What's the Deal with those Billboards?
A national organization targets the local unaffiliated.
“There is a lot of sleepy branding out there in the Jewish space.”
JewBelong seeks to connect Jews through advertising.
The Fountain of Youth. The end of the rainbow. The Holy Grail.
The unaffiliated Jew.
The search for this large and elusive demographic vexes every rabbi, Federation director, and board president. A generation ago the seats were full, donations were flowing. Where did they all go?
New York-based JewBelong is one of the latest organizations to get its hands dirty digging into this conundrum. Their strategy? A straight-up ad campaign.
Even though I knew about JewBelong, I still nearly drove off the road when I looked up and saw one of their signs at the intersection of Rainier and Dearborn reading, “Judaism: Come for your girlfriend, stay for the lack of Hell.”
It’s an unusually direct message in a city where people barely even make eye contact and Jews tend to enjoy an under-the-radar existence. This top-of-the-funnel marketing strategy is aimed at bringing in what Gottesman calls disengaged Jews, or DJs for short.
“The reason we are doing billboards is because DJs are very hard to find,” says JewBelong co-founder Archie Gottesman. “They’re not going to be on a Federation email list and they’re not going to be on a synagogue membership list and they’re most likely not going to be sending their kids to Jewish camp.”
Yet they’re everywhere. According to the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s 2014 community study, 32 percent of the area’s 63,400 Jews identify as “Jewish not by religion.” Twenty-six percent are culturally Jewish or secular, and 16 percent are “just Jewish.” Sixty percent of Jews between the ages of 35 and 49 are in interfaith marriages. Over 30 percent never go to synagogue.
JewBelong’s philosophy is to “rebrand” Judaism to appeal to the DJs as well as the J-curious and those with Jewish partners who don’t know where to start.
Gottesman’s background is not in Jewish leadership, but rather marketing. She and Stacy Stuart founded JewBelong after years of working on cheeky advertising for Manhattan Mini Storage. Gottesman considers Judaism “a great product with lousy marketing,” according to her bio.
“There is a lot of sleepy branding out there in the Jewish space,” Gottesman says. “JewBelong is interested in a younger audience, because that’s where the Jewish community is having a particularly challenging time keeping the Jewish community engaged.”
JewBelong is trying to break down one major barrier to entry into Jewish institutions: intimidation. They’ve even coined the term “JewBarrassment” to describe the feeling of anxiety most of us have felt in Jewish situations where we didn’t know what was going on. “So many people write to JewBelong,” Gottesman says. “We get a lot of messages on our social media saying, ‘oh gosh, you know, I’ve been JewBarrassed my whole life and I just didn’t know that there was a word for it.’”
Once DJs find their way to the JewBelong website, they can explore easy-to-understand, mildly snarky guides to major lifecycle events and holidays, which are designed to create minimal JewBarrasment. (For instance, Lag BaOmer and the Omer are categorized under “those other holidays” with the description, “Spiritual renewal for 49 days? Burning man only lasts nine.”) They can also explore “J-ello” pages—“Like a phone book for Jews…but still relevant!”—for a selective list of resources including youth groups, national organizations, and Israel programs.
Notable for an organization geared toward young Jews is JewBelong’s explicit support of Israel and clarity around where anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism connect. A six-minute history of the Jewish State on the website is titled “Today Is Stop Talking Crap About Israel Day,” and an updated version of the Passover 10 plagues lists the blights of anti-Semitism; one of the plagues is academia.
JewBelong’s direct messaging—clean white type on a hot pink background—took a turn from lighthearted cringe to hardcore after the May 2021 Gaza-Israel conflict that many point to as a pivotal and clarifying moment for American Jewish relationships to Judaism and Israel. Earlier this year, two billboards in Berkeley calling out a petition to bar pro-Israel speakers from UC Berkeley’s law school were defaced by anti-Zionist activists. And for the past year or so, JewBelong has been running an aggressive anti-Semitism campaign with ads like, “For a town that loves social issues, you’ve been pretty quiet on antisemitism.”
In Seattle, for now, they’re sticking with gentler messaging. In addition to the Rainier and Dearborn billboard, JewBelong has another on 15th Ave W a little south of Emerson. This one has a picture of bacon and eggs and assures passersby that God is not worried about dietary choices.
The closest thing I can think of to JewBelong’s strategy is Chabad. Even though their philosophies are diametrically opposed, their goals are basically the same: Get Jews back to Judaism by any means possible.
Judaism is “really beautiful. It’s time tested. It’s got really good values,” says Gottesman. “The world is crazy. It’s so hard sometimes. It’s such a complicated world we’re living in that having Jewish values that are your touchstones can be so helpful.”
Gottesman says the site gets around 430,000 unique visitors annually, people who tend to peruse resources around holidays or lifecycle events. Their Instagram, which is populated with a mix of seriousness and East Coast-inflected humor (“If Jews ran the world, would there be so many shows about home repair?”) has 54,000 followers. But there’s no precise way to track who in Seattle will be impacted by a billboard and the corresponding social media campaigns.
“The way that marketing often works is people need to see a message three times or more before it gets into your psyche and then you're like, oh yeah, I see that everywhere,” she says. “No, you didn't really see it everywhere. You saw it on that billboard and then you saw it in your phone and then your friend posted it and then you saw it on her Instagram…. It just makes you think about it.”
JewBelong has no intention of pulling people away from local institutions, but there is no coordinated effort to funnel Seattle-area DJs to any particular organization. It’s just about helping them find meaning, and assuring them that wherever they are on the Jewish journey, they’re doing just fine.
“Community and education and Shabbat, that makes a lot of sense no matter what kind of life you’re leading,” Gottesman says. “I think that those [values] can be lost on people who don’t have a Jewish education. They don’t realize like how beautiful and humanistic and important the Jewish values are. The branding’s confusing.”
Community Announcements
Check out the Seattle Jewish community calendar and the virtual calendar.
This week’s parasha is Matot-Masei.
Candlelighting in Seattle is at 8:45 p.m.
Sign up for the SummeRun & Walk this Sunday, July 16th in Seward Park and support ovarian cancer research. —Melissa Rivkin
The WSJHS is thrilled to be recognized by the Washington Museum Association for this year’s WaMa Award for Excellence with the Outstanding Achievement in Publications for the Family of Strangers: Second Edition. —Lisa Kranseler
Shoutouts
Shoutout to Karen Treiger for keeping women’s readings going. Todah rabah. Thanks so much to Minyan Ohr Chadash for hosting JCRC and Courageous Leadership sessions in your beautiful space. —Linda Clifton
I saw that sign at Rainier and Dearborn and didn't know what to make of it. But, now I know. Thanks for explaining.
I miss the culture and decorum of our old East Coast synagogues - traditional cantorial music, a cappella music, not turning Jewish services into a church with pianos and other instruments.