Orienteering

Archival research resembles a hiking trip. You start out the hike with a path you decided to follow based on some known information: distance, incline, degree of difficulty. The first few miles you manage to keep yourself oriented to the path as rendered on your map. There are clear cairns, or trail markers, that keep you from wandering astray. At some point, though, you come to the intersection of two trails, or the trail markers become obscured, and you can no longer tell if you're going north or south, east or west. Experienced hikers can figure it out quickly and get back on the trail, but if you're not so good at reading a map you end up standing there, looking left and right, unsure of whether you should forge on or backtrack. You wonder--what will happen if I leave this path? Will I wander off so far that I can't find my way back to this point, or will this be a productive detour that leads me past some beautiful nature stuff that I didn't even know was there?

If the dissertation prospectus is my map, and the historical narrative (the history of JCCs) is my trail, I feel like I'm standing in the middle of the woods completely disoriented. Up until now, this path was all about children--more specifically, how Jewish social workers in JCCs tried to prevent delinquency and promote conformity and "adjustment" to an American-Jewish identity. Moreover, I presumed these kids were secular or Reform Jews. As I've read through historical records from urban JCCs in the 1960s-70s, though, that path has become less clear. Somehow, I've found myself on an intersecting trail, one that runs somewhat parallel to the first but has its own distinct features--Jewish Senior Citizens and Orthodox Jews! 

I'm not sure why I didn't foresee this change of direction. Youth culture and Conservative Judaism moved out to the suburbs after WWII, leaving behind an older and more observant Jewish community. JCCs were increasingly called upon to deliver services to senior citizens, despite their long history of being a youth-centric institution. Most young Jews in the city, however, were Orthodox. The JCCs, which espoused pluralism, had often come into conflict with the Orthodox community. Most of their children went to Yeshivas, and parents found alternative leisure spaces for them rather than have them exposed to non-observant Jews, or God forbid to non Jews! By the '70s, though, the JCC felt pressured to cater to Orthodox families. Demographic changes thus had a big influence on the evolution of the JCC. 

The other big influence that I did not foresee when plotting out the prospectus was how economic recession in the 1970s would influence the JCCs' embrace of programming for Senior citizens. 

In New York, for example, the municipal government provided funding to JCCs for service programs dedicated to improving the quality of life of older​ adults. These ranged from subsidized lunches to tenant advocacy to housekeeping assistance to transportation. Urban JCCs became multi-generational or family centers during these years because this funding filled budget shortfalls, and because serving older Jews provided a new justification for their existence after the departure of young families and children from the city. 

To return to my tired hiking analogy, I'm currently sitting on a log eating a PB and J while I try to decide the direction in which  I should trek. ​It's scary to wander away from the narrative I outlined in my prospectus, but I also get the feeling that the view will be better if I follow the money... And the old people.

PIT-EWR-LGA-PIT

There are many elements of dissertation writing that gut your self confidence and leave you flailing, but there are also moments when you witness progress and feel really pumped and good about yourself. I literally brush my shoulder off when this happens. Even when I'm alone, at home, disheveled, and there is absolutely nothing swag about me. It's my academic humble brag. Oh, I just finished taking notes on thousands of pages of documents? Aint no thang. 

Amidst the swirling uncertainty of the first weeks of working on the dissertation, the one reliable confidence fix I regularly got was the realization (and re-realization, and re-re-realization) that I already knew A LOT about my project. If I made one good decision in graduate school, it was to continue working on the same topic I researched for my mandatory, year-long research seminar. The semester after the end of that course, I continued exploring the topic with my advisor in an independent reading course. I based the dissertation on the two years of work I had already done. 

So, even when I had no clue what I was ABDoing, I could open up my laptop and celebrate. I already had SO MANY DOCUMENTS! Better yet, I had a really good idea of where I could find the rest of the documents I needed! The catch was that they were all in New York, and my home, my friends, and my partner were all in Pittsburgh. I had to figure out whether I wanted to pick up and move to New York for the academic year--I have fellowships for both semesters this year and do not have to be in Pittsburgh to teach--or whether I would rather travel back and forth between the two cities.

Ultimately, travel won out--in addition to really liking my partner, it was going to be a huge burden on our finances to maintain two separate homes. So, in the last five months I have been to New York for a week in June, two weeks in August, and a week in September. On Sunday, I head back for another week! While I am quite sick of airports at this point, each of these trips have been incredibly productive. Next week I will break down the process of archival research into more detail, but for now I will discuss just a few of the great historical documents I found during these trips.

