonus or raise to a prized employee, they turned a positive into a negative. It led to one of the other morning greeters who was very warm and welcoming, to quit. And even other staff, waiting for the door to open, have also voiced their annoyance at the silly rigidity.

The question: What should I do now? I certainly do NOT want to endanger this employee.

1. I can write to the headquarters again.
2. I can go talk to the local manager, but anyone who has done so says that she is neither pleasant nor responsive.
3. I can quit and give the money I don’t give to Equinox as a bonus to this employee.
4. Other?

I am now going to be away for a bit so I won’t act in haste, but I do want to do something. Let me know your thoughts.

How philanthropy taught me to embrace failure – a precondition to success

[This posting bridges my two blog sites: it is both about effective grantmaking and about personal learning. Thus I am posting it on both.]

Typically, I find that I, as with many of my colleagues who write about philanthropy, extrapolate from personal experience to develop insights into good grantmaking strategies, ethics, and impact. This time, however, the reverse is true: after years of grantmaking, and teaching about grantmaking, I have learned very important things about myself.

The issue: the value of failure.

For at least the last decade, anyone who has heard me speak about philanthropy or who has taken a course with me knows that I view private philanthropy to be society’s risk capital. By definition, risk means some possibility of failure. Good grantmakers needs to develop a tolerance that some percentage of their grants will not accomplish everything that they wished or that their grantees strived to do. Grantmakers who support start-ups, early stage organizations, new approaches to almost anything, need to accept that, if they are doing it right, some failure is not only inevitable but indeed desirable.

Even grants to established organizations and projects run the risk of failure. After all, every grant is a bet on the future. And nothing is guaranteed in the future. The market may crash and erode financial stability. A key staff person may leave. A public benefit organization [aka non-profit] may have new and vigorous competition. A highly competent staff may misread early indications of interest as real demand. Unanticipated variables serve to yield unanticipated results. It happens all the time.

Those of us who are funders need to be careful not to penalize these kinds of failures for two reasons: The non-profit was true to its proposal; it just didn’t work. And we as funders endorsed their proposal by funding them; we agreed that it was worth the risk. [I want to make a very real distinction between this kind of failure and that of a grantee that doesn’t do what they say they will do, or doesn’t engage the funder in significant changes in an approved project. Funders have every right to be annoyed and, in some cases, hold the organization financially accountable.]

Let us also make clear that funders themselves have been known to make failure more likely. When funders look at a budget, see that a project needs a certain amount of money and support to have a good chance to succeed; we should not then try to see how little funding we can get away with. Organizations are so hungry for support that they will often swallow hard and accept less than they know they really need. Funders should not be surprised if this project doesn’t succeed. This is not the kind of failure I applaud. But back to our topic:

Why is acceptance of failure so important: when properly examined, one learns what went wrong and what might be done better. It helps distinguish between a great idea poorly implemented and an idea which simply wasn’t ready for prime time. It helps avoid simplistic replication and encourages constructive application.

A case in point [of many]: Some years ago, when I became ceo of the foundation I used to head, one of the first challenges on my plate was to review a very innovative project which we were funding in collaboration with two other foundations. The creator of the project only reported wonderful things about his cutting edge methodology, the wide and prestigious acceptance of the project and the great emerging demand for the program. Before I arrived, a colleague at one of the partner funders didn’t buy it. Since our foundation was the lead funder, we initiated an independent evaluation of the program – and lo and behold – we discovered that almost everything the founder of the program told us was more or less true except that virtually none of the methodology, acceptance and demand had anything to do with the reason the program existed – in other words, to use the vocabulary of some evaluators: the reports were full of “outputs” but failed miserably with “outcomes.” The challenge for us as funders was to determine whether this was a failure of an idea or of implementation, a case of ego driven leadership, or something else. We decided that the idea was a solid one – but the founder was too fond of his own Kool-Aid to see that he had not delivered. A change in professional leadership, some more hands on supervision/direction by me, and a more specific set of expectations led to the program achieving much of what it was intended to do.

It would have been easy to cut the program but we funders chose to learn from our early mistakes. I am quite convinced that the program which emerged after the failure was much better and stronger than it would have been had it not failed in the first place.

This is but one example of many, and it is gratifying that there are a growing number of those in our field who are finally openly discussing the value of learning from what has either failed or significantly underperformed. In fact, I now believe that we can only do excellent funding if we are willing to acknowledge and learn from our mistakes, errors, failures, and shortfalls.

