The following is a transcript of Episode 181 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Tuesday, March 26th, 2024. 

So I often wonder what sort of thing is this big network of organizations and institutions that makes up the organized Jewish community, or, if you prefer, the establishment. I’m not alone in struggling to figure this out. Consider the following paragraph, taken verbatim from a report by Leading Edge, which is an organization in this very system that works on workplace culture and leadership. 

The report says, “All around the world, Jewish organizations and their partners work to solve the most urgent and pressing humanitarian problems. All around North America, Jewish human service agencies provide vital support to people struggling with poverty, isolation, unemployment, physical and mental health needs, abuse, and other issues. Throughout the cycles of weeks, holidays, years, and lifetimes, synagogues, JCCs, and Jewish arts and cultural organizations bring deep religious and cultural meaning into people’s lives, connecting people together, and linking the present to the past and the future. Every day, early childhood centers, Jewish schools, camps, social engagement organizations, and campus institutions enrich the lives of children and adults and pass on the full richness of Jewish life from generation to generation, and all the time, Jewish federations, foundations, national umbrella organizations, and many other Jewish institutions, by the way, I think that’s where I found the Hartman Institute, many other Jewish institutions, work tirelessly behind the scenes to help this ecosystem of organizations and the community it serves to grow and thrive.” 

That’s the end of the paragraph. Phew, it’s a lot. And are all of these things the same? Cultural centers, global humanitarian relief NGOs, daycare centers, synagogues, social service agencies, obviously not, yet they’re all imagined as bound together by the fact that many of them are called Jewish organizations. And by virtue of the fact that framings like this consider all of them part of some sort of shared ecosystem of organizations that serves a particular community, the Jewish community, but if we’re being more accurate, it’s not the Jewish community, it’s a lot of different communities all of whom refer to themselves in one way or another as Jewish. 

Sometimes, when I’m trying to figure out what this system of organizations is, I imagine the Jewish professional field as an industry with a huge GDP, combines a bunch of sub-industries, and is fueled by a bunch of economic drivers, including the markets, which shape philanthropy, the tax code, and then there’s a whole bunch of basic human needs that in turn shape any industry and any resulting economy.

Other times, the metaphor I look for, it seems more like a kind of weird quasi-government for the Jewish people who are correspondingly a weird kind of people. We have a Treasury Department, that’s philanthropy. We have various departments for services for different members of the population. We have a Judiciary and Educational class. We have Foreign Services too, like the AJC and the Joint.

At still other times, the whole sector seems like an embodiment of the Jewish people itself, translating our complexities and needs into a variety of organizations. So because Jewishness, for instance, can’t be fully captured as just like an abstract set of behaviors or practices without context and frameworks to behave or practice Jewishly, therefore we have all of these Jewish institutions. It’s just taking Jewishness and making it into a real thing.

I think what’s confusing about all of this is that the Jewish nonprofit sector, or if you prefer, professional field, has no obvious parallel. Other religious communities in America sometimes envy the infrastructure the Jewish community has managed to build, as do other immigrant ethnic communities, and it’s precisely because Jewish peoplehood welds together religious and ethnic that we have this crazy superstructure that can be exasperating to navigate, and oftentimes makes bad choices, but is also in many ways an extraordinary unicorn that has no real peer. 

So hold that question for a second, the question of what the Jewish community is, and here’s a fascinating statistic. According to that same Leading Edge study that I quoted that paragraph from before, and acknowledging it’s just one study, so you’d need a bunch, nearly half of respondents to the opt-in study about Jewish communal organizations that were surveyed identified themselves as non-Jewish when it comes to religion. That, by the way, sometimes could include people who are genuinely not Jewish. It also can include people who are Jewish but who refer to themselves as atheist or agnostic, which to most other Jews means they’re still Jewish, but they may not have chosen the term Jewish themselves. 

Okay, it doesn’t matter whether it’s all non-Jews or some Jews and non-Jews, it’s still a really large percentage of this workforce and I was surprised by it. I wasn’t surprised, like I know that non-Jews work in the Jewish community, we have non-Jewish staff here at Hartman, though because our programs have a knowledge barrier that’s pretty high, our current non-Jewish staff largely operates in functions like IT and finance, although we have one special exception in the Kogod Research Center because the leading Talmudist in North America right now happens to not be Jewish. 

But still, 30% to 40% of the workforce feels really high. So now take that statistic and go back to my question about what this Jewish professional sector is and index the question against this data. It now seems like that question is more consequential, because if this sector is just an economic sector, then the question of identity is basically irrelevant.

