The Jewish Public Forum at CLAL

Exploring The Jewish Futures:
A Multidimensional Project On The Future Of Religion,Ethnicity And Civic Engagement

2002

Biotechnology, globalization, the Internet, and emerging forms of spirituality will all, in different ways, reshape our communities, families and identities in the coming years. We start from the position that in order to engage head-on with the most important challenges of the future, we need to ask new kinds of questions. This is true for religious leaders, philanthropists, researchers, educators, and others exercising moral and ethical guidance in institutions across the societal spectrum.  Yet within the Jewish community, and within other religious and ethnic communities, conversations about the future are generally narrow, failing to consider the effects of large-scale societal shifts.  A preoccupation with the disappearance of familiar institutions and approaches often drains resources in fear-based responses to change. 

Jewish Public Forum seminars aim to move beyond the usual frameworks in which important issues are considered.  Our meetings are about generating better questions rather than about coming up with definitive answers or policy recommendations. It is our conviction that new perspectives most often come from interdisciplinary conversation, and so our meetings gather people from a broad range of disciplines, communities and perspectives. In seminars combining playfulness with discipline, we aim to provoke conversation that is as creative and fearless as possible, in the belief that only by so doing will we come up with questions that will be critical for building meaningful lives and ethical communities in the years ahead. 

The Jewish Public Forum has been engaged in a multidimensional project, now in its third year, called “Exploring the Jewish Futures.” The project explores, in the broadest possible terms, what may be in store for Jews and Jewish communities in the next decades.  In June 2000, thirty people from a range of professional backgrounds participated in a seminar exploring how new technologies and the “new economy” are reshaping the ways people make meaning in their lives. Participants joined CLAL faculty in an experimental, collective research process of “learning journeys”—visits to cutting edge businesses, online communities, public spaces and cultural venues around New York City.  In January 2001, the Jewish Public Forum held a two day “scenario planning” workshop, in which fifty participants collaborated in developing creative but plausible stories about the range of challenges, choices and possibilities that might face Jewish and other ethnic and religious communities by the year 2015. 

In 2002, the Jewish Public Forum convened a series of seminars—“The Future of Family and Tribe,”  (January 2002) “The Future of Education and Cultural Transmission,” (March 2002) and “The Future of Social Change” (May 2002) — that focused on some of the most important themes that have emerged in the project to date.  Each of these day-long seminars brought together ten to fifteen participants—anthropologists, rabbis, politicians, scientists, journalists, historians, and others. Participants also contributed essays on the seminars' themes that will be published by CLAL, and disseminated broadly to religious leaders, philanthropists, academics, community leaders, and other opinion-makers. 

Seminar I: The Future of Family and Tribe, January 28-29, 2002

Relationships between the sexes, between parents and children, and between families and the wider society are at the heart of contentious debates about the dangers and possibilities the future holds. And change is surely afoot: the rise of genetic engineering, the postponement of marriage in favor of pursuing other life goals, the increasing practice of transnational adoption and new reliance on “out-sourcing” family functions are all developments that profoundly re-shape families and intimate relationships.  

Fundamental changes in family structures—indeed, in our very ideas about what a family is—produce controversy and anxiety on many fronts: religion, law, policy, education, medicine, and social services.  Some of the questions explored at the seminar were:  Will traditional religious or ethnic groups be able to survive if the boundaries between these communities blur, as people marry outside their own religions or cultures, and as they borrow freely from others' rituals and spiritual traditions in creating their own and their families’ customs? Will American society cohere when women and men shift the way they balance family and work? Who will control whose fertility and reproduction? Will our children's children be genetically engineered past recognition? Will the institution of marriage be transformed, or dismantled?  How will the ability to genetically design offspring and to extend human life span change the ways that lovers, parents and children relate to one another?

To read more about the seminar, click here.

To access participants' essays, click here.

Seminar II: The Future of Education and Cultural Transmission, March 18-19, 2002

Education, media and entertainment are often beset by controversy.  What happens in schools, universities, museums, movies, television, popular music, and the Internet matters so intensely to families, religious and ethnic communities, and society at large because these are our primary mechanisms for transmitting values, knowledge and traditions.

But technological, economic and cultural shifts raise whole new sets of difficult questions.  Some of the questions explored at the seminar were:  Will new communications technologies dramatically change the role and authority of teachers? Will they change our understanding of the possibilities for maintaining cohesive communities?  What are the long-term implications of the blurring boundaries between education, media and entertainment?  If schooling in this country has often been seen as the means for “educating citizens,” will that remain true over the next fifteen years, as education increasingly becomes a business?  How do we educate people to honor particularity without encouraging particularism?  What kinds of new “experiential” methods will be integrated into educational processes?  How will the changing role of pharmaceuticals affect people’s experiences of education and entertainment?  When should education begin and when should it end? Who will have access to what sorts of information and knowledge?

To read more about the seminar, click here.

To access participants' essays, click here.

Seminar III: The Future Of Social Change, May 20-21, 2002

People working to effect long term change in society - whether they are activists or analysts, artists, scientists or religious leaders - will face new kinds of challenges in the next decades, making their work look different than it has in the past.  This is true for people working in the public sector, in non-profits, in corporations or in universities.   Individuals, communities and institutions that see their role as moral or ethical leaders will need to consider the effects of major cultural, economic and technological shifts if they are to make a long term impact. 

Some of the issues explored at the seminar were: What kinds of new ethical issues will grab the headlines in the coming decades?  What are the “stealth issues” that might have a sudden impact on our society?  How will biotechnology, nanotechnology or cryptography create new challenges, rifts and coalitions?  How do new communications technologies empower groups and individuals in new ways?  How do global markets or international institutions differ from national governments as targets for change efforts?  What are the spiritual and psychological dimensions of social change?  In a world of loose connections and declining civic engagement, will we need to think in new ways about mobilizing support?  Does the need to communicate in sound-bites affect the way we think about the possibilities for long-term change? What kinds of partisan and ideological divides will emerge to replace an increasingly murky left-right divide?

To read more about the seminar, click here.

To access participants' essays, click here.

To learn more about The Jewish Public Forum, click here.