The Jewish leader as cultural anthropologist
How leaders can apply the tools of cultural anthropology to uncover deeper insights and build stronger, more adaptive communities
Before entering the Jewish nonprofit world, I spent most of my career as a product manager. If you’re unfamiliar, product management sits at the intersection of customer research, business strategy, and engineering. It’s about understanding what people need, aligning teams around goals, and iterating on a product to deliver value. At its core, it’s about continuously improving a company’s value proposition.
The best product managers I’ve worked with aren’t just strategists or data experts; they’re cultural anthropologists. They have an innate curiosity about human behavior and a drive to uncover why people act the way they do.
What makes a product successful?
Let’s take a popular product most people have heard of: Facebook’s newsfeed. Before its creation, users had to visit profiles individually to see new pictures or posts. Somewhere along the way, a product manager observed this friction—perhaps through user testing, data analysis, or screen recordings—and recognized the opportunity to centralize updates into one feed. But the real magic came from asking deeper questions: Why are people so eager to see what their friends are up to? What feelings are triggered by those pictures or updates?
Maybe it’s about aspiration: seeing a friend’s vacation photos sparks dreams of your own adventures. Maybe it’s about connection: humans are wired to value glimpses into others’ lives that feel personal or exclusive. These insights allowed the product manager to create a feature that not only addressed logistical challenges but also tapped into profound emotional drivers.
Applying cultural anthropology to Jewish institutions
Jewish organizations, like synagogues, schools, and campus groups, provide a variety of programs—each serving unique audiences. Leaders who adopt a cultural anthropology mindset can better understand their constituents’ needs and motivations, using these insights to design more meaningful experiences.
Morning minyan: A synagogue case study
Let’s look at a familiar Jewish institution: the synagogue. A synagogue doesn’t have a single product; it has many—Shabbat services, 1:1 counseling, early childhood programs, morning minyanim, and more. Each product serves different audiences with different needs.
Take one customer segment of morning minyan as an example. My father has attended morning minyan six days a week for 17 years since my grandmother passed away. A leader observing minyan participants might notice a popular age demographic: 60- to 80-year-olds. They might see clusters of people praying together (or perhaps more commonly chit-chatting), then gathering in the social hall for breakfast and lingering for hours.
But a cultural anthropologist would dig deeper. They would have probing conversations with participants to ask questions like: Why do people attend? What keeps them coming back? What emotions do their experiences elicit? Some might come to honor a parent’s memory, finding comfort in the daily ritual. Others might value the sense of community during a life transition—like retirement—that leaves them feeling isolated. Still others might discover a spiritual or meditative connection they hadn’t anticipated.
By focusing on both the surface behaviors and the underlying motivations of minyan participants, a leader could transform an already meaningful program into an even more powerful engine for connection and purpose.
A synagogue leader inspired by these observations might ask questions like:
How can we identify people nearing retirement who may need a new social outlet?
What can we do to elevate the social experience at minyan and encourage participants to invite others?
How might we create pathways for new attendees to connect with longtime participants?
What personalized strategies can we design to retain new attendees, and who will be responsible for them?
How can we measure the success of our strategies and track improvements over time?
This is one example customer segment from one product inside of one institution. In a synagogue alone there might be half a dozen products and another half dozen segments creating over 30 different segment-products to study. A product manager would prioritize - Which of these segment-product combinations is most ripe to allow the synagogue to best accomplish its goals?
Insights Across Jewish Institutions
Obviously, this is merely an example of how one institution could iterate on a single product. This curiosity-driven approach applies across other Jewish institutions though. To name a couple other examples:
Early Childhood Education -
Goal:
Enhance community building moments as a means of increasing retention and triggering word of mouth
Select cultural anthropologist observations and questions:
Why do some parents linger at drop-off while others rush out? Are these behaviors purely pragmatic, or do they reflect underlying discomfort or shyness? For parents who linger, where did their journey toward community start? Why do they linger? What feelings does that evoke for them?
Hillel -
Goal:
Increase participant satisfaction at first experience events as a means of increasing retention.
Select cultural anthropologist observations and questions:
What spurs the first interaction a new student has with Hillel? What is their mindset attending their first program? What are their worries? What are they excited about? What feelings do they have the moment they enter the room at their first event? When they decide not to come back what are the core reasons?
By addressing these types of questions, Jewish leaders can uncover both the practical and emotional factors that influence participation. These insights can then spark iterable product enhancements that can further the goals of these institutions making them more welcoming, engaging, and effective.
Conclusion: Leading with curiosity
The world’s best products often begin with a keen ability to observe and decode subtle aspects of human behavior. The best product managers—and Jewish leaders—excel at scanning their communities, asking “why,” and using those insights to develop hypotheses that enhance the experiences they offer.
For Jewish leaders, adopting the mindset of a cultural anthropologist is essential. This involves more than surface-level observations; it means approaching participants with empathy, posing thoughtful questions to uncover their deeper motivations, and using those insights to prioritize areas of investment. By iterating on programs and adapting offerings to better align with these needs, leaders not only strengthen connections but also foster a sense of belonging and purpose.
An added benefit of this curiosity-driven, empathetic approach is that it signals to participants that their experiences and perspectives matter to leadership. This type of engagement builds trust and reinforces relationships, creating a feedback loop where the institution becomes increasingly responsive and relevant to its community.
Ultimately, this mindset is not just about improving programs; it is about cultivating a dynamic, evolving community that meets people where they are and grows with them over time. In doing so, Jewish leaders lay the foundation for institutions that are not only adaptive and impactful but also deeply connected to the people they serve.
I love the angle on this article Ari. I’m reconsidering Jewish schooling now from this cultural anthropologist angle to ask how we can better engage students and parents. Thanks for your insight!