Forward, Flashback, or Stuck?

Although I embarked on writing chapter three with a point-based outline, a road map for how I wanted to build my argument, the journey has not quite proceeded as planned. Over two weeks and twenty-something hours of writing, I have generated several pages of content and several pages of "murdered darlings." I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that I've deleted a paragraph for every paragraph that remains. Two steps forward, one step back!

Why has it been such a struggle? I can't decide how the chapter should begin and end! Unlike chapter two, which began where chapter one left off and then proceeded quite logically in chronological order from a precipitating event through to the resolution of a controversy, the "open membership" debate that I'm describing in chapter three happened three years after the final major event that I describe in chapter 2, the JWB's 1963 Lakewood Conference. In addition to this chronological gap, I also want to use chapter three to fill in a content gap. The JWB made some important decisions in the years I covered in chapter two, but I left them out because they weren't directly relevant to the controversy at the center of that chapter. This left me with three options:

#1: Start with the 1947 JWB/Janowsky Survey recommendation on open membership and move chronologically forward in time to the 1967-69 JWB Committee on Open Membership in Jewish Community Centers, which reaffirmed that JCCs should accept all applicants for membership regardless of race or religion. 

Advantages:

  1. Easy to write and simple for the reader to follow!
  2. Follows the same pattern as chapter 2: beginning with disagreement over one of the Janowsky Survey's policy recommendations (in this case, over an inclusive membership policy)  and ending with the Committee that, between 1967-69 debated whether the JWB should uphold this  policy.
  3. Clearly demonstrates change over time, particularly the rising influence of the Civil Rights movement on the JCC movement.

Disadvantages:

  1. Rather than foregrounding the most important event, moving chronologically "buries" the moment of rupture in a longer narrative arc. 

#2: Begin the chapter with the 1966-67 controversy at the New Orleans JCC that precipitated the JWB Committee on Open Membership in Jewish Community Centers, then flash back in time to fill in the content gap, then move forward to discuss the Committee's debate and decision.

Advantages:

  1. By instead beginning the chapter with the controversy at the New Orleans JCC--about whether to accept non-white, not just non-Jewish, members--all of the preceding decisions and events of the 1940s and '50s can be contextualized by how they contributed to the eventual controversy and debate in the late 1960s. It's a helpful way to distinguish what details can be relegated to the background. 

Disadvantages:

  1. It's more complicated to write and puts a bit more of a burden on the reader to follow the chronology, even if it ultimately clarifies the argument. 
  2. It makes the Southern context of the Civil Rights movement seem more important than the Northern context. Foregrounding how New Orleans, a Southern city, catalyzed the JWB to renew its debate about open membership diminishes how active the Northern Civil Rights movement was in the mid-1960s--and though JCCs were located in cities in both the U.S. North and South, the decision-making "center" of the JCC movement was the JWB headquarters in New York City. 

#3: Try to do both at once.

Advantages:

  1. Experimental! You never know what will work best, so why not try every possible option.

Disadvantages:

  1. Confusing!
  2. Unproductive.

Always ambitious, I went with option #3. And that is how I ended up stuck in the cycle of writing and deleting.

I have now committed to Option #2, and it seems to be working well. I'm trying to be mindful of the disadvantages, so 1) I'm including plenty of signals to the reader about where the chronology is heading and 2) I'm incorporating evidence of how Civil Rights activism in the North also had an impact on the JWB's open membership debate. I hope that I can now proceed without too much deviation from my point-based outline: two steps forward, no steps back!

 

Drawing the Road Map

In a marathon work session last Thursday, I hammered out the outline for my third dissertation chapter. After I reviewed a large sampling of sources that described the JCC movement's response to Civil Rights activism and the urban crisis, I pulled out my colored pens and began to outline the temporal and political themes that I observed.  

I began by identifying three distinct phases or "moments": a period I call the "open membership debates"; the "classical" period of the civil rights movement; and the urban crisis. The phases I pinpointed map neatly onto periodization that historians already use to distinguish between phases of the Black Freedom Movement: first, the early legal fights for equal rights in housing and education during the 1940s-50s (Shelley v. Kraemer; Brown v. Board of Education); then the national, legislative push for voting rights and equal hiring opportunities of the mid-1960s (Civil Rights Act, Economic Opportunity Act); and finally the rise of black nationalism and the urban rioting of the late 1960s. More critically, however, I observed in the documents that JWB staff and Jewish Center workers exhibited distinct attitudes and decision-making in each of these three periods. At the outset of the 1960s, the vast majority of JCCs accepted non-Jews (including non-white Jews) as full members of the JCC. Despite this "equal" policy, however, most Centers did not have African American members and did not serve non-white members of their community with any regularity. Centers used their progressive policy to avoid changing their practices,  and black community members recognized that although they could apply to join the JCC they were not necessarily welcome. By the mid-1960s, however, growing support for equal rights, equal facilities, and equal services pressured JCCs to explore how they could serve non-Jewish and non-white members of their communities as effectively as they served their Jewish membership. 

After I sketched out these transitions, I drafted my overall argument for the chapter and wrote some tentative claims that I would like to make in each section. In my first-year research seminar, my professor advocated for this process of "point-based outlining." Whereas a regular outline identifies the topics you plan to include in your paper (or chapter), a point-based outline models how your overall argument will build from a series of claims. In my experience, drafting a point-based outline helps you avoid summarizing when you begin to write--it forces you to select only the evidence and context necessary to support your claims. 

