Today is election day in Israel. Elections matter. Who governs matters.
But on a day when everyone is focused on polls and coalitions and who’s up and who’s down, I wanted to step back and share a fascinating conversation I had on my recent trip to Israel, with someone thinking about the biggest questions, the ones that will still be on the table no matter who sits in the Knesset.
Judah Taub is a venture capitalist in Tel Aviv and the author of a new book on what he calls moonshots for Israel: ideas big enough to change the country, and maybe the whole region. Getting water to neighbors who desperately need it. Turning Israel’s defense industry into something five times bigger. And reversing the shrinking of diaspora Jewry, which he argues Israelis should care about way more than they do.
Judah, welcome.
Judah Taub: Thank you.
Noam: Awesome to have you here. Where are we right now? We’re sitting in Tel Aviv and we are at your offices. But where are we historically?
Judah Taub: So we’re sitting inside a templar, which were built by the Germans about 150 years ago. These templars, if you look at pictures and we have them in the entrance of the offices, were built in a certain way mainly to keep the downstairs. All the templars have an underground sort of little floor to keep them relatively cool so that they could fit the barley down there or the wine and it would stay cool throughout the year. In 1948, when the government came over, these are the offices of Israel’s 1948 government. So over the road is where you have still the defense minister sitting together with the head of the IDF. But this once upon a time used to be where the government is.
And if you go around the different Templar buildings and people will know Sorona and what these Templars look like, they say on them what the government did in each of these Templars in 1948. So this particular Templar is where the head of innovation sat in 1948. So that’s why we very much like the idea of sitting here. That’s why we invest in Agritech, Cherry Tomato, I’m joking about that. But like that is the historic sort of place we’re sitting in.
Noam: What is a templar?
Judah Taub: To describe the building is basically four pretty thick walls, which sometimes can make wifi here today a little bit more sort of challenging. And so you have to have a special router and you have basically, I mean, you can see it here, wooden planks, which once upon a time, by the way, this floor didn’t exist. So it was a very tall building. You can still see the ceiling here goes up very tall. Some of the Templars are trying to add actually another floor.
Can see here what the floor is and you can imagine the roof sort of bearing in and what we’re surrounded by is the biggest tech companies in Israel so over there you’ve got Amazon, Facebook, Google, I mean you can literally go around but this small roughly sort of half square mile you can’t touch for historic reasons and that’s where we sit today.
Noam: So, I just find this fascinating. So the Germans were here before
Judah Taub: The Ottomans.
Noam: Yeah but the, but Germans were here. Yeah. They were here. And, and there were even Nazis that were here.
Judah Taub: I think there’s a jump in time between 1850 Ottoman Empire that built these and then…
Noam: Thirties and Forties. Yes. But there really were Germans.
Judah Taub: If there’s a problem with the plumbing, can call up the embassy and say to them we expect you to come and text in.
Noam: Wow, this is very, very fascinating. Okay, but that’s not why we’re here. Why we’re here right now is to talk to you about Israeli society, to talk to you about tech, to talk about defense, to talk about all these different topics. So I want to just, I wanna start off by just, I want you to finish the following sentences. Say five sentences starting with the words I am. You have to think on your toes right now. I am.
Judah Taub: I’m Jewish, I’m Israeli, I’m the husband of Leah, the father of five kids. I live in Jerusalem. I’m proud of all the things I just said.
Noam: Those are good. Those are really, really good. So you are a father, you are a husband, you are Israeli. That’s who you are. So I want to understand, what does it mean to be Israeli to you? Like you already said, I’m Israeli. What does that mean? What does it mean to be Israeli?
Judah Taub: I was born in London and I moved to Israel when I was 10 months old. And that was because I told my parents, right, I’m fed up of London, it’s time to move. All my siblings were actually born in Israel. So I’m the oldest of six and I’m the only one who maybe one day will get at the age of 100 a letter from the king congratulating me on my old age.