But if this sector is supposed to be a kind of mirror of the Jewish community itself or imagined to be a kind of government for the Jewish community, maybe it’s more suggestive or more significant that nearly half of the sector is not Jewish. Or maybe not. Let’s consider all of the ways in which the boundary between Jews and non-Jews has eroded here in America. How many millions of Americans are, to quote my colleague Christine Hayes, “Jewish adjacent” through their family members and social networks, and now you wonder, is the presence of so many non-Jews in our workforce an anomaly relative to the Jewish community? Or maybe, strangely, it’s become a perfect representation of the complexity of what Jewish identity has actually become. 

So I’m speaking today to Darin McKeever, the president and CEO of the William Davidson Foundation in Detroit, long-time leader and entrepreneur in the nonprofit and social sector. Darin has been at Davidson for a little less than a decade, first as the chief program and strategy officer before being elevated to the top job, and previously in a senior role at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, before then running a major AmeriCorps project in the Washington, D.C. area. 

There are a lot of topics of expertise that I could have Darin on the show to talk about, topics that actually reflect his expertise in the fields in which he and the foundation operate, and I feel a little sheepish introducing him here to speak about non-Jews in the Jewish professional workplace, which is less about expertise than it is about identity. Although, as I’ve suggested in the introduction, I think the topic embeds a lot more issues that actually matter in Jewish life. 

And for what it’s worth, Darin has actually written about this experience publicly, about coming both to Detroit as a newcomer and to a major Jewish funder as an outsider. A few years ago, he wrote in the Detroit Jewish News that when he started at Davidson, he had to Google the phrase Shabbat shalom when he started seeing it in his Friday emails, now he writes, “After more than seven years, I not only wish friends Shabbat Shalom, I also know the difference between tzitzit and tzimtzum, Heschel and Herzl, shmura and shmita. By the way, that’s a lot more than most Jews. 

I should also acknowledge here that for those who appreciate this kind of transparency, Shalom Hartman Institute and our digital department, especially, are proud and grateful grantees of the William Davidson Foundation. So it’s been exciting through that to get to know Darin on the inside of the work as well.

So Darin, thanks for coming on the show today and thanks for talking about the sector in this field. And maybe you could go back to that moment of being recruited and the kind of questions that you, that it raised for you and what it felt like to kind of step inside a quote Jewish foundation and what that kind of felt like at the beginning.

Darin: Sure. So first off, Yehuda, thanks so much for the invitation. This is a topic that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about, and the invitation helped push my thinking a little bit forward and look forward to our conversation. I’m a longtime listener and first-time caller to this podcast. Although I think for purposes of today, maybe I should introduce myself as the Shabbos goy. Or maybe you can come up with a better term. A friend of mine called me a Jew-y non-Jew, so we can navigate exactly what they call me, but delighted to be on here. 

So it has been nearly a decade since I got a call from a headhunter. I was at the Gates Foundation, as you mentioned, in introducing me. And I was looking for a job in a C-suite of an organization that was undergoing what I described as an entrepreneurial moment. I’m used to building teams, building organizations, helping navigate those moments for people and organizations that are trying to find their purpose, realize their passions, but need some leadership, some structure, some frameworks. And in particular, I thought I had more to give to the philanthropic community. 

Also for personal reasons, I wanted to return to a little bit more of my community-based work that had rooted my first decade or so in Washington, DC, and Detroit was on the map for a few different reasons. And the headhunter proceeded to describe a family that was in the early days of building what would become a billion-dollar foundation that would have a very close connection to its home community of Detroit that required a professional who had some experience in the philanthropic community and could bring to bear certain tools and frameworks, and could navigate both the sort of technical and emotional questions that come with the start of an institution along these lines. 

And I read a little bit more and I learned that it was a Jewish foundation and it worked in Israel. And so I could answer the questions about how to build an institution, how to build teams, what would be my first hire. But the questions that I had that I had to had to get comfortable with is, what does it mean to work in a Jewish foundation? What would it mean to work in support of Israel, not having visited Israel at all, not having at least consciously been working in the Jewish community? 

And we’ll talk perhaps a little bit later about, I’m glad you introduced the term Jewish adjacent because I did want to explore that with you. But one of the questions I had for the board and the board members at the time was, are you sure that it’s right for you in this moment to be hiring a non-Jew for such a position? And they assured me that it not only was fine, but that it might be an advantage. And I said, you must really want me, because I didn’t quite believe them. 

