Volunteering at a Conference

Earlier this week I had the distinct pleasure of assisting the staff of the Association for Jewish Studies with conference registration. Running a conference is labor intensive, and the conference organizer asked graduate students if they were willing to help staff various tables on the first and second day, when most registrants arrive. I wish I could say I volunteered out of a sense of altruism and dedication to the Jewish Studies community, but they offered to reimburse my conference registration fee in exchange for my labor. The experience ended up being much more than just remuneratively valuable, though, because I was assigned tasks where I could meet many of the academics in my field.

The first day, I worked at the registration table printing new badges for attendees. As scholars shuffled up one by one to apologize for losing or misplacing their badges, I put faces to names of authors whose works I read for my doctoral exams or for my research. On the second day, I handed out tote bags and badge holders to newly arrived registrants. I had the pleasure of meeting a historian whose article on Oscar Janowsky--the scholar who directed the Jewish Welfare Board's 1947-48 study of Jewish Centers and thus shaped the postwar agenda for JCC programming and growth--helped me understand the politics at play in the Janowsky Survey. I also met two of my "academic crushes," historians whose work lead me towards the big questions that animate my research.

I also met many of the staff members of the AJS, who run many academic programs and workshops in addition to the annual conference. They were all so lovely to me and provided words of support when I got nervous before my presentation. They ran such a tight ship, and I was impressed by their foresight. I enjoy event planning and organization, and it was helpful to see how the sausage gets made, per se, when you host an event of this size. Additionally, it was a great opportunity to meet the other graduate student volunteers. We chatted throughout our shifts and it was an easy way to make new colleague-friends.

I would highly recommend that other graduate students take advantage of volunteer opportunities at conferences. I'm sure that the experience varies across conferences and disciplines, but volunteering is an easy, fun way to network. The registration table was an invaluable place to introduce myself to scholars. The informality of the setting made the interaction less intimidating and more social. Volunteering also fostered a sense of involvement with the wider organization--you feel that you are actively creating a communal atmosphere and facilitating scholarly engagement. Finally, it's the best kind of productive procrastination. Volunteering at a conference is a great opportunity to feel like you're working on your career and your research even though you're not staring at the screen of your laptop! 

Chanukah at the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood

Tonight marks the first night of Chanukah, an eight day holiday commemorating the revolt of the Maccabees--as the five sons of Matthias the Kohein came to be known--against the vast army of Syrian King Antiochus Epiphanes IV. The Maccabees fought back against Syrian attempts to destroy Jerusalem and stop Jews from practicing their religion. We light candles for eight nights to remind us of how the Maccabees rededicated the desecrated Temple Mount in Jerusalem in celebration of their victory. They celebrated God and we celebrate the survival of Judaism and the Jewish people. 

As I lit the shamash tonight, the candle we use each night to light all of the other candles in the chanukiah (or menorah), I wondered how the members and staff of Jewish Community Centers have celebrated the holiday in the past. I've just spent the last three days at the AJS Conference deeply immersed in some new work on postwar American Jewish life, and so my curiosity led me to go back and look for mentions in the holiday in the records of the Y of Washington Heights-Inwood.

In his monthly report to the Board of the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights, Executive Director Samuel Solender announced an upcoming event about which he was very excited:

"On Thursday, Dec 26th in the afternoon, we shall celebrate Chanukah by a suitable program in which the children will participate. We have invited Dr. I Mortimer Bloom, Rabbi of the Hebrew Tabernacle, to attend and give a short talk on the significance of Chanukah. Thus you will see that an attempt is already being made to secure an increased interest of the Rabbis in our work. Instead of the old adage “Opportunity comes to him who waits” I believe in the modern that “Opportunity comes to him who hustles while he waits”.  This time it is Rabbi Bloom, another time it will be another Rabbi, etc. Whenever it is possible we shall call upon our local Rabbis.” [1]

