God Is in the Crowd ― Twenty-first-century Judaism

Part call to action and part riveting personal story, an original proposal for discovering relevance in Judaism and ensuring its survival from a pioneering social activist and Harvard MBA business leader who served as a fighter in the Israel Air Force.

God Is in the Crowd is an original and provocative blueprint for Judaism in the 21st century, told through the lens of Keinan's unusual personal story. Keinan's analysis of the threat to Jewish continuity is sobering: as Jewry has become concentrated in just two parts of the world, America and Israel, the Jewish people has lost the subtle code of governance that made Judaism relevant in the Diaspora. This "code," as Keinan explains it, is a derivative of Francis Galton's wisdom of crowds (aka swarm intelligence or collective intelligence). Keinan argues forcefully that the science of crowd wisdom has played a key role in Jewish survival over the centuries and must be resurrected now, since the alternative is the extinction of the Jews. Born to a secular Jewish family in Florida, Keinan's interest in Judaism was piqued by a Christian minister at Exeter. That interest took him down an unlikely path to becoming a fighter pilot in the Israel Air Force. Through the prism of his own dramatic personal story and the lessons he learned from his professional life, Keinan embarks on an investigation of the core values of Judaism in the twenty-first century, and looks to the relationship between American and Israeli Jews to enrich world Jewry in a post-Diaspora age. God Is in the Crowd presents an innovative plan in which the wisdom of the Jewish crowd is harnessed to endow Judaism with new purpose and ensure its survival.

TAL KEINAN is an American-born entrepreneur and social activist. He is the co-founder of Clarity Capital, an asset-management firm with offices in New York and Tel Aviv, and Chairman of Koret Israel Economic Development Fund, Israel's largest non-profit lender to small and micro-businesses. Keinan is one of the handful of new immigrants in Israel's history who graduated from Israel's Air Force Academy; he served as a fighter pilot in the Israel Air Force for a total of eighteen years, including reserve service. Keinan is active in a number of social causes in Israel and in the Jewish world and sits on the Boards of Directors of the Steinhardt Foundation and the Heseg Fund. Tal is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and Chairman of the YPO Intercontinental Chapter. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Tel Aviv University and a Masters Degree in Business Administration from Harvard Business School. Tal and his wife, Amber, have three daughters.