In time, I think there may be an advantage, but it certainly had a whole lot of disadvantages, because not only was I coming to a moment of uncertainty for the organization, but also I was coming from a place of unfamiliarity with a number of the issues. Sometimes that place of ignorance is valuable. You can ask questions out of ignorance. You can solicit ideas and options and put forward things without having to be maybe fully associated with endorsing them. But I did think that it was something that I would have to overcome to some degree, and maybe even stronger than that, prove that I could do this job.

Yehuda: So what would you characterize as the advantage? Is it that kind of curiosity? Is it neutrality? I mean, I can imagine in a community like Detroit, which is not a huge Jewish community, relatively speaking, a neutral outsider helps to alleviate all sorts of potentially internal competitiveness or tension. What are the advantages you see?

Darin: Yeah, I think the neutrality is one. Asking more fundamental questions that might not have been raised because there is a shorthand kind of conversations and there’s a nod at the start of conversations like everybody knows this. And so certain assumptions can be explored when I’m the one who’s maybe raising the questions or framing the conversations at times. I suppose that’s an advantage. 

The work in the Jewish community, particularly in Detroit, highly relational. That’s something that, yes, has been a disadvantage as I tried to figure out who do I need to talk to, who has the knowledge, who has the right relationship with the right other person to get to that person. But on the other hand, that comes with downsides because people make assumptions. If you are of a certain family or of a certain shul or of a certain bloc that you might have a certain perspective about things. And so therefore, questions of me or questions of the institution may not be asked either. So that’s where I see some of the advantages.

Yehuda: Yeah, I’ve been reading a little bit and in preparation for today, Deidre Munley writes about some of these issues for JPro, for a different kind of Jewish organization that focuses on the landscape of Jewish organizations, has been writing from the perspective of non-Jewish employees in Jewish organizations about what Jewish organizations need to do to be more hospitable and welcoming. And a lot of what she seems to focus on is kind of insider cultures and outsider cultures avoiding assumptions, being inclusive in language, diverse job applicants, career opportunities, et cetera. 

There’s a double-edged piece that comes with you because not only were you coming in to the Jewish community from the outside, but you were coming in at the top, or at least relatively soon after the time where you started Davidson, you came to this role. So you also get an opportunity to participate in culture shaping. 

And I guess I’m curious about that a little bit, how you’ve shaped the culture there, but I also want to layer onto that, I kind of like insiderness sometimes in the workplace. And that’s not only because I’m part of that group, but because it’s like, well, yeah, but this is the advantage of my working here as opposed to like, you know, as a in the non-Jewish workplace, like there’s something nice to that. So I’m curious how you navigate preserving the right of Jewish workplaces to be very Jewish even if you also want to make them places that are hospitable.

Darin: I want to think a little bit more about your question about culture shaping, but one of the things that that comment just raised for me is I remember people would ask me these questions early on. And there were certain moments that were a little bit unsettling. Or I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, if you’ll forgive that analogy. 

And one of those was when I would get on the phone and people would immediately start asking me, so are you married? Where’d you grow up? Who are your parents? Do you have kids? And I was one who had very clearly said Facebook is for friends, LinkedIn is for professional contacts, and I also was getting Facebook requests from people who I was working with. And there was this sense of there’s a blurring of boundaries. 

I came to call it a certain intimacy of working in the Jewish community, of being perhaps in the position I’m in. There may be a Midwestern quality to some of those questions and conversations as well, which again, a reminder, I grew up on the East Coast. So I was also moving into Detroit. 

But there’s this intimacy of working in the Jewish community where we come to know each other in a very deep way, but what I said at the time was there was a worry that I had there was a certain insularity that there were conversations, particularly in philanthropy, about power, about transparency, that were going on within the secular, philanthropic, and nonprofit sector, that it felt like sometimes the Jewish nonprofit sector, the Jewish philanthropic community, was somewhat new to. 

And I attributed at the time to this intimacy insularity set of questions, I’m not sure that was all that was going on, but it struck me that that was an interesting difference of working in the Jewish community. 

There’s one other experience that I had in my first few months or so, which was, you mentioned at the top, I was at the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation, if it does anything, which is a lot, internally, it works a lot on questions of strategy. It sorts out what to do and what not to do. And I looked to some of my experiences at the Gates Foundation for frameworks to how to raise questions to our board and to the early staff about, well, what can we do in support of Detroit, in support of Jewish community, in support of Israel? 