On the more serious note, I think the key word is I’m proud to be Israeli. That’s a key part, which, again, I didn’t think about this beforehand, but I did say I’m proud of all of those things. So, for example, I remember when I was in London at a later stage and I was working at a hedge fund, at some point throughout the year I was there, I remember turning to my wife, Leah, and saying, look, we really just want to and should be moving as soon as possible to Israel.
And this wasn’t about antisemitism. We were feeling very comfortable in the Jewish community there. I moved to London after being in the army here. I was an officer for five years. Leah, my wife, is British, she wanted to make aliyah. She was in the middle of her nursing study. So I said, instead of going to Thailand for a year, let’s go to London. What’s the difference? Apparently there is a difference. I was living there. And she wanted to make aliyah. So it wasn’t like it was a hard conversation. But I remember throughout the year, even though I had a great job and really sort of very nice sort of situation in society, I just felt the place for me to be as a Jew, as an Israeli, is in Israel.
And I remember having a conversation with my boss back then, who wasn’t Jewish, and he thought I was negotiating at the beginning about my salary.
Noam: Like leverage.
Judah Taub: Yeah, yeah. I said to him, I’m planning on leaving at the end of the year. And he said, OK. And then afterwards, he came back to me said, by the way, so how much do you want? And I remember saying to him, like, it’s got actually nothing to do with the money. I just want to live in Israel. And everything else, what I’m going to do, what I’m going to study, what I’m going to work at, was secondary. I knew I wanted to live in Israel. And everything else can figure itself out afterwards. And I’m proud of that.
Noam? There’s a a lot to proud for there, but I I wanna like with the understanding of what does it mean to be Israeli. What does this word mean, Israeli? Because it relates to a lot of what you’re doing. What you’re doing is innovation, right? What you’re doing is thinking about tech, what you’re doing is thinking about defense. So I want to go through what Israel was as Israel became known as this thing called the startup nation, right?
But before that, it was building water systems, agriculture, and a defense industry out of necessity. Because there wasn’t another option. Right? We’re surviving, Israelis are surviving no matter what. What does that look like? What do you think it was in Israel’s makeup culturally that turned survival, necessity into invention?
Judah Taub: So I’m not a historian, so I don’t actually know what it was. And even then, I think it would be a bit of a guessing game. What I do think is that we’re at a unique point in time today where Israel has graduated, as you point out, from a point where we have to innovate to survive. Yes, it helps. And we can list a whole variety of existential threats that Israel is facing today. And we can play the Dooms game.
But the reality is if you were to ask any one of the founders of the state of Israel and say, imagine Israel in 80 years’ time, and we were to project the situation we’re in today, I think today, today’s Israel would exceed every single one of their imaginary dream Israel 80 years later. Israel today is, to the best of my knowledge, the 22nd most powerful country from a GDP perspective. I’m putting military aside. If you look at the region, we’re infinitely better placed, again, just economically, militarily than in the past.
And there’s many things we need to improve, many. But like the situation that we’re in today, is a little bit like a startup that is turned into a corporate. And the corporate is big. The corporate has a balance sheet. The corporate has a steady flow of income. The corporate is strong. That is Israel today.
However, Israel’s DNA was also, once upon a time, a startup that knew how to keep reinventing itself and not looking every single time for a small, better step. Something that would make us marginally better tomorrow than we are today.
Israel used to be a state whereby we could reinvent the wheel. Give you an example. I’m imagining the conversation where I’m sitting as the venture capitalist in this room and Eliezer Ben Yehuda walks in and says, I am going to bring back the language of Hebrew. That is something that only the startup DNA of the Jewish people of the Israelis many years ago sort of had. Yes, it sounds impossible. Who’s brought back an ancient language? And we can take a variety of things that Israel did over the last 70, close to 80 years. And these are really big innovations.
And what I’m interested in today and where I spend a lot of my time and the book that I’ve published, and it’s going to come out in English in November, is what are potential moonshots? What are big ideas that could potentially help us not take small step functions but leapfrog, whether it’s in education, whether it’s in water or defense or a whole variety of ideas. But what I’m interested in most at the core of all of these is can we bring back what is, believe, in the core of our DNA, that ability to take sometimes risks, but mainly just think big and say, you know what, we will make this work. And we do. And so that is the part I think that we are being challenged with today and that we can live up to.