And crucially, since there are no external standards, accreditations, or public independent reviewers of the quality of grantmakers and foundations, any commitment to this kind of quality improvement in our grantmaking must come from within. By no means a simple goal. After all:

Since not everyone takes our courses, contracts with us, or even reads these posts [shocking, I know!], I want to add a word of empathy for those who staff or lead foundations. I fully appreciate that failure is rarely rewarded. Families may see themselves as stewards of very precious resources and legacy and want to be as careful as possible. Corporate foundations may be unwilling to take risks with shareholders’ money and are cautious with possible public fallout. Community foundations want to be identified as supporting the interests of the community and may not want to risk angering or disappointing potential supporters. I am not naïve nor unsympathetic with those who choose to follow a safer – if less adventurous – path with their grantmaking strategy.

But for those who are committed to truly “making a difference”, who recognize that risk can be healthy and rewarding, and who want to push their own grantmaking to excellence, understanding and tolerance of failure are indispensible. It is important that the early efforts to report on and learn from our failures be expanded. When others ask for more transparency in grantmaking, this should be window #1. The entire sector will be the better for it.

Readers whose interest is “philanthropy” and not about me might well stop here.

What does this say to me about me? The more I have learned about the real benefits of risk taking and learning from failure in grantmaking, the more it has helped me understand certain crucial decisions made or avoided in my own professional life.

What I learned was that, for most of my career, I was too risk averse. It wasn’t that I wasn’t ambitious but that my fear of failure overruled my drive for excellence. Certainly, much success has come my way, for which I am thankful and proud, but when I look back, I realize that there were too many occasions when I settled for the good or safe when I could have achieved excellence or made a real difference. My long personal list would be of little interest to readers and perhaps a little too self revealing, but a very few examples may be helpful to others:

• In the mid 1970’s when I was still in academia, I delivered a series of lectures on post-modernism and its impact on late 20th century identity. They were popular and well received. A publisher actually offered to publish them in a book. I froze [writers block?] – and some years later others began saying and publishing those same ideas. I frankly felt a sense of failure that others were saying what I had said earlier. Sadly it was another 30 years before I finally published my first and, to date, only book. What did I learn? That I was more afraid of possible criticisms than I was motivated to get those ideas out there. Big mistake. It might have enhanced the public discourse at an opportune time. Lost opportunities to make a difference.
• I always enjoyed public speaking, and had lots of opportunities since doing so was integral to my careers I always thought I had plenty to say, but couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting the big invites. I felt like I was a failure in a part of my career that mattered to me a lot. It was not until Mirele helped me understand that indeed I was too inconsistent in my presentation style to be in demand. No one had ever told me that before – in fact I had file folders full of complimentary letters that led me to think I was doing just fine. It was quite late – but not too late - in my career that I participated in a mentoring program offered by the National Speakers Association and learned how to be a more disciplined and much more engaging speaker. Now much of my income comes from my public speaking; return invitations are the norm and not the exception. What did I learn? That no one except you and your spouse are really committed to getting you from “good” to “excellence.” I wish I had learned that much earlier. Big mistake. It might have enhanced my role as a thought leader. Lost opportunities to make a difference.
• Before becoming self employed a decade ago, I had been an employee [even if at a fairly high level] for 35 years. That decision was a bit of a risk I would not have taken earlier, but not relevant to these personal insights. What did surprise me was the response to things I said or wrote after I became my own boss. People, many of whom had known me for many years, told me that they never realized that I had such passion for certain political positions or such a commitment to social change and innovation. My ideas, passions, and commitments had not changed and I always thought they had been evident. Apparently I was too cautious. Of course, when one is an executive and working in organizational leadership, one needs to be self aware of what one says, and when. But in retrospect I overly self-censored and, remarkably, was unaware that I did so. I feel now that I failed those ideas and organizations which would have benefited from my more public articulation of support. What did I learn? That I probably was more afraid of incurring the anger of those who might disagree than providing leadership and insights to expand the public discourse. Big mistake. I was in a leadership role and did exercise true exemplary leadership. Lost opportunities to make a difference.

The list could go on, but the underlying message is consistent. Risk aversion and caution have their place. But if one is committed to making a difference, of changing at least some part of the world, of having an impact to the extent of ones ability, then one must take risks, incur failure, and most important, learn from them. If philanthropy is much better for that approach, so can one’s own life and career. In both there may have been lost opportunities but in both it is never too late to learn.

