Hello My Name is…The Case for a Jewish Meetup.com

This idea comes from Julia Levy, the NYC-based Director of Advancement for Cornell Hillel.

I was a skeptic of meetup.com for years. Until I attended a meet-up with 400 attendees and 10,000 members in the wings on their mailing list.

Suddenly, I understood its power: the ability to self organize in your community around a shared interest.

Within a matter of minutes, you can find topics of interest, from food to nature to art to music. Enter your zipcode and an instant community is at your fingertips with twenty to hundreds of people to meet per group.

What if we created a meetup.com for the Jewish community?

I could find young Jews interested in exploring the culture of New York City together through walking tours, host supper clubs where we cook family recipes to see who has the best rugelach, or start Jews on Ice for the hockey or figure skating fan in all of us to watch and play games together.

I believe in the power of of connecting your passions in life to spark a Jewish connection. That’s what attracted me to work for Cornell Hillel. I love that a student can be studying environmental science and design a community service project to change lightbulbs to be energy efficient and transform campus with this principle rooted in tikkun olam, repairing the world. Or that a student studying abroad in Italy can connect to Jewish life by researching and learning about the Jewish community there through a study abroad grant. She might not have stepped foot in a Jewish place on a trip to the country with friends, but exploring the rich history and connection to the global Jewish community through the language, food or museums she is already curious about, may link her to her heritage.

I recognize that it’s not only about the content, but a lot about the people who are engaging you or alongside of you in these activities. That’s where a Jewish version of meetup.com can have an impact.

On college campuses there is creativity and room for students to design organizations from the bottom-up. The examples are abundant. From baking and selling Challah for Hunger for charity which started at Scripps and spread to other campuses to a program unique to Cornell where students host Sephardi-Persian nights to bridge the cultural divide between Iranians and Jews with food, music, and comedy. Call it what you wish – vending machine Judaism with a special create-your-own button or there’s an app for that Judaism, Hillel strives to create that space for an entrepreneurial spirit in volunteer work that meetup.com offers in the real world.

However, besides college, where else in the Jewish community does such an opportunity exist? Once you graduate and move to a new city, how do you first find Jews with similar interests if you are not already connected to the community or the type of person who seeks out the opportunities instantly?

There are a few options. First stop, the young professional organizations whose events are designed to build the next generation of leaders. I have attended thoughtful speakers, panels, and fundraisers from these many groups. That being said, I’m tired of seeing the same people at these events who more often than not attend with their friends and stick to socializing with their group, defeating the purpose of meeting new people.There are the synagogues and the community centers, but we aren’t joining them because they aren’t relevant to us. And there are the innovative groups such as Kehillat Hadar and Moishe House which I admire for their creativity. But, still there is a large majority of Jews who these opportunities are not reaching.

My organization, Cornell Hillel, has enabled my peers and I to try an experiment because we wanted to address this gap. So we have invested in a young alumni program to bridge campus and community. It has been a great space to engage recent graduates who were and were not involved in Jewish life on-campus in the cities where they move based on a connection to their alma matter. But, after a while of building this community, there is a desire to meet up with other similar communities to broaden our connection. Where do we find the other recent college graduate groups if they don’t already exist?

Ultimately, the question I find myself asking is the following: where are the broad opportunities to connect locally with similar interested people? In particular, what if you don’t associate with any of these defined spaces? We are creating our own projects independently as solutions, but what if we brought together the already defined and paired it with the start-ups in one place?

Let’s enable Jews to meet around any topic in any city. Anyone could start or join a group (with the suggestion of minimizing the formation of too many similar overlapping interests). Still, imagine the possibilities: On Sunday afternoons, I could join the Israeli Film Forum meet-up to watch movies implied by the genre of our name, and discuss them over drinks; on Tuesdays evenings, I could exercise with the Latin-Israeli dance meet-up; and on Thursday evenings, I could attend the monthly meet-up of “28 days, 28 ideas” to listen to several people pitch ideas for the Jewish community and allow the audience to respond, and engage in conversations.

Certainly, on this site there would be space for the meet-up versions of the already established Jewish organizations. It actually would be really helpful to aggregate the vast activities in one place so that I could find an event by interest area on any given night.

While I wholeheartedly believe in the power of organizations and the staffing structure to support these opportunities, there is something powerful about volunteer driven work. Ultimately, there is no staff to fall back on if you can’t find a venue or send out the event description each month. The responsibility and reward rests with the person investing time and energy for their own enrichment and that of others. Utlimately, our site could expand to provide seed funding for our groups that are growing in size and provide counsel to them about next steps.

So, let’s refresh and start from the bottom-up. This site does not have to limited in age to solely young people, but we need to start somewhere and we are looking for a place to gather on and offline so why not try a meetup.com?