Noam: So you wrote this book, Israel’s Potential Twelve Moonshot Ideas, right? Could you give us tell me like two moonshot ideas? Give me, give me one or two.
Judah Taub: Yeah, so the way I thought about it and just to give you some context here, these have to be big. any idea that…
Noam: What’s not a moonshot? Okay, what is a moonshot?
Judah Taub: So the idea of a moonshot came from Kennedy who said we are going to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard. And the fact that the US went to the moon had a ripple effect literally throughout society and technology and geopolitics and…
Noam: You’re saying that Americans actually landed on the moon?
Judah Taub: That is where the term moonshot comes from. kidding.
Noam: I’m kidding, there’s conspiracy theories that they didn’t actually go to the moon. But don’t it’s by the way, we’re not conspiratorial thinkers here, so don’t worry about it. Americans did land on the moon. It happened. It happened. And that is where the history of the moonshot idea comes from. JFK sending them to the moon because they were there. Don’t tell it.
Judah Taub: The flag wasn’t. The point is that is where it comes from and that is the type of spirit that nations, or sometimes we see this in startups, can really change sort of a society or sector etc. And so the way I thought about this is what types of ideas could be worth to the state of Israel at least a hundred billion dollars or an equivalent of a hundred billion dollars or more. And for a state where the GDP is only six hundred billion, this is a big, big, big ideas. Ideas that we came up with that were only two or three billion.
Noam: So tell me before you tell me the the moonshot ideas, what are examples of things that are not moonshot ideas but are big ideas? Right.
Judah Taub: So Jerusalem is really struggling to balance its budget, as an example. And that’s a real issue. It’s the capital. If you look at the deficit, it’s literally increasing for the capital, where a million people out of close to about 10 live. And there’s a variety of ideas that we came up with that could really reverse that for Jerusalem. But when push comes to shove, it’s only about 2.4 billion shekels a year, with the ideas that we came up with to the municipality, they’re actually looking into a variety of them. These could be really beneficial, but for the book and for the projects that we want to talk about at a national and international stage, not big enough.
Noam: Got it. Got it. So that’s not big enough, two point four billion dollars Jerusalem. Give me a couple of examples of moonshot ideas.
Judah Taub: So category one, there’s a variety of things that Israel is really good at, but could actually be dramatically better. So for example, the defense ecosystem in Israel. Defense ecosystem in Israel is one that employs 100,000 individuals, slightly more, brings in roughly $20 billion a year. And for defense, okay, for the defense of the people of Israel is a crucial part.
There’s a number of changes that can be made that will make that 20 billion grow within five to seven years to 100. That means in practice, the state of Israel will be immensely more wealthy from a geopolitical perspective. That gives you a lot of power behind closed doors. The fact that Germany’s using the Iron Dome, the fact that you’re selling equipment to India gives you a lot of power behind closed doors. And finally, and maybe the most importantly, it will mean that Israelis, whether they’re the paratroopers or Golani, Givati, etc, when they’re going into battle, will have the best equipment at a much cheaper price point. So there’s a variety of structural things that we’re recommending. Yesterday I was at the IDF talking about these in more practical terms. But that’s a huge moonshot if that can happen.
Another example of something that we’re already good at but could be much better in is water. Israel is the only country in the region and possibly the world, because it depends how you measure, where we are both able to produce water, manufacture water. I’m using the word manufacture.
Noam: What does that mean? You manufacture water? What?
Judah Taub: What does that mean? Because that’s how water is made today.
Yeah, but the reality is the vast majority of the water that we drink today, definitely in Israel and increasingly in Western countries, comes from desalination, where if you look at the plants, and you can go and visit some of them literally maybe 45 minutes from here, you will see they are big factories where there is an input, which is seawater. There is a second input, which is electricity, and that’s the key variable here. And the output after those two inputs and the variety of different processes along the way, is drinking water.
