by Bob Goldfarb, eJewishphilanthropy.com

Just about everybody agrees that the attitudes and behaviors of younger Jews today are very different from those of the preceding two or three generations. Jews who lived through the Holocaust and saw the birth of the State of Israel viewed those events as defining aspects of Jewish identity. The many who suffered as Jews from legally sanctioned discrimination in housing and employment felt anti-Semitism to be an ever-present threat.

A generation later, baby boomers rebelled against their parents’ assumptions, and some of them moved beyond the Jewish community into antiwar or feminist activities. But many still felt a strong connection to their Jewish identities and set out to change Jewish institutions rather than abandon them.

Now, as we regularly see, a lot of younger Jews in the United States are even more influenced by American values than by a particularist Jewish perspective. They view Israel as a foreign country, and their attitudes towards Israel are refracted through the lens of American sensibilities about war, race, and human rights. Their cultural references come from American pop culture. They understand ethical imperatives as obligations to humanity rather than applying first to their own community. And at least half of them have non-Jewish relatives by marriage.

The words and deeds of the organized Jewish community, however, barely register these changes. Of course the leadership sees the declining interest in Jewish institutional life, especially federations and synagogues, and it recognizes that younger people are different today. But the response has often been superficial, temporizing, or panicked rather than substantive. Institutions tout their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds as tokens of how up-to-date they are. They create groups exclusively for young adults, as if this age cohort simply needs special attention and activities. In some cases these institutions try projects like a music video or an online contest in a bid for youthful relevance, sometimes at enormous expense and generally with little effect.

It’s not that these are inherently bad ideas, imperfect though they may be. The problem is that they hold on to two assumptions that are largely no longer true...

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