The business of grooming and funding young Jewish social entrepreneurs and innovators — essentially the search for the next big Jewish idea — is now a big one.Incubators like Bikkurim, funds like Slingshot and Natan as well as gatherings in Jerusalem like the PresenTense Institute and the ROI Summit have in recent years helped to spawn a thriving cottage industry to support and mentor these big doers and thinkers. Surveys have revealed that there are more than 300 new Jewish startups in the U.S. alone in the last decade with operating budgets of under $2 million. These startups, a $500 million enterprise, are engaging close to 400,000 Jews.But this isn’t merely an American-Jewish trend.

“The Jewish innovation pipeline is alive and well in the United States, but there is also a growing interest in Israel, Europe, and Latin America in new community-building models,” says Shawn Landres, CEO and director of research at Jumpstart, a think tank for Jewish nonprofit innovation.

The ROI (Return On Investment) five-day conference held last month in the Maccabiah Village in Ramat Gan, Israel, was proof of this international phenomenon. The conference (600 applicants vie for 120 spots) is the brainchild and program of philanthropist Lynn Schusterman and considered the premier address for skill-building, professional development training and networking opportunities for the international community of Jewish innovators under the age of 35. Participants included social entrepreneurs and do-gooders from 29 countries, including Uruguay, India, Belarus, China and Latvia. (This reporter was an ROI participant, with travel and lodging provided by the funders.)

Despite the attention being given these innovators, little is actually known about them in terms of their politics, their cultural views, their views on gender, their priorities. Some of their projects — most notably the Moishe House, which features 28 Jewish community centers based out of the homes of 20- and 30-year-olds around the world — have had a significant impact on the lives of young Jews.

But a poll, though informal and unscientific, at the recent ROI Summit, is providing the first glimpse at who these innovators are and what they believe.
And some of the results may be surprising.

In a question about Jewish communal priorities in the current economic downturn, one-third of ROI participants believed that the Jewish community must focus on providing basic communal needs (welfare, food, shelter). One-quarter favored cultivating innovation as the top priority and about one-quarter preferred to invest in Jewish education.

“I was with the 25.2 percent who favored the support of innovation,” says Deborah Plum, a recent immigrant from New York who is the co-founder of Omanoot, a nonprofit based in Tel Aviv that provides educational materials focused on Israeli music, film and visual art. “During a crisis, we can’t freeze up. In the darkest hours, we should have the faith and the courage to support what is new and creative.”
This has been the mantra of major funders like Charles Bronfman, Lynn Schusterman and others who have argued the point in Jewish Week op-eds.

In fact, at the opening of the ROI Summit, Schusterman invoked the memory of her late husband, Charles Schusterman. “Dream big,” she said. “The times ahead will not be easy; there will be fewer resources available. But Charlie always said not to limit your thinking by making it about limited resources.”

In reality, we don’t have to choose among “innovation,” “education” and “basic needs,” says Jumpstart’s Landres. “Innovation is not in and of itself an outcome; it’s the way we identify new outcomes and come up with new paths to outcomes. It will be innovators of all ages, in all kinds of organizations, who will find solutions for meeting basic needs and advancing Jewish education in the 21st century.”
Justin Korda, director of Israel programs at the Center for Leadership Initiatives (CLI), an ROI partner, said the results of the question about priorities “reflect common sense rather than any conservative leanings of the group as a whole.”

The group’s politics provided something of a surprise.

A question about whether President Barack Obama is good for the Jews and Israel revealed that nearly one-third believe he is not good for either. Fifty-five percent said Obama is good for the Jews and Israel. (Obama garnered nearly 80 percent of the Jewish vote in the U.S. in last November’s election.) The polarization may be partially accounted by the fact that one-third of participants hailed from Israel, where Obama’s approval rating has fallen to 6 percent, according to a June poll sponsored by the Jerusalem Post.

A question about gender led to some heated discussion.

When it comes to being married by a female rabbi, 40 percent of ROI participants said they would feel comfortable while an additional 40 percent said they wouldn’t be comfortable (the remaining 20 percent were still figuring it out).

“Hesitation to be married by a woman rabbi is not a conservative view for someone from a community that has never had one or met one,” says Yonatan Gordis, executive director of CLI, noting that female rabbis are a very American concept. “They were given five seconds to answer, so I would not read terribly much into this other than the fact that some definitely feel connected to ‘old school’ religious habits.”
(The poll was carried out at the conference’s opening event using real-time technology. Participants answered 30 multiple-choice style questions simply by clicking a number on their individual remotes, which corresponded to responses posted on a big screen.)

Some participants bristled at the wording of the woman rabbi question, which they say was unfair. “I may not be comfortable getting married by a female rabbi because of the way I was raised,” says Chaim Landau, an ROI participant who grew up in the Orthodox community in Elizabeth, N.J., and whose organization, Perspectives Israel, aims to educate about the complexity of the challenges facing Israel from a wide variety of viewpoints within the Israeli-Jewish spectrum.

Landau continued: “I firmly believe, however, that women need to be included in Jewish leadership roles.”

When asked which Jewish environment best positively nurtures Jewish identity and community involvement, 32 percent chose “home/family life,” which was followed by “youth movements” (21 percent). Only 6 percent answered “day schools.”

“The participants are most likely speaking from their personal experiences, and my guess is that few of them went to day school,” said Gordis. Youth movements figured very high, more than 50 percent for participants from Europe and Latin America, places where youth movements are very popular.

The fact that Jewish day schools were favored by only 6 percent is “upsetting, but not surprising,” says Plum. “Not every Jewish family or every Jewish home is affiliated or knows how to be,” she said.
A question about cultural tastes may have yielded the most surprising answer of all.

Asked to choose “the greatest Jewish movie,” a third of ROI participants picked “Fiddler on the Roof.”
“Schindler’s List” (which garnered 21.9 percent of the votes) and “Defiance” (not one of the choices), “are much more interesting to me, and present a more truthful history,” says Jeremy Applebaum, a Kansas native and real estate entrepreneur who is running a series of events aimed at introducing Kansas City Jews to the work of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Yes, “Fiddler” is “a super film, with fab songs,” says Samuel Green, a Geneva-based Zionist rapper. “But it depicts a real low point in Jewish history; the ‘old Jews,’ the shtetl Jews, beaten by the pogroms, not standing up for themselves. And then it celebrates assimilation and intermarriage. It’s certainly not something I’d like to hold up as a shining example.”

Other Jewish film choices included “Exodus,” “The Ten Commandments,” “The Chosen,” “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” and “The Jazz Singer.” Although there was no write-in ballot, shouts of “where’s ‘Yentl?’” could be heard within the crowd.

No matter what the political or cultural views of those she is helping groom, Lynn Schusterman, the sprightly 70-year-old chair of The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, is clearly pushing the value of innovation. Schusterman is the sole funder for ROI, a partnership between CLI and Taglit-Birthright. ROI, now in its fourth year, has seen its budget grow from approximately $600,000 in 2008 to nearly $1 million this year.

“The idea for ROI came from my realization that I was seeing something that others had not,” she told the crowd at the opening ceremony, held inside a circus tent in Tel Aviv. “Yours is not a generation of apathy. You care about so many things.”

E-mail: tamar@jewishweek.org