And I found pretty early on that every strategic question that I raised would precipitate multiple answers, multiple questions. And I pushed to try to get specific answers so that we could move forward in a way that I had experienced in other organizations. And the definitive answer never was reached. And I realized that my job here is going to be very different than I expected coming into here. What I need to do is curate debates and conversations, and hold the questions, knowing that we will always be returning to those. 

And in that way, I think I learned what it meant to be at the top of a Jewish foundation or at the top of a Jewish institution. There are these questions that we’ll keep circling back to. And part of our responsibility as leaders, as culture shapers, is to make sure we don’t jump to answers, make sure that diverse viewpoints are solicited in the course of discussions, recognizing that the more that you push to have definitive answers, the more that the community at that institution, the culture at that institution may push back on it. And that’s a good thing.

Yehuda: I think I need to understand that more. Are you saying that there’s something even essential between, I mean, I know you’re comparing one foundation to another foundation, but you seem to be suggesting that there is something endemic or native to Jewish foundations and institutions that privileges a culture of either questioning or lack of definitiveness. And that sounds to me like it might, you’re describing it as a feature and it sounds a little bit like a bug. And I want to understand why you think that that’s there. What is it about a foundation that focuses on Jewish causes that it can’t yield the kind of direct, this is what we’re doing, this is how we’re doing it, this is how we’re measuring and where we’re going.

Darin: I didn’t mean to paint it as a bug at all. I actually see it as a feature. 

Yehuda: Yeah, I know, that’s what I’m asking about, yeah.

Darin: And I think the fact that it’s a feature seems that much more prominent in this day and age where there is such a quickness to jump to conclusions. I’ve started calling it sort of algorithmic allyship where it’s like, if you’re for this, then you must be for this. And there’s a collapsing of debate or there is an elimination of the space for conversation and argument. And I think that’s where the Jewish community, Jewish tradition, Jewish history can be all the more important to be mined for the relevance of this moment where, you know, so many people are, I think quietly disappointed is maybe a soft word, but frustrated by the absence of spaces where we can really talk across differences, walk away not having had to agree to something that we didn’t feel fully on board with. So I very much see it as a feature, not as a bug. 

Does it make the work harder sometimes? Yes. I think in multilayered organizations where I’m trying to give guidance to my team and they’re trying to interpret exactly how our board might react to this or that grantee or prospect for funding. Of course, it makes it a little bit more difficult because you not only have to account for changing perspectives over time among the board, but there may be something lost in translation through layers of an organization. But I very much consider it a feature, not a bug, and something worthy for the Jewish institutions, but something that may be relevant for the rest of the world as well.

Yehuda: I guess there’s another particular layer for the foundation that you represent and it’s of a generation of foundations that were essentially, for a while they weren’t foundations, they were just wealthy individuals, right? It was Bill Davidson. And then they’ve gone through over the past couple of decades major professionalization, the building of charters, the execution of a long-term vision. 

And the endearing stories that are told about Bill Davidson, which I know are sometimes described in the context of like the non-professional way that funding works, is like if you bumped into Bill Davidson in the supermarket at the right time, an initiative can get supported. And I don’t know if that’s actually true. It’s just the legend.

Darin: I thought you could bump into Bill Davidson at a bar or in the grocery store and you wouldn’t know that it was Bill Davidson. But okay,

Yehuda: Right, those things might be connected. I guess the interesting part of that, the endearing part of that, is that it also tells a story of community belonging and a sense by the super wealthy people in particular Jewish communities that they were basically responsible for keeping the Jewish community operating, which is really different than when a foundation professionalizes itself and then is going to start moving to all of the things that we know are very good for smart philanthropy, which is things like strategy and plans and goals and benchmarks as opposed to,

Darin: I still believe in those things too. 

Yehuda: Yeah. So I’m curious both specifically about the Davidson Foundation, but also when you reflect on that model of how actually Jewish communities for centuries operated. You had a wealthy person, sometimes called the Parnass, and they just kind of made sure that the place operated, which takes place with a very different ethos than with foundation at a remove from the community.

Darin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you put your finger on, I think, one of many dynamics, I think, in the industry or ecosystem or what did you call it, a quasi-government that is this world that we inhabit and operate in. Yeah, and I think that there are benefits and drawbacks to, I think, a layer of professionalism. I think even in just the near decade that I’ve been at the Davidson Foundation, I’ve seen that move within foundations, there’s been a significant growth of those kinds of professionally staffed organizations. 

