I don’t know that there’s so much more to be said about this. It seems to me that this topic has been pretty well mined out, but it keeps coming up again. How many times can we hear that Federations are not thriving today; they pander to the wealthy and the elderly, and exclude – more or less by accident, which doesn’t reveal much positive in their internal decision making processes- the young, or really anyone who is of working age, still working on the model of sty-at-home women who have time and desire to volunteer to go to meetings in the middle of the day; they don’t appeal to people who want to direct where there money goes, rather than have the organization make the decision (this actually isn’t in itself a bad thing – lots of non-sexy but essential programs would never get funded if it weren’t for this, but it’s difficult to get people to contribute on this model); they give money to lots of causes outside of the Jewish community, and – how to say this in a very gentle way – to parts of the Jewish community that don’t themselves contribute because they’re happy to take that money, but don’t consider the donors “true Jews;” and they work on an assumption that of course Jews will automatically fund federations, because that’s what we’re supposed to do.
And none of these are functional things to do. So how many articles do we need before someone actually does something?
Just askin’