And Israel is the best country in the world, there’s a number of books that have been written on this, I think the best one is Let There Be Water, but like there’s a few others as well, where they talk about the process of how you do that. And Israel, especially over the last 15 years, has become a global leader in this technology.
And there is a second component to that, which is that our neighbors in the region are struggling more than ever before, especially Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Those three countries, if you look at the supply of water and the demand for water, the gap between those two graphs has grown over the last decade to the largest gap ever. They need water. And we have it. How much do we have? How much water is in the Mediterranean Sea. We can literally manufacture as much water as we want. There’s a cost for it, etc.
And then the last piece of the puzzle, which is interesting, is that the cost, because of solar and another few factors, for Israel manufacturing water, has come down to a point where we can actually sell it to them at a profit.
Israel sells to Jordan water at a discount for historic reasons. And Jordan is desperate for that water. And Israel currently is holding back on the negotiations and we’re thinking about it and we can get into all those details. But the point is, if going back to the moonshots, I am suggesting we should be doing this on a huge scale.
Imagine the scenario where Damascus knows that its water is coming from Israel and they need the water and we can provide it. And if you look at the map, one of the closest ways for Damascus to get to the sea is by the way through Israel. So there’s a lot of logic to this as well. This couldn’t have happened 10 years ago. It couldn’t have happened 50 years ago for different reasons. And now at this point in time where if we take the initiative with this sort of moonshot hat, big ideas, this could change not only the state of Israel but the entire region.
Noam: Why does Israel have the ability to solve the water crisis? But Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon don’t. Is it something that’s geographic? Is it something that’s demographic? Is it something cultural? Could you explain, what’s the reason?
Judah Taub: Yes, there’s different answers for Lebanon, category one, and Syria and Jordan, category two. So you need two things to be able to do this. The first is you need pretty good cutting edge technology. And that is something that Israel is literally at the forefront. Okay, it’s not so simple to do. If you can look up how water is desalinated, it sounds pretty easy. But to actually do this at scale at a certain price point without a variety of sort of leakage and it’s not so easy, Israel is at the cutting edge of this. One.
Noam: So one is technology.
Judah Taub: Yes. And two is you still need water. You need access to seawater. So Lebanon, as we know, is on the sea. Jordan doesn’t have that access, especially in certain very populated areas. The closest place that they could get to the water is through Israel and to the Mediterranean. And Syria is obviously a very big country, so some areas are close, above Lebanon, to water. But Damascus, which is the capital and the heart of the country, is far lower down. And so Damascus’s closest place to get to the water is either over an extraordinary terrain through Lebanon which would sound nuts, they don’t have water themselves and to the Mediterranean that way. Or through Israel which is really not that far where literally if you do a map and I did this in the book and colored it of who has water how much it cost them you see the shade change between the border of Syria and Israel in the strongest contrast that you could imagine.
Noam: So it’s technology and geography. Why should Israel get water to these different countries? Do you, are you passionate about this because it does something for world peace? Are you doing it because, do you think it’s important because this is one of the goals of what it means to be Israeli, to actually not just care about your own nine to ten million people, but you care about your neighbors? Is it because of hasbara, as some people might think? Like what would be the reason? Hasbara meaning like, look Israel’s not so bad to Palestinians, let’s say, Israel does great things for the world. Check this out. Is that what’s the reason that you think it’s important for Israel to help other countries get water and two of those three countries don’t technically have peace with Israel?
Judah Taub: Yes, so I think there’s three reasons.
The first one is I do believe that it is in Israel’s interest to help its neighbouring countries. I could argue this both from a moral perspective, if people are dying of thirst, providing them with water is a good thing. And two, we also know that when the economic situation in certain areas is really bad, that typically helps terrorist organizations and bad ideas to foster. So you could take this reason or this reason, but I think it’s in our interest as Israelis and as Jewish people to help our neighbors. One.
Two, I think that from a defence security perspective, it’s one of the wisest investments we can make. There is an argument against Israel giving Jordan water. The cost for Israel to give Jordan water, because the terms were negotiated a long time ago, is roughly 50 million shekel a year.