In our case, I very much consider us a, and we are a family foundation. And so grant decisions are made by the family. It is different operating a foundation where there are six family members or two family members, where it’s not a single decision maker. And certainly there’s a layer of complexity that that adds. 

But I think there are benefits because we can connect at different levels at different moments with our friends at Jim Joseph Foundation or Maimonides Fund or Weinberg or any number of other great institutions out there. And we can also have different conversations with the communal infrastructure that has played such important role stewarding, curating, supporting institutions. We have a great relationship with our local Federation and with the Federation system overall. 

So at the Davidson Foundation, we look at some of these benchmarks, making sure that we operate in as lean away as possible, not get over our skis or get too big for our britches. And we are about half the size of the staff-wise of your typical foundation or spend about half the amount on operating costs. And I’d like to keep it that way. I know our board is keen on keeping that way. And that enables us, I think, to make better, faster decisions in some ways and not get overly bureaucratic. 

That would be something that, while I’d never met Mr. Davidson, I have heard from his family that he would be upset if we became overly bureaucratic. We might not be the ones to make decisions at the grocery store, but there are different advantages.

Yehuda: Yeah, and I assume that you still, and I know that you still embrace the culture of being principally responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the Detroit Jewish community, that that remains local. And I assume that that’s also part of the same legacy that Bill Davidson left behind.

Darin: Absolutely. And it’s not just Bill Davidson, who is our founder, but the generation that came after him and generations before him. The things that we care about at the William Davidson Foundation, the vibrancy of Detroit, the vitality of the Jewish people, the security and prosperity and strength of Israel, those are commitments that the Davidson family has had for generations.

Yehuda: One of the things that I mostly like about my job and I’m grateful for is that I have no boundary between the things I care about in my life and at work. And I actually kind of love that.

Darin: Well, I love your Facebook posts.

Yehuda: I, I, for that reason, right? It’s all one thing. 

Darin: And right, exactly. If I were only on LinkedIn, I wouldn’t have the benefit of seeing those posts.

Yehuda: There you go, exactly. I also mean that even spiritually. I don’t know how it would feel, and I have obviously a lot of friends and family members who go to work to work on one set of things, and they set aside the things that their existential fears and concerns. And I’m very grateful most of the time that I don’t have to do that, with some losses that I have to incur, which basically means you’re working all the time. 

I’m curious what that looks like for you. What does your outside-of-work Jewish life look like?

Darin: I’ve been to Israel a couple of times since October 7th, and I go up to the airport desk, and the security asks me questions. I think that’s one of the questions that they ask me, what shul do you belong to? They kind of look at me funny. 

Obviously, we are two very different people. But in some ways, I think what you described is there not being a boundary between your work life and your home life or the life outside of the office. I think I would say the same. 

There are moments where I show up to talks, Shalom Hartman, you do such great work in our local Jewish community, And I show up to a speaker that you’ve helped bring to Detroit. And I ask myself sometimes, is this personal or is this professional? Because I am deriving so much benefit, joy, inspiration, insight, that goes well beyond, I think, what you might expect of a workplace. 

I see this experience at the Davidson Foundation as very much informing my identity and continuing to inform how I spend my time outside of work, but also giving me insight into why I might’ve spent time outside of work the way that I did. 

I mentioned before, until I took this job, I wasn’t conscious that I was living and working a Jewish adjacent life. But part of what this near decade has taught me is that I have, and I can tell you some of those experiences and insights. So I grew up in a town in Southwestern Connecticut, very civically minded, very supportive of artists, liberal-minded thinkers, So unsurprisingly, it was a fairly large population of Jews. I didn’t think twice about the number of bar and bat mitzvahs I went to in seventh grade. Temple Israel was a familiar institution to me. I have realized subsequent to that, how anomalous that might be for someone who might not have ended up at the Davidson Foundation. 

My nuclear family, my parents, my siblings, were not Jewish. I grew up going to the Episcopalian Church. But my closest family members who lived in the next town over were my Uncle Morty and Aunt Betty, and my cousins Rebecca and Sarah. Uncle Morty, when I was growing up, ran the Norwalk JCC. I didn’t think twice that I knew what Hanukkah Gelt was before many people my age might have. And Heads Up, which was the nonprofit I started in DC back in the 90s, some of our earliest funders were Jewish families, Jewish foundations. Again, I wish I appreciated it at the time, but it’s only been here at the Davidson Foundation that I’ve come to see that strain, that strand, that thread that runs through my career and my life and I’m incredibly grateful for it.

