I really appreciate your being here with us this evening and I can promise you it will be worth your while. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Ellen Yamansky, the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Professor of Judaic Studies here at Fairfield University. I want to welcome all of you to our 15th annual Judaic Studies Scholar in Residence Program. This program is one that I look forward to each year with great anticipation. It gives me the opportunity to bring to the university someone whose work I admire and someone from whom all of us, including myself, can learn a great deal. And this year is no exception. With us tonight is a first-rate scholar, an insightful and caring teacher, an extremely conscientious and successful administrator, and as you'll see tonight an engaging public speaker, Dr. Eric L. Goldstein, the Judith London Evans Director of the TAM Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University, an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory as well. Dr. Goldstein received his Bachelor of Arts degree in the Departments of Religion and Near Eastern Studies at Emory University in 1992, and his Master of Arts degree and PhD degree in History at the University of Michigan. He is the author, in addition to a slew of articles and chapters and books, he is also the author of The Price of Whiteness, Jews, Race and American Identity, published by Princeton University Press, a book which won the Saul Weiner Prize of the American Jewish Historical Society, and the Theodore Saludas Prize of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. From 2006 to 2011, he was the editor of the quarterly scholarly journal American Jewish History. He's currently completing a history of the reading culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews, which I think is still tentatively titled, but maybe now the title has changed, turning a page how reading transformed Yiddish-speaking Jews on both sides of the Atlantic. And he's also working on a book entitled Crossroads of Modernity, Jews in Small Town Lithuania and its Diaspora. He has just completed writing the co-authored comprehensive study of the Jews of Baltimore, from 1765 to the present, which will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press. I'm deeply grateful to Eric Goldstein for accepting my invitation to serve as this year's scholar in residence. Through the annual meetings of both the Association for Jewish Studies and the Southern Jewish Historical Society, of which come November we will both serve as officers, I've known Eric for many years and have come to consider him a friend. I've taught his book, The Price of Whiteness, several times, and appreciate and have learned a great deal from his tackling the very difficult but important subject of Jews and race. As grateful as I am to Dr. Goldstein for being with us, I'm equally grateful to David and Edie Chafetz for literally making it possible for us to invite Dr. Goldstein here. For 15 years, David and Edie have been and continue to be the Angels of Fairfields Scholar in Residence Program in Judaic Studies. And for that, and for their genuine interest in learning from our scholar, along with the rest of us, they have my deepest thanks and appreciation. My thanks to Rabbi Marcelo Cormas of Congregation Bethel in Fairfield for having hosted a fascinating lunch discussion with Dr. Goldstein and local clergy and educators earlier today. And last but not least, my thanks to Rachel Lyke who joined the Bennett Center in late August as program manager and since then has experienced a real trial by fire, literally jumping into the many aspects and demands of her work at the Bennett Center, including helping to organize Dr. Goldstein's three-day visit to the university. Now at this time, please join me in welcoming to Fairfield University to speak about American Jewries' historical and contemporary... Wait, that's not the title of it. Now I already forgot. What's the title of the talk? I don't know. I didn't write it down correctly. American...what's wrong with me? Okay, sorry. All week in class, I've been telling my students about the talk and every time I've forgotten the title of the talk. I don't know why. I knew it was about American Jewish history. I know it's about the future. Here's the title of the talk. What American Jewish history can tell us about the American Jewish future? Please join me in welcoming Eric Goldstein. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'd particularly like to thank Ellen for inviting me. The Chavitzes for their generous sponsorship of tonight. Father Von Arks for hosting us and also Rachel Leich for helping with all the arrangements. It's been a wonderful visit so far. I look forward to being here in some classes tomorrow, meeting with faculty and getting to know everybody better. But thank you for coming tonight. Okay. So 12 years ago in 2004, American Jews celebrated a major milestone with the 350th anniversary of the American Jewish community. That anniversary marked the arrival in 1654 of a ship carrying 23 Jews. They were refugees from Recife, Brazil, which seems an odd place to have been the place of origin of the first American Jews. The reason they were there, Recife was a Dutch colony. These were Dutch Jews. And it was taken over by