Peoplehood Papers | Schusterman.org

June 19th, 2012

Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky once said, “You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” What is true in sports is also true for our efforts to build Jewish community in the 21st century.

If we want to harness the creativity and passion of young people that want to build our community in their own image, we must take risks. We need to develop a balanced communal appetite for risk, and we need better tools to understand and analyze it. This is central theme of my piece in the latest issue of the Peoplehood Papers, which aims to examine what we as a community can do to better nurture Jewish Peoplehood. A diverse group of Jewish leaders and thinkers were asked to weigh in on the topic and address some of the following questions.

What are the key changes that need to be made to better the community’s ability to nurture Peoplehood?
How can we overcome the challenges to a notion of collective Jewish identity?
What is the role Jewish Peoplehood should play in Jewish life? Read More »

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March 6th, 2012

Peoplehood Papers: Putting the People Back in Peoplehood

The term Jewish Peoplehood may be a modern formulation, but the belief in an underlying unity that makes an individual part of a Jewish people dates back millennia. As the Haggadah will remind us in a few short weeks, “In each generation every individual should feel as though he or she had actually been redeemed from Egypt.”

In the 21^st century, however, the challenges the Jewish community faces in ensuring we remain a group of people bound together by a common set of values and beliefs—and in finding agreement on the question at the heart of it, why be Jewish—have become increasingly complex. Read More »

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