The Jewish Futures Narrative Project

The reports presented here were the culmination of a roughly year-long narrative research study that sought to understand the differing ways and reasons Jewish Americans identify as being Jewish. The Foundation’s ultimate goal in commissioning this study was to better understand how to tell a more inclusive and sustainable story of what it means today to be Jewish in America and the world.

Our approach to this study utilized the Story Platform process, a proprietary process initially created by Kirk Cheyfitz and developed over some two decades by him and a collective of researchers. The process is meant to produce a “Story Platform” — essentially, a few words that shape and express a persuasive narrative that is most likely to be understood, believed, and embraced by its intended audience.

The results are reported here in two parts. For Part 1, researchers Kirk Cheyfitz and Michael Ahn, working with all the material and findings previously collected by the Foundation’s Emergent Strategy team, conducted 20 in-depth, hour-long, in-depth interviews (IDIs) with participants selected to represent the potential leaders of movements to create new kinds of Jewish communities. The purpose of the interviews was to discover the range of ideas and the underlying narratives driving the participants’ concepts of Jewish futures and, particularly, the potential nature of Jewish communities. All are proud to be Jews. The vast majority were unaffiliated and disengaged from Jewish communal life.

The IDIs focused on questions meant to discover the range of ideas, feelings, and underlying narratives driving the concepts of what “Jewish” means — what makes a community Jewish, the role played by Jewish history and tradition, what Jewish futures can be, and what constitutes Jewish values today.

The themes that emerged from the IDIs then informed the design of a one-day Story Platform Workshop, which is the subject of Part 2. The workshop had 18 participants, and the conclusions they reached together helped produce the core narrative that was the object of the Jewish Futures Narrative Project: a core narrative that could powerfully call American Jews to rebuild Jewish communal life on a more broadly engaging and inclusive basis.

“Story Platform Workshop for a Jewish Futures Narrative,” Kirk Cheyfitz and Michael Ahn, July 2022