the Portuguese and they brought the Inquisition there. So the Jews had to flee and they came to New Amsterdam, which is now New York. And that was the first permanent Jewish community in what is now the United States. Jews, of course, had a long history living as a minority people in the diaspora setting. A phenomenon that began in ancient times as successive rulers conquered the Jewish kingdoms of Judah and Israel. And in the process helped disperse a significant portion of the Jewish population to various parts of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean regions. Then after 70, the year 70 in the common era when the Romans destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, Jews dispersed even more widely through the Roman and Babylonian empires. Later, when most of the Mediterranean region came under Muslim rule, Jews lived in almost every part of the Islamic world. By the high Middle Ages, they had become well established in Christian Europe as well. Now in these different locations, Jews had always lived spread over vast regions and they had significant cultural interactions with their neighbors. But before the rise of the modern era, fairly distinct social and religious lines continued to separate Jews and their neighbors and a specific set of laws that applied to Jewish populations wherever they were found distinguishing them again as a separate and distinct group. All that changed though in the 18th century when a combination of forces including enlightenment thought, the rise of secularism and a series of democratic revolutions ushered in a new period which diminished the social and legal boundaries that had long kept Jews separate from their non-Jewish neighbors. While a process of Jewish emancipation and integration took place across the Western world during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries at different paces in different countries, nowhere did this process happen earlier or more quickly than in the United States where the nation's founding documents included Jews in the body politic from the beginning without even a need for a formal process of emancipation as happened elsewhere. The result was a remarkable new setting for Jewish life, unprecedented in its freedoms and opportunities for Jews, not only to take part in the larger non-Jewish society, but also to reimagine and reinvent their own Jewish practices and traditions. This new American setting was also unprecedented, however, in the challenges that it posed for Jewish identity. With such a lack of boundaries and limits imposed on Jewish life, what would it mean to be Jewish in the United States? What lines would remain between Jews and non-Jews? And what would be the standards that would guarantee the continuity of Jewish life and traditions in a place where the possibilities for change and integration seemed almost limitless? As a professor of American Jewish history, I spend much of my time trying to get students and the public more interested in the ways that American Jews have answered these questions over the past few centuries. And these answers have been by no means consistent, given the fact that there were three major waves of immigration of Jews to the United States, one in the earliest years of the new nation, who came from a variety of European countries, but who were dominated culturally in many ways by Sephardic Jews with origins in the Iberian Peninsula, one during the 19th century, mainly from Germany and other parts of central Europe, and the largest wave numbering about three million Jews who arrived between 1880 and 1924 from Eastern Europe. Each of these groups navigated the challenges of American life in different ways and at different paces, developing their own forms of Judaism, setting the boundaries of Jewish identity in ways that were appropriate to their own backgrounds and experiences. But despite the fascinating story of these various immigrant waves and how they navigated the challenges of American Jewish life, I find that time and time again, audiences I speak to are more interested in the present and especially the future of the American Jewish community. An interest that reflects the fact that not only are the challenges of defining the boundaries of Jewish identity still very present in the United States, but, as I'll suggest in a few minutes, they are now more present than ever. Historians, as you might imagine, are more comfortable speaking about the past than about the future, which is notoriously hard to predict. We historians are also known from our study of the past just how many times people have miscalculated about what the future would bring. So I want to share an anecdote that drives home how poorly we usually do when we try to predict the future course of events. So in 2006, I published the book that Ellen referred to, which is called The Price of Whiteness, about Jews and American ideas about race during the 19th and 20th centuries. And one of the more interesting characters in that book is a Jewish doctor and anthropologist named Maurice Fishberg, who practiced medicine at the turn of the century in New York. He was a Jewish immigrant from Russia. He worked for the United Hebrew Charities, which provided medical care to poor Jewish immigrants. But in his spare time, he did research about Jewish health and