Daniel Sieradski, a prominent blogger in the Jewish community, recently began a new blog called “31 Days, 31 Ideas.” The basic gist of this month-long blog was to present his innovative ideas of ways to improve upon the Jewish community at a time when our society is progressing forward at an unprecedented rate, and to ultimately generate support for these ideas in order for them to come into fruition.
For the most part, Daniel’s ideas are original and pretty novel in my opinion (although he does lend credit where credit is due); and most have something to do with the Internet. All of these ideas were fascinating and though-provoking, but several of them seemed worth creating conversation about.
I encourage you to check out Daniel’s blog for yourself, but in the meantime, here are a few of the ideas that I felt were worth sharing:
- Open Source Beit Midrash – an online study hall that uses web conferencing and video chatting in order to have multiple people looking at the same page of text, with a teacher guiding a live, video-enabled lecture. This type of website could forever change the study of Jewish texts across the world.
- Jew It Yourself: The Jewish Catalog 2.0 – This would provide online resources that facilitate self-directed Jewish learning and practice to those who do not affiliate Jewishly in traditional ways or who do not have access to a Jewish education
- Jewish Book of the Month Club – as an avid reader with a love for learning about the Jewish community, I am obviously a fan of this idea, and am confused as to why this never existed?
- Jewish Non-Profit Employees Union – a union for the tens of thousands of employees of all non-profit Jewish organizations, ranging from day schools, synagogues, JCC’s, to advocacy groups, with Jewish and non-Jewish employees alike.
These concepts definitely bring a new perspective to the Jewish community table. And with a new Jewish experience just at our fingertips, Daniel’s ideas could potentially be the change the community needs for revitalization.
-Emily