50 million shekel is not a small number for the Department of Water. But if you were to knock on the door of the Chief of Staff of the IDF and say to him, is it worth 50 million that the entire Jordanese border knows that at any given point in time you can turn off the water? If you choose to, he will say, that or three tanks, I will take that any day of the week. So I think from a security perspective, the more we can make people and our neighbors depend on us, it’s in our interest.
And finally, I think we could make a profit. I think it will increase our national resilience as well, internally, that we always have excess water, that we export what we don’t need.
Noam: Great answers. I want to understand, let’s go through, I know you’re not a historian, but I want to go through, just get an understanding. You know, Israeli society, you mentioned that 80 years ago the founders of the new state of Israel would be so surprised and so positively shocked about the successes of Israeli society.
But initially it was broadly speaking a kibbutz society. It was, I mean, even though the vast majority of people did not live in kibbutzim, if when you look back, if you look at if you say forties and fifties and early sixties Israel, what’s the image that the vast majority of people have? The image that vast majority of people have is the kibbutz, is the commune, is everyone being together in a bit of a socialist society.
In the 70s, Menachem Begin ends up winning. And over time in the 80s and 90s, society in Israel moves from this socialist kibbutz mentality to what people call a startup mentality. What do you see as the future of Israeli society? Do you think it goes from kibbutz to startup to what?
Judah Taub: So I don’t know. It’s worth saying that. I think the challenge for Israel, and I think it’s a challenge for most countries in the world, is to find the right balance between what I will call Western thinking and Eastern thinking. So in the East, you have communal values, family values, and a lot of positives on we all are under the same sort of, I don’t know, challenges together, we’re carrying the alunka together, and we’re somehow sort of very, very communal.
Noam: The alunka means the stretcher.
Judah Taub: I was trying to think of the translation.
Noam: Meaning it’s it’s more groupish it’s more national it’s more tribal.
Judah Taub: It’s more like we’re we’re we’re in this together, collaborative. And in a world where you feel the disparities, the inequality is just growing. I live in Jerusalem and I take the train every day to Tel Aviv.
Noam: How long does it take you? One way.
Judah Taub: I mean the train takes about 30 minutes. It’s getting to the train station that sometimes you can be stuck in traffic. But like you feel the gaps and it’s not just between cities, it’s within cities. So the real challenge that sometimes the Eastern thinking brings to the table is how you do that.
At the same time, we know that Western thinking allows for competition in a way that allows startups to succeed, technology, solutions and things to thrive. So the question is how do you balance these two? And Israel geographically is in the middle. And so the question for us is, can we somehow keep this unbelievable engine of startup nation innovation that has really taken Israel to new heights on one hand and at the same time make sure that society, or least parts of society, doesn’t fall behind. And I think that is at the heart of Israel’s challenge for the next.
Noam: So it’s I mean so interesting you said I had one I think one of the top, if not the top Israeli philosophers on my podcast, named Micha Goodman, and he spoke about the dialectic between Eastern and Western thinking, and he said the unique aspect of Israeli society is that Israel has the best of individualism and the best of collectivism. And if you merge individualism with collectivism, it’s essentially exactly like what you are saying, then that becomes a unique Israeli identity as opposed to other societies.
Like he said, Persian society has more binary thinking because they they come from Zoroastrianism initially which had a god of good and a god of evil Judaism has ethical monotheism and the concept is that there’s east and there’s west and Israel exactly you’re saying merges the two and and that might be the next segment of Israeli society. So that’ll be very very interesting to see.
But I know that you don’t just care about Israeli society. You also care a lot about the Jewish world writ large like, you care so much about Jewish thinking. And there were some great rabbis, great scholars, who used a provocative term, which you also used to me before we started recording. They said that after the Holocaust, they used this term called the silent Holocaust.
There’s a rabbi named Rabbi Norman Lamm who said that he, talking in American society, that when there are so many Jewish people that are choosing to not marry Jewish, what they are essentially doing is they’re choosing to not have Jewish grandchildren. And there’s this ridiculous statistic that I heard. There are between 5.7 to 7 million Jews in the United States of America. Okay? But there are 20 million people that have Jewish grandparents in America.