9/11 Recollections - 10 years later

Most of the moving and impassioned recollections of this 10th anniversary have, appropriately, been by those directly involved as victims, survivors, first responders, or their families and friends. As well they should. This anniversary should still be defined by direct experience and memory, and should not yet be relegated to icon, myth, and symbol. Indeed, one might ask if there hasn’t been too much of a rush to install icon, myth, and symbol; surely, as one looks at long-term responses to historic events which have become part of the public consciousness, it appears to me that it has.

However, this recollection should be understood as but a footnote to history and not as central to that public consciousness. Nevertheless, for most of us, our memory is vivid, even if we were not direct participants, and the full story of how our lives were changed then and now helps bring vitality to that fateful day.

On 11 September 2001, I was with a small delegation accompanying Edgar Bronfman to Mexico City.

To understand such a visit requires a recollection of the central role that Edgar Bronfman and Vicente Fox, Mexico’s president, each played at that time.

Vicente Fox, it should be remembered, was the tall, American trained, business background president of Mexico at the time. He was a symbol of a new Mexico, and more importantly, of a new priority with the United States. George W Bush, remember him, had very little international experience or curiosity, Mexico being the exception, since as a Texan he lived on its border. Texan Bush and Mexican Fox seemed destined for a unique and mutually productive relationship. Bush exhibited only isolationist tendencies but articulated an apparent exception for his articulate and imposing colleague to the south.

Thus it would hardly be surprising that Edgar Bronfman, then widely regarded as the symbolic “king of the Jews”, long-time President of the World Jewish Congress, Chair of the Board of Governors of Hillel International, Chair of the then existing Seagram Company, and Chair of the Samuel Bronfman Foundation [the name of the corporate foundation of the Seagram company which closed when the company did; I was its EVP], would have a person to person meeting with President Fox. It was a role he played with heads of state throughout the world for a long time.

We were accompanied on that trip by Israel Singer, the long time chief executive of the World Jewish Congress, Richard Joel, President of Hillel, Elon Steinberg, also a long-term executive with the WJC, and Robert Kasdon, the chief of security for Seagram. What a difference a decade makes. None of us is connected to the institutions which then significantly defined us.

Sitting in Edgar Bronfman’s suite watching events in NY unfold before us, one could hardly be surprised when the phone rang. It was President Fox himself asking if our meeting could be delayed for a day. [Given the lockdown of air travel and borders, it wasn’t as if we had much choice.]

That meeting did take place the very next day, but it was with a leader who had just watched his own international role diminished overnight. George Bush may not have cared about the rest of the world on 10 September, but on 12 September, as he emerged from his bunker, he could hardly avoid it. And that world did not exactly put Mexico at its center. The tone in the Mexican President’s conference room could hardly have been more somber.

But our real story was the rest of the week. Here we were, guests of a head of state, in a 5 star hotel, with access to private planes and influence at the top levels, with whatever resources one could ever need, yet we were prisoners. As with everyone who happened to find him or herself away from home that week, we had no way of going home, no way to know when we might, no way to know what our own future held. I vividly recall a brief conversation with Richard Joel who, looking at me, expressed his concern that he had never seen me look like that. My response, as prescient as any I suspect, was “the world that we know has changed forever.”

Our days were filled with exploratory phone calls, television, eating, and for a couple of us, “davening” [an oft-used expression for Jewish prayer.] Both Israel Singer and I were in the midst of the year of mourning for a parent and were therefore attending the local synagogue 3 times each day. Mostly waiting expectantly. [We should remember that this was before smart phones, or universally available wireless service. Only one of us had a cell phone which was able to call NY. None of us had a laptop. Only 10 years ago…]

Sometime each day brought a suggestion that we might leave. And each day that possibility dissipated.

Until… finally on Friday, we were told that private planes could fly but commercial ones couldn’t. Then that commercial planes could fly but private ones couldn’t. And it was not at all clear that either could fly over international borders. Nevertheless, we packed quickly and went to the airport where the Seagram jet was parked. After sitting there for a couple of hours, we learned the truth. We could fly to the Mexican boarder, but no further. To go home would require a taxi ride across the border and then be met by another private jet.

