hat do you do when you get an ‘aha’ moment? How often do ideas pop into your head that get brushed to the side never to be seen again? It can happen to the best of us, so it’s always inspiring when someone chooses to put that thought into action and do something about it.
More than ten years ago, that was Allison Josephs. She got connected to a journalist who was working on an article about the Orthodox Jewish community. The journalist came in with set ideas about what she thought Judaism was, but after speaking with Josephs for three hours, left feeling completely differently from her negative perceptions that were there at the start.
It was this experience that left Josephs thinking about how important it was to change that perception further, and that if she could do so, how much it would impact the kiruv world in the future. “Once people see how beautiful Judaism is, they want to choose it freely,” she says. “The question became, ‘What’s the mechanism? How do you do a worldwide makeover?’”
She set out to take control of the narrative about Orthodox Jews, starting with a YouTube video under the name “Jew in the City.” Her passion for the project only snowballed, and soon, she left her full-time job in kiruv to work on it 100% of the time. “When I started this, I had no business plan or seed money,” Josephs explains. “My husband was in his last year of law school. I sat him down and said, ‘I’m going to have no money for awhile, do you mind if we live off more student loans and credit card?’ He said, ‘Go for it.’”
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