The Announcement I’ve Been Dreading: Official Long-Term Hiatus

Dear Friends,

I’ve long been dreading making this announcement, wanting to put it off as long as possible hoping that things would change. As you know, I’ve been on hiatus, but it’s only fair that I make it official.

Jewish philanthropy, as manifested in my career, my volunteer work, my writing, and most poignantly, this blog, are my passion. It is my privilege to work on behalf of the Jewish people and the State of Israel every day of my life.

I regret to say that at present, I am no longer able to devote the immense time and energy needed to maintain this blog. It is my ardent hope that I will be able to return to continue its work, but the time is not now.

For the many of you who have written to ask about the Bronfman Big Idea Series, the series will be revived (with the permission of individual authors) when the blog returns. I apologize for any inconvenience this has incurred and assure you that I would keep blogging and writing about issues central to the Jewish world and our innovations if I had any capacity to do so at present. But I don’t.

Thank you all so warmly for your devoted support. I encourage you to stay subscribed so that you will be notified when I return.

I am available by e-mail (although with some delay) at mayan80 [at] yahoo.com.

With love and admiration,

Maya

Big Idea Series: Announcing Phase Two!

Phase Two Begins!

I am thrilled to announce a new phase of the Big Idea Series. Thanks to Prof. Jonathan Sarna, Chair of the Bronfman-Brandeis Contest, I was able to invite all contest participants who wanted to bring more publicity and discussion to their proposals to republish them in The New Jew: Blogging Jewish Philanthropy. Over 65 proposals were submitted!

Series Publication Begins

Series publication will begin the first week of April. All authors will be contacted beforehand with their proposed publishing schedules. If you still want to apply, this Thursday (March 21st) is your last day to do so.

Once the series gets fully underway, I will add a tab to the top navigation bar for easier movement between proposals and categories. This will also help integrate Phases One and Two of the Big Idea Series.

Thematic Organization

In Phase Two of the Big Idea Series, proposals will be organized by theme and category in order to optimize their impact and develop thinking and conversations among ideas and readers.

As always, your thoughts and reactions are the key to making this series work. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

Comment Moderation

Please note that due to previous issues, the series will be heavily moderated to ensure relevant and healthy conversation. My big goal is to promote innovation and give breath to fresh ideas in the Jewish community– we can only do this by talking with and learning from each other. I hope this series provides a strong conduit for idea generation.

Personal Note

On a personal note, thank you to all who have e-mailed me with warm wishes for a full and quick recovery. I am still quite sick– and as you can see this is a major project (which I am so proud to facilitate)– but all regular blogging is still suspended until I am better. Your continued support is immeasurably appreciated.

Hag Purim Sameach!

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Yehuda Kurtzer Wins Bronfman Brandeis Contest: Read His Full Proposal Here

Photo by Diego Lemas

Huge congratulations are in order for Yehuda Kurtzer, who has been chosen as the winner of the Bronfman Brandeis contest. His biography and proposal are below.

This is the 10th entry in the Bronfman Big Idea Series.

About the Author

Yehuda Kurtzer is a doctoral student in Jewish Studies at Harvard University, where he is writing his dissertation on the Jews of the Mediterranean Diaspora and their relationship to the rise of rabbinic piety. As part of this project, Yehuda focuses on transformations in Jewish identity in the changing ancient world.

An alumnus of the Wexner Graduate Fellowships and Bronfman Youth Fellowships, Yehuda has served as a teaching fellow at Harvard and for the past two years as an Instructor in History at Hebrew College in Newton, MA. Yehuda has worked as a Research Fellow for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum helping to bridge the worlds of Jewish Studies and Holocaust Studies, and as a consultant on rabbinic texts for Facing History and Ourselves.

He has lectured and taught widely in adult education settings, including The Curriculum Initiative, the Brandeis Initiative on Bridging Scholarship and Pedagogy, and NYU’s Center for Online Judaic Studies. Yehuda also helped co-found and continued to help lead Brookline’s Washington Square Minyan. He lives in Brookline, MA with his wife Stephanie Ives and their son Noah.

[Further links in body of text below.]

“The Sacred Task of Rebuilding Jewish Memory” by Yehuda Kurtzer

Jews Have Six Senses: Quoting Jonathan Safran Foer

“Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing…memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger.

The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep while stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain – that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.

When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?”

~ Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (p. 198.)

Introduction

The next great step for the Jewish future will be the reclamation of the Jewish past. I believe that the most successful, interesting and engaging programs currently invigorating the Jewish world are seizing upon this idea, and implementing the gifts of the Jewish past in surprisingly progressive and fresh ways.

I feel part of this process through my various communal initiatives and both eager and equipped to study and articulate its roots and its implications. The innovation I propose to advance at Brandeis is not a limited program but a powerful programmatic and public policy statement on what authentic Jewish memory means, from where it derives, and how the Jewish community can reinforce its values both in theory and in practice.

Keep reading to learn more.

Yehuda Kurtzer Wins Bronfman’s Brandeis Contest

Photo by Steve Ryan

L’Chaim!

Huge congratulations are in order for Yehuda Kurtzer who has been declared the winner of Charles Bronfman’s Brandeis contest.

