On Jewish Orgs' Dismal Showing in the Web 2.0 Era

Hear, hear to JSpot editor Mik Moore’s op-ed in The Jewish Week on his visit to YearlyKos and his befuddlement at the near-total lack of Jewish institutional presence at one of the nation’s largest and most influential Democratic political events.

Though Mik offers several reasons for the Jewish community’s non-appearance, his focus on the technology gap, as you might imagine, resonates most strongly with me.

“[T]he Jewish community,” writes Mik, “has not figured out what to do about the new forms of communications, networking and organizing represented by blogs and various Web 2.0 tools.” And he’s precisely correct.

Despite noble efforts like the RACBlog, the 92Y Blog, the AJC Wire, and BBYO’s B-Linked, mainstream Jewish institutions (whether liberal or conservative) have done little to take advantage of new media, such as blogs, viral video, podcasts, social networking and other online technologies, or to incorporate these technologies into their overall strategies. Surprisingly, only Chabad and Aish HaTorah are the real exceptions to this rule, staying current with new technological innovations every step of the way. This seems particularly senseless in light of the affordability of these technologies (most are available for free or at discounted rates to non-profits) and the almost self-evident enhancements they bring to communications, member relations, and fundraising. (Yes, personnel is an issue. But if your team isn’t up-to-speed with this stuff, what good are they?)

I would actually go a step further and say that most Jewish organizations have no web strategies whatsoever. The majority of the Jewish community’s websites either sit in disrepair or, as Mik notes, are strangled to death by bureaucracies that place institutional politics before basics such as successful user interface design.

He illustrates:

One of the inherent challenges that blogging presents to more established organizations is the premium the forum places on candor, independence and individuality. Traditional Jewish organizations typically have one spokesperson and the message is tightly controlled, as vividly demonstrated by the recent dismissal of the New England regional director of the Anti-Defamation League for acknowledging the Armenian genocide.

I’m not going to touch that last bit (I’ll leave it to Eli Valley). But to the former, I would say that this sort of issue has come up time and time again in my work, particularly on ShulShopper. Some potential grantors, from organizations that I consider to be incredibly up-to-speed, actually turned down the project for fear that they would be held accountable for the reviews left by users on synagogue profiles, despite both our policy against lashon harah and the public’s awareness of a publisher’s non-liability for user generated content. It seems that even the most forward thinking organizations are afraid of a future that’s already here.

Mik closes with a point I’ve been trying to make for the past two years: If yesterday’s Jewish organizations don’t catch up, they will render themselves irrelevant, and be supplanted by new organizations seeking to replace them.

In the months and years to come, Jewish organizations will need to reevaluate our relationship with technology and the communities whose growth has been a product of that technology. We must begin to change our culture to allow for — even encourage — debate and dissent in the public square. Otherwise some of the younger, more nimble Jewish organizations will fill the vacuum.

Again, hear, hear.

Organizations that represent the Jewish community and Jewish interests must acknowledge that the Jewish community is larger than their own boards of directors or individual pools of funders. That means making a space for members of the wider Jewish community to interact with their organizations in ways that may get a little uncomfortable.

Jewish institutions that intend not only to survive, but to excel, in the Web 2.0 era, will have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.