In June, the Executive Director of the YM-YWHA very graciously allowed to make copies of the minutes from the Board of Directors meetings between 1960 and 1980. These valuable sources have provided an excellent overview of the major issues that the Y's leadership considered over these decades. In August I conducted an extensive survey of the Jewish Welfare Board records. This organization served as the leader or guide of the JCC movement for most of the twentieth century. I found materials ranging from conference presentations about JCC's relationship with synagogues to surveys of local communities trying to evaluate the number of Jews living in the area. I was especially excited to find many documents relating to the JWB's concerns about the Urban Crisis. In September, I returned to look at these materials more thoroughly. 

In the interim, I've organized all of these documents into a giant database and I'm slowly making my way through it. I've taken thorough notes on the growth of New York City's senior citizen population and it's Orthodox Jewish community over the 1950s and 1960s. I've also read a lot of materials that discuss tension between JCCs and synagogues. And luckily, I've also found a lot of what I'm looking for: discussions between leaders about how the JCCs should react to the changing demographics--both by race and class--during the urban crisis. 

Reading these documents has shown me that, while many of the arguments that I laid out in the prospectus were spot-on, the history was much more complicated than I initially thought. No surprise, there, but it's certainly a challenge to reconcile my preconceptions with the reality, and I feel disoriented. More on that tomorrow.

Ground Zero

This post begins a three-part series describing my dissertation project. Today I will lay out the study as originally proposed. Tomorrow I will discuss the research I have accomplished so far. On Friday, I will post some reflections on how the project has evolved and changed since its inception. Change over time being, of course, an historian's primary interest, both in the distant past and the immediate, personal present.

I recently re-read the abstract I wrote before I defended my dissertation prospectus. My department requires that the abstract be circulated to faculty and graduate students in the email announcing the defense. I distinctly recall finishing one of the last drafts of the prospectus and absolutely dreading the task of writing the abstract. I also remember that, once I sucked it up and forced myself to sit back down at the computer, writing it was a loathsome, tedious experience that yielded an unsatisfactory product. 

The best part about the whole "ordeal" was that it did not matter; no one cares about the abstract for a document that by its very nature is prospective. Five months later, however, when I read this overstuffed paragraph I do find it instructive. It's a testament to the ambition of the project. I really wanted--hell, I still want--to tell a thoughtful story with contemporary relevance, national scope, and valuable implications for urban leadership. It's also evidence of my determination; I stubbornly jammed in every element and angle that I determined was important. The abstract talks about Jewish identity, professionalization theory, spatial politics, demographic transition, intra-religious tension, and ethnic conflict over three decades in three cities, and maps all of this onto the history of one institution!

Here's the basic premise: Jewish communities in large urban neighborhoods began to change after WWII, for a variety of structural reasons. Demographic changes pushed Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) in these neighborhoods to reevaluate their membership policies. Executives, Boards of Directors, and Federations of Jewish Philanthropy debated the options for membership intake policy. Would they accept non-Jews, eschewing their sectarian mission? Or should they double down on their sectarian commitment, and work to strengthen their membership's Jewish identity?

I argue that the gradual shift towards more inclusive membership policies in postwar urban Jewish Community Centers derived from the universalistic social work training of movement leadership and local Center executives; that this universalistic commitment was guided by the imperative to maintain professional prestige and legitimize their expertise among fellow (non-sectarian) social work colleagues and to distinguish their expertise from religious leadership; that this distinct professional identity required constant validation because the unique expertise of Jewish social workers justified the existence of separate sectarian institutions like JCCs; and finally, that universalism won out over particularism during the urban crisis, as local demographic changes affected Center memberships and forced a reevaluation of these institutions’ sectarian missions.

I proposed to do case studies of three urban JCCs in order to support this argument: the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood in northern Manhattan, the Soto-Michigan Community Center in Los Angeles' Boyle Heights neighborhood, and the Miami Y.  Throughout the chapters, I would move from telling the history of the JCC movement more broadly to an specific, emblematic episode in the history of one of these Centers. This close study would demonstrate how broader national or regional trends played out at the local level. For example, after describing how autonomous JCCs often came into conflict with their Federations--metropolitan fundraising bodies--over agency priorities, I would zoom in to describe a fundraising campaign undertaken by the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood in the early 1950s. The Y was struggling to pay for the construction of a new building, and they wanted help from Federation to meet their fundraising total. The episode not only illuminates the complex financial relationship between the New York Federation and individual Centers, but also how these entities disagreed on the degree of responsibility Board members, Center staff, and local members had to subsidize and contribute to their own services and spaces.