anthropology. And he was very concerned in trying to counter claims of racist scholars who argued the Jews were inherently different physically and could not assimilate into American society. So he gathered all the details from his patients that he saw at the United Hebrew Charities, and he wrote medical studies and journals to try to prove the Jews were no different physically than any other group, like other groups they would adapt and assimilate into American culture. And then any differences they had were because of the environment, but not because of any innate physical or racial traits. In fact, he was so anxious to prove his thesis about Jewish assimilation that he went further than most, as you can imagine, most Jewish leaders wanted him to go, and he argued that Jewish immigrants were assimilating so quickly to American society that within a generation, there may not be any differences left between American Jews and American Christians. And to prove this, he used as an example the issue of Jewish names. So he said that the names Jewish immigrants were giving their children were a sign of just how completely they were leaving behind their Jewish separateness and adapting to the American standard. No longer were Jews giving their children biblical names like Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, and Rebecca. They were now giving their offspring purely Anglo-Saxon names like Hyman, Isidore, Rose, and Sadie. So one of the reasons predicting the future is so hard is that it's... So anyway, it just goes to the point that, you know, we think we have a vision of the future, but it doesn't always end up the way we think. One of the reasons predicting a future is so hard is that it is often hard to get sufficient perspective on our own lives to be able to recognize or fully understand the changes that are going on around us. Often people living in very important times of historical change think their lives are rather ordinary and pedestrian. The 23 Jews, for example, who landed in New Amsterdam in 1654, for example, probably had no clue that they were in the process of founding what would eventually become the largest and most significant Jewish settlement in the world. In truth, Jews had been moving around the globe creating new settlements since before the Common Era, so there was no reason particularly for Jewish immigrants to America to realize what a break they were making from their familiar pattern of Jewish history. So it took some time for the distinctiveness of Jewish life in colonial America and later in the United States to sink in and for the unprecedented freedoms of their new social and political environment to become apparent. In the meantime, they had little sense of their own role as trailblazers of a totally new type of Jewish experience. Let me just briefly quote from another source. This is a personal letter that I found in my research from 1913. This letter is from a Jewish immigrant, his name was Hyman Gordon, who immigrated to the United States around 1880 and he became a successful businessman in the city of Beaumont, Texas. Writing to his niece who was studying in New York, he addressed the subject of a new autobiography that had just appeared of a Jewish immigrant girl, Mary Anton. And I don't know if you all know this book, The Promised Land. This has a special meaning for me because when I was, Ellen was talking today about some of the first books that she read that her aunt gave her in related to Jewish studies. Well, this is kind of my similar story, which is I went into a used bookstore in the town where I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland and just looking through the books, I found this old copy of The Promised Land published in 1912. And I had these wonderful old pictures of life in the shtetl and it was one of those old books that has the tissue paper over the pictures almost like a real actual picture. And I just fell in love with it and I read it and that was my start thinking about, you know, the background of American Jewry and immigration and things like that. So then I found this letter years later where this man is writing to his niece and they're talking about this book just as it came out, the year after it came out. So The Promised Land became one of the classic accounts of the East European Jewish immigration to America at the end of the 19th century. But from Gordon's perspective, the book was totally uninteresting from a historical standpoint. And so I'll quote a little bit. He says, her description of the persecution and the Jewish life in Russia is accurate and correct, he wrote to his niece. Her portrayal of the Russian Jew, of his prejudice and superstition and his tenacious love of his religion and traditions is flawless to a degree. And I also know from my own heart the love, the patriotism of the Jew to America, his adopted country after his immigration. But in all this I cannot see in the whole book any moral lesson, any philosophy or any scientific point. It is simply a plain girl story of an uninteresting life such as thousands of others could have written. What you really see from Gordon's rather unexcited view of Anton's book is that we often need distance to understand the momentous qualities of our time and to really understand the weight of changes that seem rather