Yehuda: Have you ever encountered in your role, I don’t know if you can talk about this, but have you ever encountered resentment that you could discern or annoyance that one of the most powerful Jews in Detroit is not Jewish? 

I’ll give you my own backstory on this. The worst thing I ever experienced in this job was a few years after coming to Hartman, I was basically verbally assaulted at a Federation board meeting by a fellow Jewish professional who basically said to me that Hartman Institute was essentially like a family business and that I was just, he said, you know how like the Saudis sometimes bring in a Texas oil man to do the dirty work? That I was being brought in by the monarchy to do that work and I was like, he actually said that phrase. And I had this window of like, oh my God, you see me in a way that I totally don’t see myself. 

I’m curious, have you ever encountered that kind of hostility of like, you took a space that belongs to us or you’re an outsider, king-making in our community and making these choices. It may be that it was never expressed to you, but I’m curious if it ever came across to you that way or you felt it.

Darin: Yeah, yeah, it’s a good question. I certainly got some quizzical looks and questions like how did you get this job? And there was a mixture I may have heard in that of perhaps professional jealousy, or it may have simply been genuine curiosity. The resentment that you’re sort of describing, I didn’t feel frontally. Did somebody say that? I have to imagine somebody said that, but maybe not directly to me. 

And there may have been perhaps, look, I was insecure about this and there’s an element of that’s still a little bit insecure around that. So there might’ve been some sensitivity, not only is it probably offensive in all traditions to maybe come on that strong in that way. And I’m sorry you had to experience it yourself in such bold fashion, but there may have been some sort of empathy to my insecurity in those early days where they were like, okay, like we’ll support you. We may have questions for you later if you don’t go the right way, but so far it’s worked out.

Yehuda: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Just to be clear, I kind of liked when that happened to me because it was so transparent. You know, it’s like you see, you’re like, you got a punch and you’re like, well, that was actually a good punch. Like, now I see what’s available on the other end. 

I imagine that there are parts of the work that, that, especially because Davidson Foundation operates in, you know, does a lot of civic work, sees itself as responsible for Metro Detroit, that there are those things that feel like a slam dunk, they’re consistent with the work that you did before. 

But on the other extreme, there’s like the Sefaria dinner. I’m like, tell me about what it’s like to be at this, because that’s so inside. It’s so like, we’re going to be responsible for a new version of the Talmud, digitizing version of the Talmud. What was the learning curve to internalizing the importance of the work when it comes to things that don’t look as kind of obvious on their face as being important.

Darin: Yeah. Oh, man. I mean, look, I can’t hide my love for Sefaria. And I described that moment in my early days of working on strategic planning. And I told the board, look, we’re going to take some time. We’re going to not make any big decisions about funding opportunities. We’re going to set up a number of our grants on a little bit of an autopilot while we sort out the questions.

And Josh Foer and Daniel Septimus and Brett called me and a couple of our board members, I was maybe six months in, and Sefaria was just a few years into their experience. And they said, well, we have this opportunity to put Rabbi Steinzalt’s translation of the Talmud online. And I told some of the board members afterwards. I said, darn, like, plan beats no plan, but then there’s a, you know, man plans and God laughs. And this was a man plans, God laughs kind of moment. 

Because look, I had done some work on open data on making sure that things that the Gates Foundation funded in the way of research was publicly available, not behind firewalls. So recognizing even those early months of how important Jewish texts were to Jewish tradition, to Jewish continuity, it felt like a slam dunk, even though it from your standpoint, it might have seemed like not a slam dunk from the start for somebody who was just coming into consciously working in the Jewish community. 

But yeah, there are some things that I still need to better understand and that may be more obvious to some of our board members than me from the get-go, understanding what has been going on in Israel in relationship to its neighbors, in relationship to the diaspora, there’s definitely been a learning curve there, but that’s part of the reason why I have great colleagues that have expertise in this. And I certainly never want to substitute some of the expertise that our board members and family members also bring to these conversations.

Yehuda: So let’s talk a little bit about October 7th, because in some ways it was one of the original prompts for this episode, actually, because we had been tracking, there’s no real data on this yet, but we are tracking in conversation with Leading Edge and a bunch of other organizations that the Jewish workplace is being transformed by October 7th. Massive influx of job applicants, primarily Jews, who are having their own kind of awakening. We have had, I think we’ve hired six new people since October 7th, and every single person in their interview talked about October 7th as an inflection point. And multiple people left non-Jewish communal workplaces to come work for us during this time. 