“The Sacred Task of Rebuilding Jewish Memory”: Excerpt

Kurtzer’s proposal: “The Sacred Task of Rebuilding Jewish Memory” will be featured here shortly. Here’s a sneak peek of what you can expect.

“In the Jewish world, I see this new claim on memory deeply manifest in the proliferation of emergent and independent spiritual communities, and more importantly in the massive reclamation of traditional Jewish text as the key anchor to Jewish growth and affiliation.

It seems now that the most effective vehicles of progressive Jewish dynamic vision are those anchored in the framework of memory, in the quest for mythical nostalgia, in the desire for what I call “new authenticity”…

Young Jews in their 20s and 30s – everyone’s most desired demographic – seek out independent prayer communities precisely because they don’t simplify the service or elaborate too much on a basic paradigm. American Jewish leadership is being transformed by institutions like Pardes in Israel, wherein traditional Jewish learning is cast as an invigorating means to seize authenticity, to enable Jews to stake a claim to and own their tradition.

What is most striking about all these institutions is that none entails a rejection of progressivism or radicalism. Many of them, by design or by accident, are extremely hip and cutting-edge…

This is again a powerful paradox: Rather than employing the language of newness and dissociation from antiquated old models, those models are being rehabilitated to convey that newness – that renaissance – much more effectively.”

To a Job Well Done

To Ariel Beery, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Anita Diamant, and Saul Singer– I greatly admire your efforts and look forward to hearing more from you in the near future.

Learn More about the Bronfman Big Idea Series

In the meantime, I am happy to welcome several new proposals from contest entrants and semi-finalists. The official contest may be over, but we’re still hard at work thinking about creative innovation for the Jewish community. You can always check out what is coming up next on the Bronfman Big Idea Series homepage here.

PLEASE NOTE

Comments on this blog should be posted with the purpose of forwarding healthy conversation. All others will be deleted. Thank you in advance.

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Note to My Readers: Short Blogging Hiatus

Photo by Nic McPhee

Dear Readers,

You know me, I’m a passionate blogger and I care deeply about bringing you Jewish philanthropy news, updates, and trends. But sometimes life intervenes.

I’m not feeling that well right now (don’t worry, I’ll be fine in the long run) and I need to spread my energy out to cover the basics of my freelancing business first.

I’ll be back soon enough. If you’d like to make sure you don’t miss anything, please consider subscribing (by e-mail or feed) to make sure you don’t miss my return.

In the meantime, you can follow my writings and projects under my Read Me section, which I am updating regularly.

Stay warm and Shabbat Shalom. I’ll be thinking of you.

Maya

Happy Valentine’s Day

A purely friendly post to say:

Happy Valentine’s Day to you.

Happy Birthday to me.

Love to us all.

<3

Image sourced from James Kimberlin

Making a Difference: Children of Ramle & Sir Nicholas Winton, Patron Saint of Jewish Children

Photo sourced from Wikimedia

Sir Nicholas Winton, Patron Saint of Jewish Children

Good People Doing Good Things

I admit it. I love feel good stories about people making a difference. Every once in a while, I feel we’re in need of a good dose of stories about people who prove our faith in humanity. Here are two examples.

Chess Club for Children of Ramle

Here’s a video about Daniel Prozumenshivov, an American chess player who started a chess club for minority and immigrant kids in Ramle, a low-income suburb of Tel Aviv.

Looks as if David and his partner are MASA volunteers.

Saint Nicholas

And while we’re on the topic of doing good, let me bring your attention to a man I have dubbed Saint Nicholas.

Sir Nicholas Winton of Britain, 98, has been nominated for a 2008 Nobel Peace for his work in organizing rescue missions to save 669 Czechoslovakian Jewish children from concentration camps in 1939. He secured safe passage for the children through Germany and found them foster homes in Britain for the duration of the war.

Sir Winton’s heroic action was secret until his wife discovered documentation in the attic detailing his efforts. Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum, does not consider Sir Winton a righteous gentile because his family was originally Jewish, having converted to Christianity before he was born.

Keep reading to learn more about Sir Nicholas Winton and his incredible efforts.

Bronfman Contest: We Want Answers– Correspondence with Prof. Jonathan Sarna

Prof. Jonathan Sarna, Chair of the Brandeis Bronfman Contest

If you know one thing about this blog, it should be that I care about what my readers think and that I always try to have you in mind.

Yesterday I asked if you were sick of the Bronfman contest. Most of you said no. I have an agreement over e-mail with someone that s/he will skip the blog for now and I’ll e-mail when the series/conversation is over. That sounds like a good bargain to me.

I think given our deep investment in the conversation on Jewish ideas so far– more than any other blog, website, or organization– we owe it to ourselves to see this contest and its ideas through. That’s what I plan to do.

Writing Prof. Sarna: We Want Answers

So, in the best interest of everyone who generously shared their proposals here and keeping in mind that many of you are very upset about how you feel you’ve been treated, I decided to write Prof. Sarna, the head of the contest, to find out some answers. We deserve to know the basics, right?

