Blog


The site offers the Jewish community’s only blog focusing on leadership. With posts from top minds in the Jewish world, the CLI blog is designed to challenge and inspire you. Take home the ideas raised in the blog. Talk about them over dinner. Meditate on them before sleep. Send them to others to get their responses. CLI aims to spark conversation.

Through its Leadership Blog, CLI offers perspectives from its own professional leadership, from popular vibrant voices in the Jewish communal world and from voices that have yet to gain access to the public ear. For years, the Jewish world has struggled with the “leadership challenge.” What is it? Why do we not have enough of it? Where can we get more? The Leadership Blog is designed to intentionally wrestle with this elusive, poignant, and vital topic.

CLI’s blog is not to be a Web 2.0 web site in the classic sense. Rather it allows the public limited access to the site where it can respond and express opinions. However, CLI will protect the tone of dialogue on its web site and will learn in real time how to maintain values-based intelligence with edge. All this will be inspired by the 2,000 year old statement in the Talmud (Eruvin 13b) that “both these and those are words of a living God.”



Living Mythical Lives
By Yonatan Gordis, On 5/12/08 2:06 PM


My mother’s father, Meyer Cohen, was something of a mythical character in our lives. Born (apparently) in Kiev in 1890, he was already in his 20’s when he immigrated to the United States. Married to Nechama (Nellie) Goldin in his 30’s, he was never much of a career man. He sold...



For the Love of Dave
By Yonatan Gordis, On 2/5/08 4:55 PM


When Dave Burnett, a 2005 recipient of the Charlie Award, a participant in ROI and Leading Up North and a dear member of our CLI family died in a tragic hiking accident on a Jordanian hillside two weeks ago, the light in our lives dimmed as if the grid of Jewish leadership had...



Community Wrestling
By Yonatan Gordis, On 11/22/07 3:37 PM


Two women in their 20's were arguing. Both grew up in the Orthodox world, and each, to a different extent, still identifies with it.

"How can I continue to remain part of a movement where the acts of individuals are...


Europe Rising
By Yonatan Gordis, On 10/25/07 10:14 AM


The past week has found me on what could be branded as an inspirational tour of Jewish Europe. My first stop was Stockholm where I visited Paideia the foremost pluralistic institute of Jewish studies in Europe. My meeting with Paideia's...



The Bridge of Babel or Harmonizing from The Conversation
By Yonatan Gordis, On 10/14/07 6:15 PM


Blogging from The Conversation 2007. Approximately sixty Jewish leaders from various walks of life (non-profit, business, media, music, and more) gather...