Armed with this point-based outline, I'm now ready to begin drafting sections of the chapter. I know that as I re-read, analyze, and argue my claims, the overall argument will subtly shift. In that way, the point-based outline is more like a hand-drawn road map than it is a legal contract. It's a tentative and flexible document, intended to be improved as I become more familiar with the landscape. As I proceed I will edit it to reflect new insights or counterarguments, making it more accurate, precise, and easier to follow. 

When Bad Things Are Good

My father-in-law, who generously does my taxes for me, always says that April 15 is Opposite Day: tax season is the only time of year when bad things are good and good things are bad. Lost money in the past twelve months? Great! You can probably count on getting some cash back from Uncle Sam in June. 

This week, my research presented me with this same perverse logic. The third chapter of my dissertation relates how the JCC movement, at the height of Civil Rights activism in the early 1960s, came to declare their support for an open membership policy that accepted Jews and non-Jews as full Center members. I've been reading through documents from this period all week, and I encountered several studies that the Jewish Welfare Board made during the 1950s to determine the extent of non-Jewish membership in Centers throughout the United States. Two of these studies revealed that several Jewish Centers had determined to maintain a Jews-only membership policy in order to exclude non-white members from using their facilities. These Centers, which were located in both northern and southern cities, carefully hid this racial discrimination behind the justification that Jewish Centers had to uphold their "Jewish purpose." How terrible to uncover such a shameful act! And yet--I confess--what an exciting discovery!

My reaction does not reflect pure callousness, nor am I attempting to shame my grandparents' generation for my own personal aggrandizement. This chapter of my dissertation describes the evolution of a debate, and a debate inherently has two sides--I'm celebrating having found the record of my second interlocutor in this dialogue. It's not particularly thrilling to bear witness to the uncomfortable reality of midcentury racial prejudice, nor is it surprising, but I do believe it's of the utmost importance to share and reflect on this historical reality. So as a researcher, in unearthing these records of racism, a bad thing became good.

Describing this dissonance to a friend, he remarked that it could be turned into a great headline for (satirical newspaper) The Onion: "Local Historian Ecstatic to Announce Discovery of  New Genocide." 

Pre-outlining

I am a woman of my word. This morning, I ignored all of the small, distracting tasks that have consumed my time as of late and instead devoted myself to my dissertation for 90 minutes. It was such a joy to return to my project after a three week hiatus. 

The first thing I do when I begin a new chapter is I gather all of the sources I will need to write it. Before I can even attempt an outline or begin to draft an argument, I have to review a good portion of the documents that will serve as my evidence for that chapter. In doing so, I remind myself of the major events, actors, and issues that I plan to discuss. Fortunately, because I have a good system in place, gathering my documents is a relatively simple task.

As I have written about before, I use DEVONthink Pro Office to create a giant database of all of my sources. I take pictures of all of my archival documents, turn them into PDFs, enter them into my database, and then add relevant tags to them such as the date they were written, important subjects they discuss (like "synagogue-center relations" or "open membership"), or organizations they reference (like the JWB or NAJCW). These tags make it easy to find and unite documents on related topics, especially when the documents may have come from different archives or collections and are thus organized separately in my database. 

With DEVONthink, I'm able to make "smart groups" in my database for each of my chapters--all of the documents I need are together in one place. To do this, I navigate to the "Actions" button and click "New Smart Group." In the creation pane, I then select that any documents with the desired tags be collected together in the group--in this chapter, that would be anything I've tagged "Civil Rights," "Urban Crisis," or "Open Membership":

In my second chapter, I had many items tagged "synagogue-center relations" that were from the 1970s. Since that chapter focused on the 1950s and early 1960s, I wanted to exclude those later documents because they were distracting and overwhelmed the Smart Group. To remove them, I created a new rule of "Tag is not" and then typed in 1971, 1972, 1973, etc. That way, I saw only the "synagogue-center relations" documents tagged with dates from the 1960s and earlier. 

When I was done selecting my tags, my Smart Group then looked like this: 

It captures my documents from multiple collections, archives, and manuscripts and brings them all together so I can easily review how the JCC movement responded to the civil rights movement and the urban crisis. And any time I want to go look at the other materials that I collected with that document, I can click on it and see (as shown in the gray box above) exactly where I found it in the archive (because my database mirrors the organization of the original archival collections). 

As with any method, there are limits to the Smart Group. If I accidentally omitted a tag or incorrectly tagged a document, I would not necessarily notice my mistake--the Smart Group is not smart enough to identify things that should be included but are not. It's imperative, as the research progresses, to return to the archival notes taken during the research process and to thoroughly examine whether there are any relevant documents listed there that did not make it into the Smart Group. Another method of screening for omissions is to review all of the documents tagged by year in the appropriate date range--for this chapter, that means I will scan through every document tagged with a date from 1960 to ~1975 and check if there are any that are about civil rights, open membership, or the urban crisis that are missing from the Smart Group. 

Now that I've created the Smart Group, I will spend the rest of the week immersing myself in the documents and thinking deeply about what I want to focus on in chapter three. I'm curious to see what I find--most of these documents were collected over a year ago, and I'm guessing that I will experience the excitement of discovery all over again. Not a bad way to end the week!