I didn’t plan to publish the letter (that wasn’t my intent in writing it), but given the response and its minimalist tone, I’ve decided to do it anyway, as I believe it will answer (or at least address) a number of questions we’ve been contemplating.

Intention & Tone

My goal in writing the letter was to get answers to some of our questions. I tried to be as non-threatening as possible in doing so in order to represent us and our intentions accurately. We have respect for the contest as a whole, but we don’t necessarily like their air of secrecy or half-way notifications about what is going on.

(You can also read a more passionate statement of frustration and discontent from one of my readers, Ian Zwerling, in his letter to the Brandeis Justice.)

Here is my call and response correspondence with Prof. Sarna.

The Letter

“Dear Ms. Norton,
Thank you so much for writing. My comments are interspersed below:

Maya Norton wrote:

Dear Prof. Sarna,

I write you with the greatest respect at what I can only imagine is an unspeakably busy time for you and your team.

As you know, I have had the pleasure of hosting 12 great proposals (4 finalists, 8 regular contributors) for the next big idea in Jewish communal innovation on my blog, The New Jew: Blogging Jewish Philanthropy.

As a central address in the Jewish blogging world for the contest, many questions are understandably directed my way. I hope you won’t mind if I pass some by you in hopes of finding some answers:

1. When might we expect the 20 semifinalists’ proposals to be published and what will the URL be? Have the semifinalists been notified of their status?

All of the semi-finalists have been informed. Only some of the 20 have agreed to allow us to publish their proposals. I hope that we can have a website up within a month.

2. What procedures or tenets are in place to guarantee that the ideas contained in the unpublished proposals will be protected?

We follow the regular search procedures at Brandeis. Only those individuals who have agreed in writing to allow us to post their proposals will have their proposals uploaded onto the site. Everything else connected to the search is, naturally, confidential.

Keep reading to learn more!

Jewish Camping & Technology: eCamp Israel & Speciality Camping Partnership

The world of Jewish camping has been twice blessed this winter with the creation of eCamp Israel and the Jim Joseph Foundation/Foundation for Jewish Camping’s burgeoning partnership in specialty camping.

eCamp Israel

eCamp Israel is the brainchild of Nir Kouris and Dotan Tamir, who have created an Israeli camping experience based on Israel’s technology expertise. Three hundred Israeli and Diaspora children ages 10 to 18 will come together for two-week sessions to learn technology skills, like web development, animation, and gaming.

While in Israel, they can also partake in an Israel adventure course, learning more about the country. Embodying the heart of its mission, eCampIsrael’s most exciting feature is its tech trips, in which campers travel throughout Israel to experience innovation in action, meeting with Israel’s true technology experts.

Thinking about how your kids should spend their summer? What if they started school in September having visited Intel, Motorola, Google Israel, or having learned first hand about some of the most exciting technological developments in robotics or having tried out an Israeli Air Force flight simulator? Insta-cool.

Do I sound like an ad for eCamp Israel? That’s because I’m crazy about the idea.

Jewish Camping Organizations Partner to Create Specialty Camp Incubator

In the footsteps of eCampIsrael is the Jim Joseph Foundation and Foundation for Jewish Camping’s $8.4 million partnership grant to create a Specialty Camping Incubator.

The Incubator will create four Jewish specialty camps based on skills such as athletics, computers, and arts according to the successful model already established for Jewish camping.

This grant follows on the heels of the Joseph Foundation’s 2007 grant of $11.2 million to entice first-time campers into the world of Jewish camping. Still in its second year of philanthropy, the foundation aims to spend $25 million annually on Jewish issues.

If the partnership is looking for an up and coming Jewish camp specializing in technology– it may well be the only one in the world– I can certainly think of some suggestions (ahem).

Keep reading to learn more about the incubator model in the world of young, Jewish entrepreneurship.

Readers, Weigh In: Sick of the Bronfman Contest?

Rodin’s “Thinker,” sourced from Wikipedia

I’m Listening

Readers, please weigh in. Are you sick of hearing about the Bronfman contest on this blog?

It has pretty much taken over the time and energy that I devote to blogging, while entries about more direct Jewish philanthropy have fallen a bit to the wayside, simply due to time constraints of one taking over the other.

Contest Fatigue?

I was bringing you the contest and proposals because throughout the series, I was hearing feedback that that was what you wanted. But now I am getting a lot of feedback that is telling me you have series/contest fatigue.

If you don’t want to hear any more about this contest, I can publish the three main proposals that are pending and close the series down.

Bronfman News: 20 Finalists to be Published on Website

We have just learned that the top 20 contest proposals are about to be published on a public website anyhow.) Prof. Sarna says of the 20 finalists:

“These were not just programs – these were really worldviews, ways of thinking that would lead to all sorts of programs and be a kind of change agent within the Jewish community.”

It’s All About You

I blog primarily for you, so please help me in understanding your preferences and desires. Also feel free to weigh in here on anything else you might be looking for that you have read here and want more of, or that you are looking to read (or not read about here).

A series on nonprofits & technology (short, under 5 posts) and another about Israeli billionaires (about 5 posts) are pending. Do you want these or am I off-base? Your thoughts appreciated.