I’m sure you’ve seen the hot-pink billboards. Failing that, you may have seen the hot-pink Instagram posts.
In case you haven’t: On top of a bright-pink background, white letters spell out phrases like, “This year, we didn’t need the Grinch to steal Christmas. The Hamas kids did that for him.” Or, “When your parents said ‘find yourself’ in college, they didn’t mean to find your inner terrorist.” They range from cliché but harmless—“Anyone who hates Jews clearly hasn’t tried my Bubby’s brisket”—to a bit menacing, with one since-deleted post reading, “Trust Me. If Israel Wanted to Commit Genocide in Gaza, It Could.” When I went to their website for this piece, I was greeted with a pink pop-up with white lettering that said, “We’re just 75 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out Jewish hate isn’t an overreaction.” OK!
The Instagram graphics, like their physical billboard counterparts, are the work of JewBelong. The nonprofit—founded by Archie Gottesman and Stacy Stuart, who worked together penning eye-catching ad campaigns for Manhattan Mini Storage—has existed for several years. As Fast Company reported in 2015, the organization hoped it would “take some of the stress and complexity out of Jewish life.” In the article, the two founders called their program Marketing Jewru, but by the next year, it was JewBelong.
“Let’s face it, Judaism can be a little/lot intimidating,” their website reads:
JewBelong is out to change that by helping you find the joy, meaning and relevance that Judaism has to offer. Our explanations and meaningful rituals are just the beginning. We exist for Jewish people, for people who aren’t Jewish but are part of a Jewish community, for anyone who has felt like a Jewish outsider, and especially for Disengaged Jews (DJs for short). That’s literally why our name/tagline is JewBelong: for when you feel you don’t!
On its face, making Jewish life more accessible and welcoming is fairly unobjectionable (though there are certainly Jewish individuals who would object to the idea). And having a website that simply offers explanations of Jewish holidays isn’t harming anyone, and could even serve as a useful resource. (Other websites like My Jewish Learning do the same thing, albeit with less snark.)
From the start, though, two contradictions were baked into JewBelong’s mission.
The first is the question of why some Jews don’t feel they belong in a broader community of Jews, be it locally or globally. In 2015, Gottesman blamed Judaism’s marketing. Is that the issue? In 2016, writing in Haaretz, Rokhl Kafrissen suggested that the actual issues were the costs of raising children at all and in particular to having Jewish education and experiences (the ninth of JewBelong’s “New Ten Commandments” is to send children to Jewish summer camp and Hebrew school).
Kafrissen also points to Jewish philanthropists’ focus (and money spent) on fighting intermarriage and supporting Jewish continuity—traditionally understood as Jews marrying, giving birth to, and raising other Jews—instead of funding Jewish education. To that group, Kafrissen argues, ignorance about Judaism is all right so long as Jews marry and raise other Jews. (“Jewish grandchildren” is the second of JewBelong’s New Ten Commandments). To this, I would add that I have never interviewed a Jewish person who said they were checked out—excuse me, “disengaged”—because of marketing. But I have spoken to more than I can count who were treated as though they did not, in fact, belong because they were the product of intermarriage, or because they themselves were intermarried. And I doubt any of them would have felt like a bright billboard telling them they belong was an antidote to that.
Hellbound and Down 
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