By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Over much of the past year, small groups of Jewish Louisvilians have met to discuss, ruminate, and consider how to move forward in the wake of 2022’s groundbreaking, Brandeis University-led “Study of Jewish Louisville.” Cohorts ranging from teenagers to seniors met at the Trager Family JCC with one overarching imperative: identify the best ways to translate the Brandeis study’s statistics into action – a process dubbed Louisville 502.0.
The Columbus, Ohio-based firm Panoramic Strategy acted as facilitator for these sessions, and earlier this month a series of meetings were held to present its core findings. It was an opportunity for stakeholders – and indeed anyone curious about the future of Judaism in Louisville – to gain a better understanding of what’s emerged from both the Brandeis study and the focus groups that followed.
“I look on this as a three-stage process: the Who, the What and the How of the community,” Jon Klein, a Louisville physician and researcher who chairs the 502.0 committee, told an audience gathered Sept. 4 at Jewish Family & Career Services. “The ‘Who’ is, ‘Who are we,’ – that was the Brandeis demographic study.”
“We learned that we’re geographically widely dispersed across the Louisville and southern Indiana area,” Klein said. “And we learned, at least from my perspective, that there are more Jews in this area that I ever realized – certainly more than previous studies had shown.
“The ‘What’ is, ‘What do we think about? How do we build an engaged and vibrant Jewish community? How do we invigorate it? How do we change things? What do we think about this place, and how do we make it better?” Klein said. “And then finally the how is, how do we implement all this? How do we execute this in a way that reaches out to people, that changes things that aren’t working and strengthens things that are working?
As an essential precursor to 502.0. the Brandeis Study benefitted from rigorous collection of demographic statistics.
“When you have data like this, it helps you make good decisions,” Klein emphasized, “as opposed to just making guesses. A really smart guy once said that without data, what you’re saying is just an opinion.”
The principal guide for the event held at JFCS – the first of five such sessions scheduled that week – was David Kaplan, who founded Panoramic Strategy in January of 2017. Kaplan (not to be confused with Louisville’s David Kaplan, chairman of Jewish Community of Louisville), stressed the democratic nature of the 502.0 process.
Fundamentally, “the whole idea is not to think from the top down, to say, ‘What should every institution of person do here?’ It’s the opposite: a grassroots effort.”
The goal, Kaplan explained, is “how do we take what we learned from the (Brandeis) study and bring it to life through actual voices that represent the people we don’t know in our community, just as much as everyone that we do know. And then how do we make sure that what comes out is accessible so that anyone…can pick up this work and decide to take action tomorrow.”
It’s largely a matter of incremental advances, beginning with taking what might be regarded as baby steps.
“My hope is that this is a chance for you to step back and say, ‘What could I do differently tomorrow,” Kaplan said “What’s one small thing I could do with these insights and recommendations to take one small step forward?’”
Kaplan divided his presentation into four components: Process, Insights, Recommendations and Resources.
“Process” aimed to “give you a sense of what we did.” “Insights” asked, “What are the key insights we learned across all the (demographic) cohorts we were able to engage with.
“Three – what are the high-level six or seven recommendations that someone can pick up tomorrow and start using in their work,” Kaplan said. “And then finally, what are the resources available to the community…a reminder that all of this work is about bringing the community study to life.”
The 502.0 focus groups encompassed five cohorts: Young Jewish Adults (defined as “Jewish adults between the ages of 23 and 34 with no children”). Intermarried Families (“couples with one non-Jewish partner and children under the age of 12”), In-married Families (“Couples where both partners are Jewish and have children under the age of 12”), GenX+ Adults (“Jewish adults between the ages of 45 and 64”), and Jewish Seniors (“Jewish adults aged 65 and over”).
Crucially, Kaplan observed, “it’s not about age; it’s much more about life stage – young families with children, or perhaps recent empty-nesters, with a range of institutional affiliations.
“It’s worth noting that so much of our engagement effort was one-to-one outreach,” Kaplan said. There was deliberately systematic recruitment of potential focus-group participants. “We did surveys; there were ads in the paper, flyers and QR codes at festivals. We had the chance to hear from people we wouldn’t typically hear from, and frankly, it was exciting to be able to hear those voices.”
In all, some 130 people participated among the five cohorts. One meeting took place prior to October 7 – “we made some adjustments and some alignment work” in the weeks and months afterward.
Many young-adult participants expressed a desire for more alternative programming. “I want to focus on the words ‘alternative’ and ‘different,’ Kaplan said, adding that there were “five insights” especially worth highlighting.
“The first was members of a particular cohort wanting to “engage with other members of their life-stage cohort. The second was that Jewish Louisville is “initially more attractive through social and cultural events,” with “a lower emphasis on religion and affiliation.”
The third insight embraced “inclusive events that go beyond institutions and memberships can showcase a cohesive, collaborative set of organizations that reflect a welcoming community.” Insight four highlighted the necessity of organizing neighborhood-based events, “particularly for our younger generations, who more frequently live outside the urban core.
“And last,” Kaplan said, “was ensuring that “clear communication and strong programming coordination” can bolster “awareness across a broad cross-section of our community.”
Perhaps nothing is as vital as nurturing friendships among young Jewish adults. Indeed, “the biggest participation barrier is that they don’t know someone going to an event,” Kaplan said.
Tellingly, “two-fifths of Jewish adults in Louisville say they’re not satisfied with their level of participation in the community. But we also saw something very different in the think tanks and focus groups, which was that most of these people didn’t know each other – even if they had a kid in the same class where they lived down the street from each other.”
Often it all comes down to relative proximity to what’s going on.
“Folks said things like, ‘I don’t want to travel 20 minutes after my work day as a two-parent, working family with my kids, to go to an event and then (drive) back,’” Kaplan said. “‘If there were something in my neighborhood, it would be much easier for me to say yes.’”
There was consensus among young-adult cohort participants that small is good; big, not so good.
“Aversion to institutions came up just as much as aversion to synagogues,” Kaplan told his community leadership listeners. “I can tell you that, unanimously across the groups – and I don’t care about age or life-stage – folks are saying it’s not about the institution; it’s about the people.”
There was a great deal of emphasis that evening on being willing to take chances with novel approaches, and not to let fear of failure deter stakeholders from venturing into uncharted territory.
“As someone who’s spent the last 40 years being a scientist, experimentation I know something about,” Klein said. “By and large experiments don’t work, and that’s something you (know) when you begin the experimentation process.”
Klein cited “an amazing speech by Franklin Roosevelt when he was running for president the first time. He said the country calls for ‘bold’ – and here’s the missing word, ‘persistent’ experimentation. We’ve got to be persistent as a community in trying something – and if it doesn’t work, try something else.”
“You could take any moment in time, but we are where we are,” Sara Klein Wagner, President and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Louisville and the Trager Family JCC, observed a few days after the JFCS presentation.
“We’ve got great things that are happening in this community,” she said, and “we have challenges that every community faces. We’ve learned we have the blessing of knowing more about ourselves, and being able to take the time to actually listen to people.” The imperative then becomes, Wagner said, “how bold can we be to change things up and try things differently, while taking nothing away from what this community does exceptionally well: the relationships, the core grounding, and the warmth people feel from the groups they’re part of.”
Everyone has different needs, and different backgrounds that inform those needs. “I’m lucky enough to be from Louisville,” Wagner said. “I have friends who I grew up with. I have people I’ve met during my decades of living here and coming back after college to work here. Some people have been here for two years and quickly found their people, we can be connectors.”
Here Wagner acknowledged a fundamental truth that defines much of 502.0. “As David Kaplan said, the first thing we learned is people are looking for their people.”