Solender was within his first twelve months at the Y, and at the time the association was still in its original location at 160th St. and St. Nicholas Avenue. Hebrew Tabernacle's temple was located only a few blocks away, on 161st St. between Broadway and Fort Washington Avenue. Jews of German descent founded the Hebrew Tabernacle congregation in the early twentieth century, and their tradition was on the more Conservative end of the spectrum of Reform Judaism. It makes sense that Solender would turn to Rabbi Bloom. Jewish Community Centers tended to draw Reform and some Conservative members, as well as Jews who more closely identified with secular or ethnic Judaism (yiddishkeit). Perhaps many Y members belonged to Hebrew Tabernacle (or another congregation). I wonder if religiously observant children were more likely to attend the Chanukah celebration and hear Rabbi Bloom describe the significance of Chanukah--or less likely, because they already knew the story of the holiday and observed it at home and at shul? Either way, Solender and his Board definitely believed that Chanukah was a good time to incorporate Jewish learning and ritual into the Y's program, and to build bridges between the Center and the local rabbinate.

The next reference I found to Chanukah celebrations at the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood was not until 33 years later! In all likelihood this omission is because I did not take notes on Chanukah celebrations in the intervening years; I doubt the Y ignored the holiday for three decades. In April of 1962, however, the head of the Y's After School programs for elementary school children reported to the Board that the Chanukah festival was one of the mass programs that the Juniors participated in throughout the year. Two years later, notes from the May 1965 Board meeting mentioned that the Women's Division raised money for the Y at a Hannukah luncheon in the winter of 1964 (and apparently the event was repeated for several years). 

I asked current Executive Director of the Y, Marty Englisher, if he remembered celebrating Chanukah at the Y during his childhood in the 1960s (he has been a member since he was in nursery school!). He remembered that during these years, when he was a Junior, his club made menorahs in arts and crafts. The menorahs were not particularly fancy. Marty recalls that they just made nine holes in a piece of clay!

It wasn't really until 1971 that the Y inaugurated a regular Chanukah festival for its entire membership. At a meeting of the Board's Program Committee in June of that year, the group discussed ways to augment what they called the Y's "Jewish Cultural Programming." One suggestion was to plan agency-wide festivals on the holidays of Sukkot, Chanukah, and Purim. Executive Director Dan Stein reported on the first Chanukah festival at the Y's December Board meeting:

"On Sunday afternoon, December 12 we held our 1st agency-wide Chanukah Festival. Three Hundred and fifty adults and children filled the Auditorium for this, the 2nd in a series of four Jewish holiday festivals to be held this year. (Mmes. Westheimer and Werden felt that the program had been an outstanding one, and that thanks were due the many individuals who had helped to make it so)." [2]

This festival continued throughout the 1970s. They brought together young families with the senior citizens who were active at the Y. In December of 1974, "One hundred parents and children, in the range below the age of 10, participated in several Workshops, the Candlelighting and refreshments, (of course!)." In 1980, there were 400 attendees! 

This renewed commitment to "Jewish Cultural Programming" was consistent with the big trends of the '70s. This was the era of the havurah movement and the Jewish Catalog, and Jews were embracing their cultural differences and rejecting homogenization and assimilation. The Chanukah celebrations brought together Y members and allowed them to demonstrate their commitment to their Jewishness and/or Judaism through learning, participation in ritual, and communal association. And there were refreshments (of course!). For the Y, the Chanukah festivals prominently advertised that the Center had a Jewish mission and was not just a daycare and a gym. As a mass program, it was an event that showed the size and strength of the Y's membership; Y leaders could chart the health of the organization through the turnout to this major holiday celebration. Finally, it was fun and social and provided a safe atmosphere for kids to learn and play while parents shmoozed. 

Chanukah sameach!

Citations

[1] Solender Family Collection, Center for Jewish History, New York, NY. This finding aid is currently being revised as the collection is being reprocessed, and so I will withhold box numbers to avoid confusion. 

[2] Board Meeting Minutes of the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood. Records privately held at the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood, New York, NY.

Baltimore or Less

Yesterday I gave my first presentation at a major professional conference. The Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies is taking place right now in Baltimore (it opened yesterday and concludes on Tuesday). It is an international and interdisciplinary gathering, and panel topics range from new interpretations of ancient texts to recent sociological changes in 21st century American Jewry. 

