Who’s talkin’ ’bout my generation?

One of the most difficult challenges our community faces is engaging young adults in the ten-or-so years after they finish secondary school. Where around three-quarters of Jewish students attend Jewish day schools, for some reason most of us end the most formative period of our lives ‘Jew-ed out’, as it’s become known.

Frustrated at the bombardment of Judaism and Zionism by unengaging teachers utilising formal education methods that illicit negative responses, many students could think of nothing worse than being involved in and committed to the community after they graduate high school.

In fact, even though the youth movements pick up so much of the slack, providing stimulating informal Jewish education, the sad reality is that so many madrichim also go missing. After the exhausting educational experience of Shnat and then running their movements for at least two years, our best-educated Zionists are burnt out, and they can’t wait to run far, far away from the structured community.

They do come back though: when beginning to consider schools for their children, they could think of no other place for them than Bialik or Moriah. Despite their negative experiences of formal Jewish education, they understand the importance of a Jewish educational environment.

From when my peers graduate at 18 until they begin having kids more than a decade later, there is gaping hole in community participation. There are countless reasons offered for it, but what’s clear is that we have so many different elements to our Gen Y identities that so many community events, campaigns and institutions are horrifyingly outdated, unappealing and most crucially uninspiring.

There are fantastic exceptions though, a few put on by the establishment, but the overwhelming majority by extra-communal leaders. They bring in young Jews in ways no one had thought of a few years ago, and they’re drawing record numbers. They come in different shapes and sizes and they’re integral to the positive development and future viability of our community.

One example is the New South Wales community entrusting fourteen separate youth organisations to get together to organise the young adult Yom Ha’atzmaut event. That there were around 1000 young people engaged enough with their Zionist identity to come to Israel’s birthday party is a great sign of positive investment by the community in its youth black hole.

On the other extreme is a small gathering at a house in Melbourne that started last year on Yom Ha’atzmaut. Initiated by a Habo graduate in her home, and this year forming part of the secular Jewish community Ayeka’s schedule, forty young adults came together to “hug and wrestle with Israel through film, literature and poetry.”

It was an event that deliberately clashed with the community concert to provide for young adults seeking an alternative to the passive inclusion the community often throws at us, rather serving up quality educational wrangling with Israel and Zionism on the most important of days.

Throw on top of that the grassroots blogs starting up that my peers and I increasingly turn to for our dose of Jewish culture and politics. The counter-cultural and hysterically brash Your JC in Sydney provides light-hearted humour and cut throat social commentary, and the Sensible Jew inspires communal activism and involvement through discussion.

The controversy stirred up by these blogs may be too much for some, but they provide a link to Gen Y’s Judaism, and a tie to communal life in a way that few communal bodies have been able to.

The organisations that are successfully engaging and enriching Jewish young adults deserve to be pushed front and centre, applauded and celebrated. The key, though, is to embrace the extra-communal efforts springing up to ensure the future strength and viability of our community. If we’re going to manage the expectations and requirements of Gen Y and try to bring them back into the fold, we need as many hands on deck as possible.

Ensuring the successful engagement of my generation isn’t easy, and it may take ten times the diversification as before, but a shift in thinking and rhetoric is going to be the only way to ensure a connection with the next generation of young Jews.

This piece was originally published in the Australian Jewish News. I’ve uploaded a PDF [755KB] of it here.

• Movements of the people
• Why are we failing future generations?
• Reaping benefits of time spent in Israel