The border taxi caravan was not the typical mode of travel for this group. However, the most unforgettable moment was the startled and disconcerted expression of the US border officer who, after asking about our business in Mexico, was told by Edgar Bronfman. “I was here to meet with President Fox and now I have to get home for my grandson’s bar mitzvah.” It wasn’t clear which part of that sentence was more out of place in that setting. Our caravan was waved through.

Thus, late in the evening we arrived in Brownsville Texas, at the airport. The roads were newly blockaded, there was no commercial air traffic and the VIP lounge would have been easily confused with a collection of hand me downs in someone’s basement den. And then we learned that the chartered plane on its way to get us had to return to Miami because of bad weather in between.

We waited – until at about 2 am there was activity. No it was not yet a plane but rather a catering truck. Ah ha! Even in Brownsville, in the middle of the night, just a few days after 9/11, there were caterers able to supply private planes with an overabundance of food. It was our signal that a plane was on its way

The rest of the journey was uneventful. We slept our way to New York, leaving most of the trays of food untouched.

But there is an amusing denouement especially given the preoccupation with security which is now our everyday reality.

On the next Monday, I went to work at the Seagram building as I always did, and at the time I always did. I arrived at about 5:45 am only to discover that there were now airport type luggage screeners in the lobby. As a good citizen, I put my briefcase on the belt. But the security guard waved me through. “No reason to do that” he said. “We don’t start that up until 6 o’clock”.

Do you think he didn’t get the message?

Ten years later, all of us who had been on that trip are in very different places in our lives than we were that week But one thing is sure; we all got the message, loud and clear, that the world as we knew it was no more. And we, like everyone else, still aren’t completely sure what is.

Customer Service not! …Or how not to run a bank

It really shouldn’t have been this hard. The back-story: My brother and I had been maintaining two joint accounts to cover expenses related to our mother’s estate. A couple of weeks ago, it was evident that the last bills related to the estate were about to be paid and it was time to close the two accounts.

One of the accounts was a savings account. Since there was more than enough money in the checking account to cover all of the remaining expenses, there was no reason to maintain the savings account. Before closing it, though, I asked, in very explicit terms, how much I needed to keep in the checking account to avoid any fees. The banking person [whatever title he may have] assured me that there was more than enough in the checking account to avoid any fees. Thus informed, I closed the savings account and distributed the money in that account appropriately.

Imagine my surprise, merely two weeks later, to open up the monthly statement and discover a new $30 monthly maintenance fee for the remaining checking account. I quickly returned to the bank in question – only to find a different banking person sitting at the same desk.

She assured me that we did not have enough in that account to avert the monthly fee and could not figure out why the previous occupant of that chair told me otherwise.

With these new facts, there was little incentive to keep that account open even 1 minute longer than necessary. Indeed all of the checks which had been written had cleared so I asked that we close that account as well. But now the plot thickens. For reasons unrelated to this tale, the distribution of the remaining money was to be uneven. My brother was to receive $500 more than me.

I guess this kind of higher mathematics is not covered in banker training school. The person with whom I was speaking spent a substantial amount of time with pieces of paper and pressing keys on her keyboard trying to figure out how to determine the proper amounts for each of the two checks. After some time, she excused herself to go to a teller to get the checks. That took an additional 20 minutes! And when she returned it turned out that my brother’s check was not $500 more than mine, but exactly $1000 more than mine.

When I showed that to the aforementioned bank person, she took out her trusty paper and pencil and wrote the numbers down, subtracted, and lo and behold she too saw that there was a $1,000 differential.

This was clearly too much for her to solve on her own so we both went back to the teller who explained that her computer seemed to be not working properly and that is why the checks were written incorrectly. [you, dear reader, are given permission to smile in a patronizing manner at that excuse.] As it happens, I still remembered my 5th grade math and within a moment calculated the correct amounts. Both of the bankers wrote those numbers down, checked them twice, tried to find out if I was naughty or nice – and, amazingly came to the same arithmetic conclusions that I had.

All that remained was the process of reversing whatever they had to do with the mistaken checks, write new ones, and send me on my way.

One might think, after close to an hour handling this very minor procedure, that an apology for the combination of errors would have been forthcoming – but none was. There was no offer to reverse the $30 monthly fee, nor even an apology for that error, no apology that two people working together could not figure out how to divide an amount of money so that one was exactly $500 more than the other, and certainly no apology for the extended amount of time I spent there.

I should point out that no other customers came into that bank on Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side during the entire time I was there. Are you surprised?