We have to imagine that there’s gonna be an exodus, in some ways both along political lines, folks who don’t wanna work for the organized Jewish community anymore because it doesn’t like what it stands for, and also from the standpoint of exhaustion. It’s just been war leadership all the time. Barry Finestone wrote about this recently, getting out of the red zone. The red zone’s gonna drive people out. 

I have to imagine that processing October 7th in a Jewish workplace as a non-Jewish employee feels different and strange. And I’m curious, you’ve been to Israel a bunch of times, you fund in Israel, you already have those relationships. So on that level, you know, caring about first order, caring about your staff in Israel is like, that’s easy. But talk to me a little bit about what those first few days kind of felt like from your standpoint. And if you’re able to get on the balcony and witness a little bit of the difference of what you might have been experiencing versus some of your colleagues, I’d be curious to hear about that.

Darin: If I may, it was January of last year, so well before October 7th. I gave a short talk to a small group of Jewish Foundation and Federation executives. And the main point of this talk was that we have visceral connections to place. I think you’ve used this phrase, the epigenetic memory, in your podcasts. 

And the point, though, that I was trying to raise was, as many times as I’ve been to Israel, I feel differently than what I imagine my Jewish friends and colleagues who are on the same trip feel in connection to the place. There is a way that Jews speak to the food, to the land, to the people, that I understand, but I don’t feel. And I compared it though, I’m a family history buff, and DNA tests tell me that I’m 39% Irish. I have 0% Jewish, unfortunately, although my family was delighted that I have a greater percentage of Neanderthal than the average person. They were not surprised. But I’ve been exploring my Irish ancestry, not knowing exactly where they came from in Ireland. But there was a moment I described in the talk where I was riding between Dublin and Belfast and my breath caught, my heart leaped. And I experienced something that I’d never experienced before. And it was that visceral connection to that place, which I learned a decade later is where the McKeevers are actually from in Ireland that I came to see a parallel to perhaps how Jews relate to Israel.

So the main point of this talk last January was, I see you, I understand that experience, but I’m different.

When October 7 happened, I was surprised how viscerally I felt it. And perhaps it’s because I visited so many times. Perhaps it’s because I had colleagues there that I knew were under threat and remain under threat. Perhaps I had a sense of having worked in the Jewish community and my colleagues who were already concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism. And I knew this wouldn’t bode well for the Jewish community here in North America, even as our friends and colleagues were under a very direct and different threat in Israel. But I was genuinely surprised how viscerally I felt it when I woke up that Saturday morning and I read an email from my colleague who works out of Tel Aviv. 

And at the time, the best information was that there were six dead and 200 injured. And of course, those numbers were grossly understated. But it was a difficult weekend. It was a very difficult week going forward. But to borrow the phrase that I think many of us, certainly many leaders learned through COVID, through the murder of George Floyd, through the Ukraine War, we had to put our own oxygen masks on first. That included myself. That included my colleagues in Israel. And we needed to sort through exactly what we were going through and what we might go through. 

So those days were hard, making sure that we supported the team, our grantees, our partners. I pulled the team together first thing Monday morning after sending a couple of emails, both to our board and to the team to make sure they understood my perspective on what they may be reading in the news and how we might go forward. But step by step, I wanted to make sure that we were caring for each other, that we were sorting out some of the significant policy strategy, cultural communications kind of questions. But that was a little bit about the early days.

One of the surprises of those early days was how quickly it felt like we were operating in two different worlds. There was a Jewish world, that ecosystem that was relating to what happened in Israel very differently than the rest of the world. And that surprised me. Many people have written about this and the personal experience, but that was unsettling for me personally.

Yehuda: It was unsettling because you couldn’t, because you didn’t understand it or because you felt like there was something wrong with the gap?

Darin: Both, both, both. I felt like this was a moment of moral clarity. In those early days, there was only one response to that, which was to condemn the attack that Hamas terrorists carried out on that day and to express all empathy and support for the Jewish people and for Israelis who were still under threat in those days. 