Meaning in the 1920s and 1930s, there are 20 million people that have Jewish grandparents. Like right now, going back in time 100 years or whatever. When I heard that statistic, I was like, wow, 20 million Americans have people who in the 1920s, 1930s have an ancestor who’s Jewish? That is wild to think about. So I wanna know.
So the term that they called it the term that they called it is the silent holocaust, where in the non Orthodox world right now, 72% percent of non Orthodox Jews in America are choosing to not marry Jewish. Now and I’m not making claim about intermarriage or not right now. I think it’s a very complicated topic. I’m actually someone that doesn’t fight intermarriage. I’m much more interested in making the Jewish education and Jewish ecosystem interesting and compelling for people. But I know you care a lot about Jewish education. A lot about Jewish education, because you were talking to me about this silent Holocaust. So wanted you to say a little bit more about what is this very controversial term. And also what you think is there a moonshot to solve this issue, to solve this issue.
Judah Taub: So I classify this as one of the ideas where if we don’t act soon, so if water and defense were things that we’re already good at in Israel, we could potentially be much better at. This idea of the diaspora Jewry and the silent Holocaust is an idea that if we don’t act soon, we will miss the window of opportunity. So it’s a different bracket of sort of moonshot ideas.
Noam: Is this one of your twelve?
Judah Taub: Yes. And I also talk about why I think Israelis should be much more aware of this and care deeply about it. And it comes down to peoplehood and not just–
Noam: What is peoplehood?
Judah Taub: I think we are a nation. So I probably am a little bit more aware of this because I grew, was born abroad. So I’m more aware of diaspora Jew than an Israeli that was born in Israel and grew up and just lived their whole lives in Israel. My wife made aliyah not so long ago. But I think Jews have a intertwined future, whether you live in one part of the world and another. And I think just like Jews on October 7th abroad, even though they had nothing to do with what happened, suddenly felt this influences me, whether it does or doesn’t, we can discuss, but they, you feel. I mean, I think that there was a real awakening.
Noam: Visceral, something in turn like you feel it. Yeah. They called the October 8th Jews. They came up with a term for it.
Judah Taub: I think there is a similar feeling that is felt and sometimes should be felt more, but we’re just not as used to it the other way around. And what is happening right now in diaspora Jewry is no less than, and the word Holocaust is very scary, but it is a dramatic shrinkage of the Jewish diaspora people.
So to put some stats around this. So right now in the diaspora, there’s roughly 7.3 million Jews that are non-Orthodox. That’s the vast majority. And the Orthodox is a small segment of that. That 7.3, the vast majority of them are in North America and predominantly in America, but also in Canada as well. But the 7.3 that I just mentioned, over the next 100 years on the current sort of demographics trends will decrease to 1 million.
Noam: How many years within how many
Judah Taub: And over the next 30 years, from 7.3 to 1, within 100 years. From 7.3 to 4, within 35 years. These numbers are just dropping at an accelerating rate. It’s scary. And the saddest part of it is that we know what the cure is. Okay, so there’s been study after study, and it’s maybe worth mentioning a few examples from recent years where they can see that those who send their kids to Jewish schools or Jewish summer camps or live within a Jewish community are far more likely, those three things, far more likely to have Jewish children and Jewish grandchildren. We know that those are the medicine, if you want, to what we’re seeing as the demographic shrinkage. But they are slowly being priced out. It’s just becoming too expensive.
Noam: So your thesis is that if we want more non-Orthodox Jewish people to stay Jewish and to be part of the Jewish people, to have a stake in the future, in the destiny, the fate of the Jewish people.
You have to be part of a Jewish ecosystem. And being part of a Jewish ecosystem means Jewish day school, Jewish camp, Jewish engagement. And if you don’t have and the reason that a lot of people are not engaging in that ecosystem is because of cost. Is that the thing?
Judah Taub: Yeah, I’ll just double-click on that. You don’t have to. There are those who succeed even though they have none of those three, and there’s those who don’t succeed even though they have all of the three. But when you look at the statistics that going through this, we did a lot of work on this, and we share a decent amount of this.