I don’t know if I should mention the name of the bank, but its signs are red, the first letter is “S” and the last is “n” and there are 3 syllables. Don’t expect to see me there.

Insider – Outsider: some afterthougthts on The Conversation

About 10 years ago, I wrote an article entitled “The Loneliness of the Short-Distance Davener.” [For those who don’t get the cultural reference, that is a take-off on a short story and subsequent popular film called “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.]

In that essay [posted elsewhere on this blog site], I shard some of the sense of feeling out of place everywhere in the New York synagogue scene – or more accurately, not feeling quite at home anywhere. I sensed that my feeling of alienation, or at least “outsider”, was not so unique.

I recalled this essay and feelings last week as I participated in the most recent iteration of The Conversation, an annual gathering of a diverse collection of American Jews, brought together by Gary Rosenblatt of The New York Jewish Week. The “open space” methodology is structured to foster talk – with that being the only ostensible agenda. The ground rules prohibit stating who attended or what any individual may have opined; in these afterthoughts, I shall honor that restriction.

When I was invited to this one, I did a double take. Not that I was so surprised to be invited: so many folks whom I knew, including Mirele, had already participated that at first blush it didn’t seem so out of line. What did surprise me was that this particular gathering was restricted to the New York community.

It is true that I live in New York, and feel very much at home in New York. But I am not affiliated with Jewish communal institutions in New York, other than one board I sit on – and that is a foundation board not based on any affiliation. Even the program I developed at NYU, admittedly a New York institution, teaches philanthropists and foundation professionals from around the world, and is not restricted to or even primarily targeted to New Yorkers. So it seemed to me that I was not really an apt candidate for a three-day meeting conversing about New York Jewry and its communal institutions. The organizers demurred, and essentially dismissed my reticence.

The collection of participants was true to that advertised. It included professionals and volunteers, younger and not so young [although not so many older – see my previous post], those who came from various ethnic and denominational and religious observance backgrounds, those early in their career, and those well established, those who see themselves as leaders and those who don’t.

The conversations covered the broad spectrum of predictable topics in this moment in history. Some topics were clearly very personal and related to how an individual experiences Jewish communal life; some topics were very much extensions of the ethnic diversity of the Jewish communal landscape, and how those ethnic groups experience being a part of or outside of the perceived mainstream; others topics were continuations of the communal agenda of generational involvement, continuity, affordability, innovation, etc. And a few were excursions into particular intellectual or artistic journeys.
“Israel” was not a major or pervasive topic. It wasn’t ignored, but given its centrality in the larger public Jewish discourse, and the intensity of how those discussions typically play out, I, and several others, were surprised by the minor part that it played over these three days. Most of us were glad, and I suspect it was because no one was particularly interested in revisiting the well worn, and too often hostile scripts of that discourse. But it is also true, I imagine, that for most, daily life is more about negotiating the portals and promenades of where one fits or doesn’t fit in the complex life of the world’s largest Jewish urban center.

Which, I came to see, was the consistent theme running through the 3 days. Almost everyone there saw him or herself in some sort of dialectic with being an insider or an outsider, enfranchised or not enfranchised, feeling counted or feeling dismissed. Some in the group had never fully met those who were were so “other” and were surprised to learn that their stereotypes were off base. Some in the group were overt advocates for the uniqueness of their particular group or experience and hoped others would experience it too. Some came with, and probably left with an imaginary “in group” and aspired to be a part of that, but most came away with a sense that there were many “in groups” and at least as many “outsiders” and more important, that those definitions were elusive and evolving.

I myself came to the conclusion that my own sense of feeling like an “outsider” was what put me smack dab in the center and not at the periphery at all. It was exactly in that space that most people felt defined, at least at some time and in some ways.

At the end, though, there was one dynamic which probably defined this group in a very different way than other “Conversations” which were more explicitly national. Lots of participants extended invitations for Sabbath meals, or to visit their organization or to experience their ethnic distinctiveness in person. And I can attest, only a very few days later, some of this has already happened – I am now facebook “friends” with many who were there; we have already had new Sabbath guests, hosted another in another context, and plans to do more, and even received invitations.

Perhaps, then, this is what it means to be a Jewish New Yorker at this moment in history – one can be connected or disconnected all over the place with more choices than one can imagine, experience, or even fully understand, knowing that even more await in the next neighborhood and the next email. If that is so, it isn’t a bad place to be at all.