insignificant in the course of our own lives. Gordon couldn't see what historic times he was living in and how the changes that he himself had experienced as an immigrant represented a huge shift in Jewish history. The immigration of two to three million Jews to the New World between 1880 and 1914, representing one of the largest movements of Jewish population in history, not only utterly transformed the lives of those immigrants, but also set American Jewry on the path of becoming the largest and most dynamic Jewish community in the world, making the freedoms, opportunities and challenges that earlier American Jewish settlers had experienced, central to the experience of world Jewry as a whole. So we have no way of knowing if our best guesses about the future will be right or totally off base, like Maurice Fishberg's. And like Gordon, we are not yet sufficiently removed from our present circumstances to be able to know if the period we are living in today will yield changes of historic proportions in the years to come. So all of this is a rather lengthy way of issuing a disclaimer that although I intend to speak about the Jewish future, I in no way can promise to predict exactly what the future of the American Jewish community will hold. But what I can offer are some observations about the past that will give us a context in which we can better anticipate future events. So one of the reasons that the American Jewish future is a topic of such great interest is the widespread feeling that American Jews today are at a crossroads. Despite their humble origins and past experiences with discrimination, Jews today in the United States are the most secure economically and socially of any American ethnic group. In a world where Jews now hold the presidencies of many of the Ivy League schools that once limited their entry, there are few of any doors that are not open to them. American politics has also demonstrated a level of participation by Jews unheard of in previous decades. Consider, for example, that although Jews make up less than 2% of the American population, Americans have elected Jews to hold 10%, 10 out of the 100 seats in the United States Senate. And Jews have been appointed to hold one-third or three of the nine seats on the U.S. Supreme Court. It's worth noting that two-thirds of the justices are Catholics, although Catholics make up only 22% of the American population. While there are no Protestant justices, although Protestants constitute 48% of the American population. In previous eras of American Jewish history, there were many Jews that could not even get on the ballot because of their ethnic and religious background, but today, Jewishness is now considered a neutral factor, if in not some cases a selling point for advancement in American society. At the same time, however, it's not at all clear that Jews are thriving as a group in American society as much as they are thriving as individuals. As Jews become more and more enmeshed in the world around them and less reliant on the closely knit social networks and religious institutions of the Jewish community, continuity has become a topic of grave concern. Fears about drift and defection among Jews has pushed the organized Jewish community to redouble its commitment to Jewish education, youth activities, Jewish summer camps, and the support of Jewish life on college campuses. And I know these are all things that a lot of you here are actively engaged in. And all of these things are seen as ways to guarantee that young Jews will continue to identify with the Jewish community. In addition to bolstering these traditional tools for enhancing Jewish identity and commitment, Jewish communal institutions have also begun to develop new and innovative ways to guarantee Jewish continuity. So, for example, philanthropists have dedicated impressive sums to programs that send unaffiliated college-age Jews to Israel for identity enhancing experiences. New Jewish community centers aimed specifically at the populations thought to be most distant from Jewish concerns have been endowed. Yet, despite these strong efforts, basic questions remain about what the future will bring. Since none of us can know how these issues will play out, what I would like to do is offer some examples from the American Jewish past, which will hopefully put today's events in some sort of a historical context. What you'll find is that the problems and concerns of today and the questions Jews have about tomorrow are not totally unique in American Jewish history. They actually represent recurring themes that have been pondered by American Jews since the earliest days of settlement here. Having combed through the narrative of American Jewish history, looking for examples that might help us better understand the challenges we face today, let me propose four lessons we can take away from the study of the past, lessons which we might call axioms of American Jewish life. Okay, so I'm going to go through these four different ones. Okay, the first one is that the American Jewish experience cannot be reduced to a story of either continuity or decline. And we often get into these narratives that things are going downhill, that assimilation is taking over, or an optimistic viewpoint that there will be Jewish continuity. But actually what history shows us