Noam: But who’s we?
Judah Taub: We had a whole team of this last year that came in and collected literally swaths of data. But you could literally see that these are the three variables that have the biggest effect on the output. And I’ll make another sort of two quick comments here.
The first one is, it’s not that we’re guessing this. Okay, there’s been a number of studies in recent years where, I’ll give an example, in Toronto, they came along and said, you know what, let’s test this thesis. And they came along and said, we’re going to drop the cost of Jewish education as an example. We’ve done this in a few places, in Seattle and San Francisco. We’ve seen this happen in summer camps, etc. But they said let’s drop the cost and see if the enrollment increases. Who knows? Maybe it’s got nothing to do with this. We’re not here to tell people you must be Jewish even though they say we don’t want to go to a Jewish school anyway. The question is are there people out there who want to send their kids to Jewish schools, who want their grandchildren to stay Jewish but are being priced out of being Jewish?
We’re not saying you mustn’t intermarry and they say, we want to intermarry. That’s not the debate here. The debate is if people want to stay Jewish, are they being priced out? And what you saw in these studies in Toronto, Seattle, San Francisco, is that when they dropped the cost enough, and we can talk about the different tweaks that they did and how they’ve done it in quite a smart way, so I’m giving a lot of credit to them, is they saw the enrollment increase. And not just increase by 10%, it is close to doubled, close to doubled.
And not only that, they saw that once they enrolled in the school, the chances that they carried on staying within the school even later continued. The chances that they sent the kid to the summer camps increased. And the domino or the network effect just continued afterwards.
So I think it’s not so much a thesis, it’s more a question of, we know what the challenge is, we know what the cure is, and can we, putting it in American terms, step up to the plate and take this head on?
And then the final piece I’d say is part of the study that we did is we tried to estimate the cost per Jew to try and reverse this trend and make it so you’re not going to make it reverse in 2030 because it takes time because it’s demographics. But could you start reversing this trend over the course of hundred years? Would you see the belly of the graphs roughly in 25 years start turning up, etc? And what was interesting is, there are huge economics for scale, meaning the bigger the organization thinks, the bigger your mindset is, the more Jews you’re trying to cover, the more the cost per Jew comes down.
So if we want to reverse this just in Toronto, the cost per Jew is going to be much higher than if we think in terms of moonshot thinking, the entire diaspora Jewry. And the cost for the entire diaspora Jewry in, I would call it, Jewish philanthropy terms is not as high because today, thankfully, we as a Jewish people are at the point in history where we are the wealthiest we have ever been. There are more Jewish billionaires and nominal, whatever you, than ever before. There’s more dollars going. The question is, can we step up to the plate and get our act together? Because the prize is reversing a trend from 7.3 to 1 million Jews over the course of the next 100 years.
Noam: What is that number?
Judah Taub: The cost? So we estimate it depends on the variety of variables. I mean, just to give a tiny bit of insight. So are you allowing people to only penny sort of up to 10% of their family income or 15% of their annual income? Are you doing summer camps as well and to what discount? But it’s somewhere between if you were able to raise 11 billion to 18 billion, that would cover Jewish diaspora Jewry indefinitely.
Meaning you would be able to take $440 to $600 million of that a year because that’s the way these nonprofits work. You end up saying it will grow at an inflationary rate. You take a piece out. If you could raise that money some more and put it to work, that will solve this problem indefinitely. Meaning you will never need to raise a
Noam: Meaning, the cost will go from what to the what for like Jewish day school to Jewish camp?
Judah Taub: So the way they did it in a smarter way, because there’s two ways to do this, OK? Big picture. One of them is just reducing the cost. So instead of paying $100, you now pay $80. And they tried that, and they saw that there was a reversal. There’s another way of doing it. It’s saying, we’re not trying to help the billionaire reduce the cost for them. And sometimes there’s certain Jews who really are like teachers or making smaller wages, that reducing it from $100 to $80 is not enough. So the way they priced it is as they said, we want to make sure that you can send your kids to Jewish school. So you as a family will not be paying more than X percent of your family income to send your kids to school. And that’s between 10 and 15 percent, the two different numbers that they played with. But as long as you’re only paying, and it still could be a big number, let’s say 15 percent, 15 percent of your annual family income to Jewish education, we will see a reversal of this number.
