What is a Jewish Cause?

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 | posted by

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There has always been debate on what exactly defines Jewish art and literature. . In The Jewish Chronicle, Dr. Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history and director of the Hornstein Jewish professional leadership program at Brandeis University, is attempting to define what is (or is not) a Jewish cause:

“But the great causes that once energised contemporary Jewry — immigrant absorption; saving European, Soviet, Arab and Ethiopian Jewry; creating and sustaining a Jewish state — have now been successfully completed. For the first time in living memory, no large community of persecuted Jews exists anywhere in the diaspora. Twenty-first-century, young western Jews are unlikely to gain the kind of meaning from helping Israel, keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust and fighting antisemitism as their parents did.

There is no shortage of secular and universal causes that young Jews can embrace — conservation, environmentalism, ethical treatment of animals, and the like. These are significant causes, with a sound basis in our tradition, but they are not, ultimately, Jewish causes.”

Aren’t they? Why not?

JGooders features projects on all of the topics mentioned by Dr. Sarna…and then some. They have all been launched, run and volunteered for by Jews, for reasons of Tikkun Olam, Chesed and Tzedek, not to mention various Jewish tenets like prevention of cruelty to animals or feeding the hungry.

So what is a Jewish cause?

Is it only a mission undertaken by Jews for Jews? Or for Israel? And what about Israelis who aren’t Jewish? Can environmentalism or Fair Trade be a Jewish cause? What do you think?