TL;DR: Global Jewry is developing our Roundtables to transform connections into meaningful collaboration. By bringing together organizations and leaders around shared interests, we aim to spark global partnerships, knowledge sharing, and joint projects that strengthen the Jewish world, and we invite you to participate.

Global Jewry was built on a simple but powerful idea: the Jewish organizations and leaders driving us forward worldwide are dynamic, diverse – and can do more together than alone. 

But a network, on its own, is only the beginning. The real question is how to actualize all our social capital to achieve our collective potential. That is where Global Jewry’s Roundtables come in. While the Roundtable program has existed for some time, we are now intentionally working to expand and take it to new heights – and we need your help. Curious? Read on! 

Why this matters now

Across the world, Jewish organizations and initiatives are investing in education, leadership, social welfare, innovation, heritage, advocacy, and community-building, amongst many other important areas. Yet many of the biggest challenges – and opportunities – of our times are complex, multifaceted, and international. No one organization or leader can address them singlehandedly. It’s when coalitions of peers working in different contexts, but facing similar questions, find one another and build together, that perhaps together we can achieve change currently unforeseeable and unimaginable.

From peers connecting to change agents

In a Jewish communal landscape filled with urgent needs, limited time, and competing demands, people do not join “one more thing” simply because they are asked to. They engage when there is real value: insight they can use, peers they can trust, and opportunities they could not access alone. Roundtables are designed with that reality in mind.

We are working to create a marketplace where organizations working in a common field – arts and culture, education, environment, volunteering, and beyond – can meet peers across borders for a meaningful, global exchange. Participants come because they care about the topic. They stay when they gain relationships, perspectives, and opportunities to strengthen their own work. 

We want to begin encouraging Roundtable conversations around a shared theme to become the starting point for something more tangible. Perhaps there can be in-person gatherings, site visits, joint initiatives implemented in multiple places across the globe, traveling exhibits, collaborative online projects – or any other format that the Roundtable can imagine.

This way, Roundtables will become a place where global Jewish connectivity becomes practical. The Roundtables will become a structure for knowledge sharing, testing ideas, and discovering where common interests might lead to common action.

As one example, several organizations in the Arts & Culture Roundtable are collaborating to produce an immersive retreat for culture, creativity, and Jewish international connections around the Tempo Latino music festival in the Gers region of France, July 30- August 3. We would love for more Global Jewry members to join us. If you might be interested in meeting other Global Jewry members face to face and participating in cultural workshops and local experiences together, please contact me (deborah@globaljewry.com) for more details.

A model built for participation

A particularly important part of this next chapter is volunteer leadership. We are looking for Roundtable Chairs passionate about a particular topic or field and excited by this idea of building coalitions to create change. Chairs are not expected to carry administrative burdens. Their role is strategic: helping shape the conversation, bringing subject-matter knowledge, encouraging participation, identifying opportunities, and guiding a constructive process in which ideas can be challenged, strengthened, and refined.

The combination of volunteer leadership and staff support is critical. It means the Roundtable can remain rooted in the expertise of the field while benefiting from facilitation, follow-up, project management, and matchmaking from Global Jewry.

At the same time, a strength of the evolving Roundtable model is that it allows for more than one kind of engagement. Some participants may choose to join to listen, learn, and connect with peers in their field. Others may want to go further through bringing ideas and building collaborative projects together with Global Jewry staff and fellow participants.

Looking ahead

As this work continues to take shape, we are thinking more about how collaborative efforts can be recognized, elevated, and encouraged more intentionally across the network. If the Jewish world wants more coalition-building, shared problem-solving, and cross-border creativity, then these coalitions have to be treated as worth investing in and celebrating. The Roundtables are helping lay that foundation now – by creating the relationships and shared work from which stronger collective initiatives can emerge.

Opportunities to get involved

For members of the Global Jewry network, this is the moment to step in to participate:

• Join a Roundtable in a field connected to your work or interests, and bring your perspective into a global conversation.
• Chair a Roundtable if you have subject-matter expertise and want to help shape a space for meaningful exchange and collaborative thinking.
• Bring an idea for a project, gathering, exchange, or coalition that could benefit from global partners.
• Contribute expertise by sharing a case study, framing a challenge, mentoring peers, or helping connect organizations that should know one another.
• Help grow the table by identifying additional organizations and leaders whose voices would strengthen the conversation.

The Roundtables can help create a future where Global Jewry is connected, collaborative, broad in reach, deep in value, and both a platform for conversation and also a catalyst for collective action. In a global Jewish moment that calls for more imagination, more trust, and more partnership across borders, that kind of space is not a luxury. It is infrastructure. 

If this vision resonates with you, join us in making it come alive! Please contact me at deborah@globaljewry.org. I look forward to hearing from you and working with you to make this vision not just possible, but a reality in our times.

Shavua tov,

Deborah Fishman

GJ Leven Fellow for Partner Engagement

Have an achievement (e.g. publications, awards, appearances, etc) you would like highlighted in a future GJ Connections? Let us know by emailing sandy@globaljewry.org.

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