As this is such a large conference, the AJS requests that graduate students participate in lightning sessions rather than presenting in a traditional panel format (where you and two or three other scholars deliver 20-minute papers and answer audience questions). Lightning session presentations are limited to 5-7 minutes, which is just enough time to introduce a project, discuss a question in the field, or propose a methodological problem. The goal is to familiarize grad students with the newest work being done in Jewish Studies, and to foster connections between grads at different universities. 

My paper was titled "Jewish Adjustment and the Professionalization of Jewish Social Work," and in it I defined how a concept in mid-twentieth century social work was used by leaders of Jewish Community Centers to justify their authority as the providers of Jewish leisure-time activity. 

This is not only the first major conference I have attended, it was also my first time trying to distill my work down into such a tight time limit.  All academics know that more time is better, and that 20 minutes always seems to fly by before you manage to make your point. To condense an argument down to five minutes required a lot of trial and error! I began by carefully structuring my paper. I included a very brief introduction of my dissertation topic and the historiographical importance of the project. I offered my argument up front and provided and overview of what I would discuss. I briefly reviewed the theoretical background and answered the question I posed at the outset (what is Jewish adjustment?). I shared a case study from my research to demonstrate how the concept was used to defend the JCC's authority within Jewish communal life, and concluded by reiterating my argument. After all of that, I still barely cleared 7 minutes, and had to remove all but the most essential context. 

I spent hours rehearsing over the past week, and the more I practiced the more nervous I became! I knew I was going to be the only historian on the panel, and the only one doing a topic on American Jewry. I was really worried that my paper was concise but not cogent, or that it flattened reality and made the past appear too simple, too pat. 

In the end, it went well. The panel was more informal than I expected, and I was sufficiently prepared and stayed close to the time limit. My respondent--an academic whose work I really respect--gave me excellent feedback and made several valuable suggestions (my favorite was that I should explore the content taught to rabbis in American rabbinical schools during the mid-twentieth century and compare it to the Jewish training given to Jewish social workers). It was informative to hear the wide variety of topics being studied by my peers in Jewish studies, and I benefited from hearing about the various themes and questions they are exploring in their research. 

I am relieved that I was able to present on the first day, and feel like I can now relax while other people present. Conferences are like a blitz of short classes, you learn or are reminded of interesting questions or themes or issues. Presenting was nerve wracking but such a valuable experience, and I feel that the lightning format prepared me to participate in a more traditional panel at a future conference. Twenty minutes will feel like such a luxury!

Five Books I Recommend About: Washington Heights and Inwood

I devoted most of last week to reading other historians' research, which was a nice change of pace from trying to write my own. I thought it might be nice to share some of the books that have helped me make sense of events in the Jewish community of Washington Heights and Inwood after World War II. 

1. Steven M. Lowenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-1983, Its Structure and Culture (1989)

One of the most distinctive features of Washington Heights' during the 1940s through 1970s was the presence of a large German refugee community. These escapees from Nazism, who arrived en masse to Washington Heights between 1938-40, balanced a trio of identities: German, Jewish, and American. In Frankfurt on the Hudson, Lowenstein argues that the refugees' adjustment to America was of a dual nature. Like the wave of Eastern European Jews who immigrated between the 1890s and 1920s, these German Jews coped with being a Jewish minority among a Christian majority. In addition, they had to cope with being an ethnic minority within the Jewish community because their German customs differed from the Eastern European majority in Washington Heights. Lowenstein's description of how, exactly, these refugees adjusted to America is vivid and--if you skim over the more dense discussion of his surveys--would be of interest to a lay reader who wanted to learn more about this particular Jewish experience.

2. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (2008)

This book focuses on another immigrant community in Washington Heights, those who migrated from the Dominican Republic to New York after 1965. Dominicans differed from the German-Jewish refugees because they had the option of returning to the Dominican Republic (and they often took advantage of opportunities to travel back and forth). Hoffnung-Garskof examines the influence of this transnational migration, and A Tale of Two Cities asks how the Dominican national identity evolved as a result of the regular movement of its citizens between the DR and the United States. This might be a difficult read for those who dislike social science theory, but Hoffnung-Garskof's book is well written and includes many engaging stories; a lay reader could skim the text for these excellent narrative nuggets.