And what struck me was, look, at our alma mater, at Harvard, the idea that 31 student groups would sign a letter, I think on October 7th or October 8th, basically saying Israel had it coming. And then a few days later in conversations about sort of secular events coming up, there was such a quickness to move on as if it wasn’t happening. And that was still, as we have today, there were Americans that had been taken hostage, not just Israelis. So it’s still been unsettling for me. I think that there was both a wrongness to how quickly those conversations seem to segment. And I was still trying to wrap my mind around, well, how did we get here?

Yehuda: Yeah, yeah. The insight you shared on the difference between experiencing a place and understanding it versus feeling it is very resonant. I guess I’m gonna only ask you this question because you’re in Detroit. I wouldn’t ask you this if you’re anywhere else, but one of the complicating variables of Detroit in particular is huge population of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, and many of whom have the same visceral relationship to Palestine that Jews have about Israel or a different, but, you know, at least I can identify with it, even if I’m on the other team.

War creates loyalties and you’re in a position, in a unique position, where you’re connected to a foundation that’s gonna express its loyalties to the Jewish people. I’m sure it must be strange and complicated because you’re not merely surrounded by you’re not merely Jewish adjacrnt, just by virtue of being Detroit and being an Irish American, you’re also adjacent to, and now I’m calling you Irish American, I don’t know if that’s how you identify. 

Darin: I contain multitudes, Yehuda.

Yehuda: Yeah, maybe you’ll be, or maybe a better hyphen is Connecticut American. But I’m sure you feel differently about that loyalty question, or you must, than maybe some of your Jewish colleagues who, for whom, like, okay, now that I’m at war, my relationship with my Arab American or Muslim American neighbors feels a little bit more at a remove or tense. Is that unfair to project that, or I’m just curious how you work through any of that.

Darin: It’s interesting, for as much as I’ve thought about it, the word loyalty hasn’t come to mind. So much as solidarity, and maybe you could tease the difference out between loyalty and solidarity, I understand that this is a moment that requires solidarity. I think loyalty lands wrong to me. It seems like solidarity connotes pride and connects, it connotes connection, connotes a sense of wanting to be among. Loyalty suggests a world where there are people on one side or the other in a way that solidarity does not, at least in this moment that we’re talking here. 

Look, it’s hard to have conversations across difference. It’s hard for me sometimes to have conversations with my own family about Israel. And there may not be a moment to work across some of these differences, whether it’s in Southeast Michigan, Connecticut, or Israel for that matter. I think if we can stay in relationship with one another, allowing for people to be confused in this moment, or allowing people to ask questions and not feel attacked for having asked those questions. I go back to what I said at the start. I think this is a moment for leaders to curate debates, to hold arguments. And it may not be possible in this moment, but if we can maintain the hope that we can work across those differences over time, I think we will be better for, we will be living a better society for it.

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean, I guess I don’t like the word loyalty either. I’ve been in a decade-long argument with Donniel Hartman about this, about the value of that term. He loves the term loyalty, loves, loves it. It has the yuckiness that you’re also responding to. On the other hand, it just felt so suggestive that you, when we started this conversation, you were talking about the kind of useful value of neutrality and loyalty, once you’ve decided to no longer be neutral, loyalty is almost like the antithesis of it. So it’s just an interesting thing over the period of time. 

You are now a stakeholder in the Jewish community in a very different way. You can’t claim neutrality in quite the same way anymore. And I’m just testing out what that means to a whole bunch of other relationships and allegiances and alliances.

Darin: Yeah, you know, there’s been a set of words that has occupied my attention over the last, well, some odd years here at the Davidson Foundation, just personally. It’s this experience that I have of being alone and being adjacent and being among and what that actually means. And I still need to think about this idea, but I think of those things as coordinates of identity. And myopic me said, I’ve worked in the Jewish community not being Jewish. I’ve worked in low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods in DC, not being either one of those things. And I thought for a time that what Bryan Stevenson calls getting proximate was a kind of superpower. And over time, I’ve realized that all of us are at various moments alone and adjacent and among. And our identities are fluid. 

And so this loyalty idea also runs up against what I was saying before. I don’t want to be boxed in. I don’t think anybody wants to be boxed in. Yes, show your affiliation, show your allegiances, particularly when solidarity requires it. But I think we contain multitudes, as I said. Walt Whitman was right. And the more that we can see everybody for their individuality, see the individual dignity in people, which is a very Jewish idea, you can tell me if I’m wrong here, but I feel I’m pretty solid ground here. I think that concept is what ultimately will help lead us to having a larger sense of belonging within this ecosystem, quasi-government, industry, whatever you want to call it, but well beyond it.