To boil it down even further, here are the assumptions and questions that are central to my project. 

Assumptions

Beginning in the 1940s, American cities rapidly deindustrialized. Economic prosperity and changing social values prompted white Americans to decamp for the suburbs. Many formerly- Jewish neighborhoods transitioned to predominantly black or Latino. JCCs that were built in these neighborhoods to serve Jewish members had to decide whether or not to move, close, or start serving what they referred to as the "total community."

Questions

How did American urban Jewish Community Centers evolve between 1945 and 1980 in response to changing American society and values? How did community building occur in increasingly multicultural urban neighborhoods? How did JCCs define the extent of the Centers’ community? Would it include non-Jews? If so, would the Center relinquish its sectarian commitment and become a secular agency? How would this stance likewise facilitate cooperation with non-Jewish membership, particularly Latino Catholics, or underscore differences? Finally, did these changes affect the social service and communal welfare infrastructure of urban areas?

Any questions? Yeah, I bet you do! I'm not sure that I've done a better job explaining it here than I did in the abstract. 

History in the News

I began writing this post in June, but lost steam as soon as I began my internship. While it's no longer timely, I still feel that this article is worth highlighting and hope my comments on it inspire those of you who missed it the first go-round to give it a read. I've chosen not to provide a summary of Coates' story and argument, and recommend that you look at my post after reading the article. 

In June, The Atlantic published a cover story by Ta-Nehisi Coates that garnered a lot of buzz. I want to recommend that you read it not only because it's a fabulous article--richly descriptive, informative, packed with history, and with a solid argument--but also because I think it does a pretty decent job of contextualizing my own research. In particular, the sixth section entitled "Making the Second Ghetto" introduces the very historiography into which my own project seeks to intervene.

The strength of Coates' article is how effectively it describes how racial discrimination has, since World War II, been incorporated into the structure of our society--our laws, policies, and practices concerning housing, employment, and mobility. This structural discrimination has perpetuated a wealth gap between black and white Americans. "The Case for Reparations" traces how American racial discrimination outlived the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights movement and continues to exist today in the form of discriminatory lending programs (especially around mortgages and housing), in unequal distribution of job training and placement programs, and in the insiduous claims of pathologically unfit black parents (particularly absent fathers and single mothers).  Coates argues that until we recognize that racism continues to shape the opportunities and decisions made by black Americans, we cannot begin to close the wealth gap and mitigate persistent economic inequality.

In "Making the Second Ghetto," Coates supports his claims by referring to a historical work of the same name, which was published by Arnold Hirsch in 1983. This book is a foundational text in the scholarship on twentieth-century U.S. urban history and African American history. In brief, Hirsch argues that racist housing and redevelopment policies in postwar cities transformed segregated neighborhoods (the "first ghetto") into overcrowded, decrepit, and still segregated black "second ghettos."  Although it is already 30 years old, historians are still debating its various merits--myself included! Why? Well, primarily because many of our contemporary social problems stem from the deindustrialization and disinvestment in American cities that occurred between the 1940s and 1970s, and if we want to understand the present it helps to examine these same issues in the past. 

The Making of the Second Ghetto offered a new, snappy thesis to explain why these events unfolded--prompting a wave of studies that agreed or disagreed with Hirsch's "second ghetto" model. Hirsch changed the way historians thought about the relationship between black and white Americans in the twentieth century by reminding scholars that state policymakers made outsized contributions to the problem of segregated urban neighborhoods. Previously, historians believed that American ghettos were the inevitable result of racism and discrimination. Hirsch challenged the assumption that the "inner city" ghetto was an inevitability, and repeatedly emphasized that the consolidation of the "first ghetto" into the "second ghetto" could have been avoided, had white business interests and white homeowners not parlayed their power into legislative action and housing policies that transformed extant ghettos into even more isolated (and isolating) neighborhoods. Hirsch wrote the following in the introduction to the book:

"Indeed, the real tragedy surrounding the emergence of the modern ghetto is not that it has been inherited but that it has been periodically renewed and strengthened. Fresh decisions, not the mere acquiescence to old ones, reinforced and shaped the contemporary black metropolis”{C}