3. Robert W. Snyder, Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City (2015)

This BRAND NEW publication traces the history of northern Manhattan from the New Deal to the present. Snyder argues that despite tense relations between the many ethnicities and races represented in the area, residents of Washington Heights and Inwood were able to bond together often enough over the biggest issues (housing, crime prevention, parks preservation) to sustain the neighborhoods through the urban crisis. As entire blocks of the Bronx burned just across the river, residents and activists in Washington Heights forged tenuous but effective coalitions to improve their schools, protect their blocks, and hold police accountable for their actions. Snyder writes like a journalist, and Crossing Broadway is almost entirely devoid of theory. It's the perfect book for any amateur historian of New York City.

4. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (1981)

City Trenches is an essential book for anyone studying the history of Washington Heights. It is, however, a dense book, and I would recommend brushing up on Marxist theory before sitting down with it. Katznelson argues that instead of breaking down and reshaping urban politics, the minority-majority of Washington Heights was boxed into the traditional "trenches" of machine politics. Black and Latino resident-activists did not achieve their radical aims of integration and equality during the urban crisis because the city's political structure of community boards pushed their complaints down to the local level where big, systemic changes like housing reform and public school funding could not be resolved. The result was to force community activism into the mold of old-school ethnic politics, where each ethnic or racial group competed for the few gains possible within the scope of their limited power.

5. Eric C. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (2001)

The title of this book is as colorful as the cast of young men and women that it studies. Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings is not exclusively about Washington Heights--there are also case studies about youth gangs in Hell's Kitchen and the Lower East Side--but one of the best chapters is about a brutal murder in Highbridge Park in 1957. Schneider's writing is very accessible and the book is narrative-driven, making it a great read for a general audience. 

If anyone has other recommendations, I would love to hear them! 

Stress Dream

A few weeks ago I began having stress dreams. I was never a particularly active dreamer until last year, and I still find them disconcerting. Recently they have reflected reality to a degree they never did before. Now my anxieties follow me from wakefulness into sleep, which can be exhausting. The silver lining, I guess, is that I get up some mornings with a certain clarity about how to prioritize my work. 

For example, last night I dreamed that I was in Washington Heights. I was sitting in a swiveling desk chair at the corner of 181st St. and St. Nicholas, by the entrance to the 1 train, and I was eating cold french fries out of a plastic bag. I found the fries underneath the chair when I sat down. I swiveled the chair back and forth, to the left and to the right, watching New Yorkers walk by on their way to work and school. It was obviously morning, which makes my choice of breakfast seem even more peculiar and suspect.

All of a sudden my friend walked by and we greeted each other. I politely extended the bag I was eating from and offered him some cold fries. He wisely declined. I asked him what he planned to do on this fine day. I can't recall what he answered but he did mention it was Thursday. 

I jumped up. Thursday!? If it was Thursday it meant I had a 9 AM appointment to do a follow-up oral history interview. I demanded that my friend tell me the time. It was already 9:48 AM! I had to get uptown!

I thanked my friend and ran down into the subway station. I only had to go two stops and I silently prayed that I could get there by 10:00 AM. I saw a train in the station, but I couldn't dig my Metrocard out of my bag fast enough and so I watched it pull away. I knew that if I walked to the furthest end of the platform and got in the first car of the next train, it would get me closer to the exit at my destination. As can only happen in dreams, bookshelves and tables and racks appeared as I walked farther along. Obviously the northernmost section of the uptown platform was a bookstore. There are worse places to wait for the train, I guess. 

That's when I realized that I was going to the oral history interview without my digital audio recorder. I decided that the recorder app on my phone would suffice. Once I resolved that problem, I remembered that I had not written any questions for this interview. Why not? I hadn't finished transcribing the past one, and so had not decided on my follow-up questions. As I contemplated my situation, a train finally pulled into the station. I somehow had the gumption to get onboard, convinced that I could wing it without my interviewee noticing.

My alarm went off about then, and I immediately advanced transcription to the top of my to-do list. Unlike Dream Me, Awake Me is not denial. I cannot wing anything.