Why I started "The Business of Jewish" substack
Why I started "The Business of Jewish" substack
I hope to bring an insider/outsider's perspective on the management of professional Jewish organizations and create a dialogue that can extend outside of the Greater Boston region
Since I’m anticipating a majority of people reading this will not care about my life story and instead just want a summary of whether to invest time in this Substack, here is the short version: I’m writing a series of articles that build off of the combination of lessons learned over a 20 year career in developing new products for internet companies, a life spent participating in Jewish communal life including 12 years of board service, and 1+ year spent entrenched as a consultant working on behalf of Jewish organizations here in Boston. My goal is to clarify my own thinking through writing and encourage further conversation and learning.
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In late 2021 I made a decision to experiment with a new career path. Prior to that point I spent my career working for internet companies in a field called Product Management, mainly focused on building out new products, first for bigger companies and more recently for seed stage startups. The role of a Product Manager is to align business stakeholders around goals, understand how to marry customer needs with those goals, and then work with engineers and designers to build features to fulfill those needs. After leaving my most recent role I decided to take my time looking for my next role. In that process, I found myself less attracted to the type of companies I had worked for previously. I also started to have some conversations in the Jewish world attempting to figure out how I might fit in.
The professional Jewish world was not new to me. I grew up attending its institutions at day school, overnight camp, at the JCC, and through my synagogue. My Mom was the director of Camp Yavneh for 26 years where I got a birds eye view into both the highs and lows of running a Jewish institution. While my Dad had a corporate job during the week he was also one of the founders of a Jewish musical group called “Safam” that for dozens of years traveled the country playing their original music set to Jewish themes. My parents modeled Jewish living both professionally and in our home where I consider myself extremely lucky to have been presented with a warm and appealing version of what our faith has to offer.
As I got older I volunteered on the board of directors for the day school I grew up in, and eventually sent my own kids to day school. During my board tenure I saw the board grapple with falling enrollment, the departure of a long time school head, the hiring process and ultimately the short tenure of a new head, and finally the hiring of a non conventional candidate who ended up a good fit for the school. After 9 years on that school board I started to serve on the board of our local JCC witnessing it make its way through COVID, and eventually hire a new CEO after a 20+ tenure from a previous one. I feel indebted to these organizations who allowed me to use my years of board service as a means of learning more about the business of engaging our community.
When I left my last corporate role, as part of exploring what a role in the Jewish world might look like, I started writing on a range of topics where I thought I could apply my range of learning from both Jewish and non Jewish worlds. I used those pieces to start up conversations with a variety of people. One of the people who took an interest in my thinking was Marc Baker, the CEO of Combined Jewish Philanthropies (“CJP”), Boston’s Jewish federation. Marc was kind enough to spend time with me exploring the overlap between my interests, skills, and CJP’s needs. In the end, we decided on a consultation arrangement where I would spend a portion of my week supporting a variety of Families With Young Children initiatives most notably serving as CJP’s strategy lead and relationship manager to our 14 Jewish Day Schools.
Over the past year Marc and his team, most notably CJP’s head of Strategy & Impact, Sarah Abramson, have let me in on a wide variety of conversations and allowed me to see the inner workings of CJP in addition to its vast array of partner organizations. My work in day schools allowed me to experience the rewards and challenges of assessing how to make an impact on a sector of our community through philanthropy and a range of consultative supports. I’d like to think I brought to some of these experiences a unique perspective given the relative uniqueness of my background in contrast with some of my peers at CJP.
One of the benefits of being an insider/outsider was that it gave me the space to establish insights on how our Jewish community does its work. There were numerous times where Marc and Sarah allowed me the space to ask a lot of “Why do we do it this way?” questions. I was consistently impressed with their openness to new ideas. While some of my ideas were better received than others, I certainly learned a lot by getting their reactions and the reactions of others inside our community.
I’ve started writing again to document some of the insights and ideas I’ve had over the past year. My hope is that by writing down some of the thoughts that may have come out in conversations with others that were not carefully documented I might help clarify my own thinking. I also hope that perhaps based on my combination of professional and personal experiences that my insights might help inspire others inside and outside our Jewish community to think differently.
If you’re reading this, thanks for giving my writing a shot. I’d love to get your feedback.