Posted in Musings, Marketing Judaism on Aug 6th, 2008
Did you buy yourself an iPhone? Here’s a cool application for you–kosherme.com. You’ll need iTunes to get it. With this program, your iPhone can tell you which blessing to say over any meal or snack, in Hebrew, English and transliteration. They have omitted all blessings that one would say on the Jewish sabbath, because traditional […]
Posted in Parenting/raising children, Outreach, Marketing Judaism on Aug 4th, 2008
I’m a big advocate of Jewish-themed museums as a potentially potent tool for reaching unaffiliated intermarried and interdating Jews. They lack the religious baggage of synagogues and the political baggage of Israel Independence Day festivals. Unlike JCCs or synagogues, there is nothing clubby about them–they are essentially public spaces marked more by anonymity than community. […]
Posted in Outreach, Synagogues, Marketing Judaism on Jun 16th, 2008
Young unmarried Jews are just as interested in Judaism as their married peers, a surprising new study shows. What’s different, say co-authors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman, is that they avoid affiliating with synagogues, federations and JCCs in part because those institutions are so focused on the traditional family unit.
Uncoupled: How Our Singles Are […]
Posted in Parenting/raising children, Marketing Judaism on Jan 29th, 2008
Overnight summer camp is awesome. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a former camper who disagrees.
But why do parents send their kids to summer camp? More specifically, why do Jewish parents send their kids to Jewish summer camp?
In a terrific essay for the (Vancouver, B.C.) Jewish Independent, Kelley Korbin writes of her shock at hearing that […]
Posted in December holidays, Synagogues, Other religions, Marketing Judaism on Dec 21st, 2007
At its recent biennial convention in San Diego, the Reform movement apparently borrowed a few chapters from the modern evangelical handbook:
In a darkened room at the San Diego Convention Center last week, nearly 1,000 people clapped, sang and danced to evening prayers, with the words projected on two large screens against a bucolic backdrop of […]
Posted in Marketing Judaism on Oct 4th, 2007
On Sept. 30, several hundred people gathered at a construction site at Fifth and Market Streets in Philadelphia to celebrate the groundbreaking on a new $150 million museum devoted to American Jewish history, according to the (Philadelphia) Jewish Exponent.
The National Museum of American Jewish History is just one of several ambitious Jewish museum projects opening […]
Posted in Marketing Judaism on Aug 24th, 2007
Across the spectrum, including among the Orthodox, synagogues have done an admirable job in recent years making themselves more welcoming to the unaffiliated, the intermarried and the just plain timid. There’s a long way to go, but between Chabad’s outreach, the Reform movement’s embrace of interfaith families and the Conservative movement’s push for keruv, religious […]
Posted in Marketing Judaism on Jul 3rd, 2007
Keeping with yesterday’s return-from-San-Francisco theme, j., the Jewish news weekly of northern California, and The Forward recently wrote about a clever new outreach strategy from Rabbi Moshe Langer of the Chabad of San Francisco: free trolley tours of the diverse and beautiful city. But unlike other Chabad marketing–free iPods in exchange for enrolling in […]
Posted in Marketing Judaism on Jul 2nd, 2007
I returned from San Francisco today, where I attended the 2007 conference of the American Jewish Press Association, the professional association of Jewish publications and websites. This was the fourth conference I attended and the sessions tend to be similar from year to year. There’s always one or two on how to make your print […]
Posted in Israel, Marketing Judaism on Mar 20th, 2007
Rabbi David Forman, the founder of Rabbis for Human Rights, wrote a provocative op-ed in the Jerusalem Post arguing that the Reform movement needs to change if it hopes to engage Jews in Israel, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Germany. While Chabad has emerged as a dominant Jewish force in many of these […]
