Haviv's Blog: Part I: The aircraft carrier and the fighter wing

The UJC’s General Assembly ended in the middle of last week, sending what must have been a record-breaking flood of Jews through Nashville’s small airport as everyone rushed to get home to their scattered communities, whether in Los Angeles, Maine or Tel Aviv. The GA is a huge conference – held this year at the Gaylord Opryland Resort with a total price tag of $2.3 million and some 3,500 attendees – that marks the annual haj for American Jewish communal institutions.
 
Two weeks ago, I attended a more intimate affair, the KolDor Third Global Conference on the shores of the Galilee. The scale was different – about 100 participants in an elegant but simple hostel – and the purpose was diametrically opposite. The GA was about self-reflection for the multi-billion-dollar Jewish federation system in America; KolDor was about reorganizing the structure of Jewish life, which is slowly shifting away from the old pillars of the community institutions, by embracing some newfangled ideas about flat networks and entrepreneurship.
 
The average age at the KolDor conference, which organizers calculated at 29-33, might have been 20 years younger than at the GA.
 
Some 550 American Jewish communities are united under the rubric of the UJC, wielding billions of dollars in the service of America’s poor Jews and non-Jews and in support of Israel. KolDor, a network focused, not unlike high-tech companies such as Nokia, on “connecting people,” has no clear membership roster or precisely defined hierarchy, and perhaps 400 individual members worldwide. Thus, a comparison between KolDor and the UJC is not meant to imply equal importance or similar purpose, only to bring into sharp relief what each – the restless information-age agitators of Jewish life and the gargantuan social welfare networks and institutions of American Jewish communities – brings to the table.
 
Perhaps it is the strange vantage point of an English-speaking Israeli newspaper, an outsider to both American Jewish institutions and US-centered Jewish entrepreneurship on the dot-com model, but it was striking to me how solipsistic self-reflection seemed to dominate both events, and how neither organizational model has learned to use the critical resources offered by the other. While KolDor gushed breathlessly with innovation and the UJC offered obsessive discussion of its own structure, neither seemed to know quite what to do with the other.