At G.A., Jewish federations see future in more collaboration

OXON HILL, Md. (JTA) – There were the vice president of the United States, two Supreme Court justices and an Academy Award-winning actress with a compelling Jewish story. There were Jewish professionals, lay leaders, clergy and recent college graduates. The West Point cadets’ Jewish choir performed. The Israeli prime minister appeared via satellite from Jerusalem.

Part pep rally, part training and part family reunion, the annual General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America drew some 3,000 people to a conference center outside Washington to cheer federations’ philanthropic work, listen to presentations ranging from European anti-Semitism to crowdfunding, and to schmooze.

As usual, much of the talk was how to bolster North America’s 153 Jewish federations.

“We can go beyond exchanging ideas to actually exchanging services,” Jewish Federations CEO Jerry Silverman said in a speech at the closing plenary. “JFNA expanded the resources of our consulting and community development department, but what if we also leverage and share the resident expertise in this room and across our federations?”

The federations face an uphill battle at a time when studies show younger American Jews are less affiliated than previous generations with Jewish institutional life and less likely to give to Jewish causes — let alone clearinghouses like Jewish federations.

Though federation annual campaigns are up by about 7 percent compared with this time last year, the number of federation donors has declined by about one-third since 2000, according to the sociologist Steven M. Cohen of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Meanwhile, last year’s Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Jews found that 43 percent of non-Orthodox Jews ages 30–49 donate to Jewish causes — in contrast to their counterparts ages 50–69, some 60 percent of whom give.

At the conference, the answer to these trends was twofold. One, organizers showcased dozens of federation programs, called “Fedovations,” that are piloting new models for programming and outreach.

The second answer was for federation leaders — and some of the plenary speakers from outside federation, including the actress Marlee Matlin — to drive home the message of the importance of collective action in the Jewish world.

“We do have the intellectual and financial potential to effectuate substantive change, but only if we work together,” Jewish Federations board chairman Michael Siegal said in a plenary address Nov. 10. “Federations must lead this charge and convene the necessary organizations and thought leaders because, simply, we have the reach that others do not.”

Vice President Joe Biden affirmed the Obama administration’s “ironclad” commitment to Israel’s security and talked about his experience taking each of his kids to the site of the Dachau concentration camp when they were 15 to teach them about the “incredible resilience and indomitable nature of the human spirit.”

Biden also called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “really great friend” — in contrast to the recent characterization of Netanyahu as “a chickenshit” by an anonymous Obama administration official in an interview with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who also spoke at the G.A.

Seeking out Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., in the audience, Biden said, “Ron, you’d better damn well report to Bibi that we’re still buddies. You got it, right?”

In another plenary, NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg got U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to discuss the Jewish values that drive his work (tzedakah) and Justice Elena Kagan, who grew up Jewish on the Upper West Side, to reveal that she has become a duck hunter since joining the nation’s highest court.