What historians later knocked Hirsch for, however, was that all of the "fresh decisions" that he focused on in Making the Second Ghetto were made by white elites and not by black residents of the "second ghetto". Much of the research since 1985, and particularly in the twenty-first century, has focused on the black grassroots activism in formal politics during this "urban crisis" of the 1960s and 1970s. The strength of "The Case for Reparations," in fact, is its focus on the activist response of the Contract Buyers League to abusive practices by white real estate speculators. Coates highlights how these aspiring homeowners organized themselves--eventually forming a group as large as 500--to shame contract sellers for their exploitation and to file lawsuits seeking repayment of funds that contract sellers extorted from these vulnerable buyers. Rather than passively acquiescing to structural racism, black urbanites reacted in a variety of ways to challenge exploitation. 

This is where my research picks up. My dissertation does not look at arguments for reparation, nor am I particularly concerned with debating against Hirsch--plenty of more advanced scholars have done a superb job of clarifying and elaborating on his theory. Rather, I am interested in grassroots activism as a response to these transformations of the postwar city (the Urban Crisis and consolidation of the "second ghetto"). Specifically, I'm curious about how urban citizens used Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) during the 1960s and '70s as sites of activism. Consequently, how did this activism reshape the JCC? My research examines how non-white (black and Latino) residents of formerly Jewish neighborhoods like Washington Heights or the Lower East Side or the Central Bronx regarded Jewish Community Centers--a space that offered them social services and recreational space but did not claim to be for them. Likewise, the dissertation studies how the Jewish residents remaining in these communities used the JCC as a place to organize to "improve" the neighborhood--whether "improvement" was a euphemism for segregation or meant accepting diversity and advocating for the inclusion of non-Jewish membership.

I Was a Workin' Gal

Time to explain my radio silence over the summer. I had the privilege of interning at a foundation here in Pittsburgh, which gave me the opportunity to translate my (historical) research skills to a different field, in an applied context. The mission of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, where I interned for ten weeks, is to keep people out of hospitals. The Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) has developed several interventions to train frontline health care workers in strategies to reduce medical errors, make their workflows more efficient (reducing redundant procedures), and have discussions with patients that empower them to become partners in their care. The JHF also provides grants to other organizations for them to pilot interventions that have similar goals.

I wanted to be an intern at the JHF for several reasons. On an ideological level, I am committed to reforming our country's healthcare system to eliminate health disparities between Americans of different races, classes, nationalities and gender identities. The JHF's work to reduce the cost of healthcare while improving healthcare outcomes appealed to me because I believe these measures are an important step towards addressing health disparities. On a practical level, I wanted to challenge myself to return to healthcare-related research and to write for a non-academic audience--particularly an audience that was actively engaged in the very work I was researching.

I was assigned to write a report summarizing the experiences of a JHF project that was wrapping up its final phase. The project managers wanted this report to be a tool they could use to share the intervention they had developed (in this case, a strategy to get HIV/AIDS patients to see primary care physicians). They hoped that other regional health organizations, health departments, or AIDS service organizations could also implement this strategy, having observed the successes and learned from the challenges faced by the JHF. 

In addition to learning how the intervention worked, how it was paid for, and what actors were involved, I also had to learn how a public health strategy like this can be evaluated. What are the measures that indicate success? What quantitative data--like number of visits to a physician by a single patient--is most useful and important? Similarly, what qualitative data--like a patients' satisfaction with the community healthcare worker who helped them make doctors appointments--helps us interpret these figures? I read narratives written by the participating organizations and community healthcare workers, compared them to the statistical analyses that my fellow intern (a biostatistician) prepared, and then summarized these findings in my report. Finding the words to communicate this information in a clear, concise, and easily digestible manner was a difficult but very instructive exercise.

Overall, the internship was a great experience. I learned an incredible amount about the current state of the American healthcare system. I renewed my desire to read, research, and write about public health and healthcare interventions. I met great people and was invited to several valuable networking events. Most of all, I found it refreshing to take a break from academia and see the all the hard work that people are doing to improve how Americans receive medical care.  

The internship ended in early August, and I quickly had to resume focus on my dissertation. I did three weeks of research in New York over the next two months, and I now spend my days reading through documents and trying to get a sense of the "big picture"--what were the major trends and events that affected Jewish Community Centers in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s? For the rest of this week, I will be posting about the dissertation project: what I initially proposed to study; the research I've done so far; and how the project has already changed!