Noam: It’s interesting because this is part of the Jewish DNA of this innovation. We have great sages like Shimon ben Shetach and Yehoshua ben Gamla in the 2300, 2200 years ago and 2000 years ago, who came up with these innovative methods to make sure that way before universal education was something that was a right for human beings.
Ben Gamla came up with this idea in the first century saying we can’t just have the aristocrats, the wealthy, be able to educate their children or bring them to Jerusalem to educate their children. We have to make sure that every single child, well, then it was sons, to be, to be honest and fair, but every single son, every single boy at that point in time, 2000 years ago, should get a Jewish education. Period.
Judah Taub: So as part of researching for this moonshot, I sat a decent amount of time with a professor called Zvi Eckstein, who teaches in IDC, and wrote a book called The Chosen Few. And his thesis is that same period of time, roughly 66 CE, he said, because of the cost back then of Jewish education, the number of Jews in the world decreased dramatically.
Noam: Wow.
Judah Taub: So he has this whole thesis, which I’ll summarize in 60 seconds. But what he says is that a Jewish family predominantly worked as farmers. That’s what everyone did back then, send your son to study, you had to basically give up on the labor of having somebody else working in the field. So every family had to make a decision, are you going to have a talmid chacham, sage, or are you going to have a worker of the land and that is the term which is used in the Mishnah all the time? And he said, so you had to pick, are you giving up on according to–
Noam: That’s where the term am haaretz comes from. They’re a person of the land.
Judah Taub: Yes, when they say it in the Mishnah, they mean somebody who doesn’t know anything. Somebody who can’t trust, you can’t eat in their house, they don’t know what they’re.. But he says, am haaretz, the work of the land, means that the family prioritized having the extra set of hands and labor in the field. And because of that, according to the speaker, the number of Jews in the world over that period of time decreased from 5.5 million down to 1.1, while the number of people in the world continue to increase. So I mean, again, I’m not here to sort of refute or stand up for Zvi, but I think it’s a very interesting and very heavily researched piece. But we are now, 2000 years later, just under, going through a very similar process again.
Noam: That’s wild. Now my last question for you. My last question for you is why do you care about this? You are Israeli. What does this have to do with Israel? What is Israeli society and the peoples behind us right now? What does it matter to them? They have to feed their families, they have to, you know, safe, they have to succeed in their lives, they have to chill on the Tel Aviv beach. Why do they care? People sitting behind us right now, why do you care? Right now what does it matter to you what world Jewry does? What is it, what does it have anything to do with Israeli society? What does it have anything to do with Israel?
Judah Taub: So you asked me at the beginning five questions of how I define myself and one of them I think was a proud Jew. And I think both Israelis and Jewish people around the world feel and understand that at the end of the day, even though we are a tiny minority in the world, we at the end of the day are a people. And as I said earlier, you saw this on October 7th, but I don’t think it is just then. If you ask Omri Kaspi, the basketball player, he used to go around different states playing for the NBA and he knew, it doesn’t matter which state I show up in, I’m an Israeli Jew, and there will be communities there who will host me for Shabbat or just during the week. And we see this time and time again. I spent a little bit of time in Boston as a child. I spent a bit of time afterwards when I was studying at Wharton in Philadelphia. And you feel this am, peoplehood.
And I think today we’re in a position where there’s a lot of things that Israel and Israelis can learn from the way diaspora Jews conduct themselves and their businesses. There’s a lot of learnings from us that we can take from there. But at the same time, there’s certain aspects where if we can, we should be trying to help as well. And that is maybe an or lagoim on how we treat each other as a people. light to the nation. But I feel this very much. I think it’s a core part of being Jewish.
Noam: Judah, thank you so much for joining me on Unpacking Israeli History. Been a real pleasure being in conversation with you.
Judah Taub: Thank you very much.