is that these are themes that are intertwined in American Jewish history and that you cannot sum up the history of American Jews as either a story of continuity or one of decline. So Ellen mentioned that I met with a group of educators and rabbis today at Congregation Beth El, and we read from the letters of a woman who lived in colonial America in colonial New York named Abigail Franks. And I just want to kind of mention this example in this context tonight as exemplifying this first axiom that I'm talking about. So these letters are from the period of the 1730s and 40s, and it's very rare to have a wonderful collection like this that gives insights into daily life of Jews during that period. And they're particularly important because they give a window into life at a time when Jews were experiencing what it meant to be in a free society, when no other Jews in other parts of the world were experiencing that, that they were sort of trailblazers in colonial America in living in a place where they were first testing the ground of what it meant to live in close contact with non-Jewish neighbors and to have freedom to worship as they wanted and not how a traditional community structure dictated. The letters show in intimate detail some of the amazing opportunities that were unfolding for American Jews, but as I said also some of the strong challenges that they faced in maintaining a distinctive identity. For example, the letters of Abigail Franks show how American Jews first began to change their religious practices to make them more relevant to the world around them. A student of contemporary literature and philosophy, Franks wove these new ideas into her understanding of Judaism. In her letters she instructs her son, Naftali, on how he should continue to observe what she called the fundamental rituals of the Jewish religion, like keeping kosher and praying, even as he begins to move in the business circles of Anglo-America. One also sees how American Jews accomplished the unprecedented task of uniting Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews into common fellowship, one which drew on the strength of both groups and guaranteed the building of impressive synagogues and the unfettered observance of Jewish rituals and observances in the New World. There were also countless examples of how the Franks and their Jewish associates were breaking down social barriers, taking their place in the larger society on a scale never before accomplished by Jews anywhere. Abigail's enthusiasm was readily apparent in 1733 when a non-Jewish neighbor expressed worry that the family might leave New York and move to London. It gives me a secret pleasure to observe the fair character our family has among Jews and Christians she confided to her son. I believe some are really sincere. Yet the same letters reveal how the freedoms that created the possibility for increased opportunity and the successful reinvention of Jewish tradition also created the possibility for fracture and loss. A decade later in 1743 we read about Abigail's daughter Phyla, who broke with tradition and left the Jewish fold, causing Abigail to question the very viability of American Jewish life. She married a prominent non-Jewish New Yorker, Oliver Delancey. I wish it was in my power to leave this part of the world, Abigail wrote. I would come away in the first man of war that went to London. What this story teaches us is that American freedom has always been a double-edged sword for American Jews. It has allowed them to reach new heights of religious and cultural creativity, even as it has sometimes threatened to undermine community solidarity. Abigail eventually came to terms with this tension. She did not leave for London but remained in New York as a proud and committed American Jew, highly aware of the challenges posed by her environment but equally aware of its promise and opportunity. Like her, today's Jews cannot expect to have one side of the equation without the other. They are living simultaneously in a time of Jewish renewal and re-engagement as well as a time of drift and defection, of continuity as well as discontinuity. Like Franks, they are experiencing this basic tension as in fact the defining feature of American Jewish life. Okay, so that's the first. The second axiom, pluralism has been one of the central characteristics of the American Jewish community. In recent years, an increasing number of commentators have there been books, articles arguing that American Jewry is experiencing an unprecedented degree of fragmentation and intra-group conflict. Pulled between conflicting values of contemporary society, American Jews, according to these writers, have gone to war with each other and the fabric of a once cohesive, conservative ethnic and religious community have been rent over issues like feminism, gay and lesbian rights, Israeli politics, standards for conversion, and even the very definition of who is a Jew. Yet even a cursory review of American Jewish history shows that this diversity of opinion has always been the case. Different issues but still always been the case. From my reading of the American Jewish experience, there has never been anything like a normative or mainstream Jewish community, although there have been plenty of efforts to establish one. In the late 1850s, Isaac Mayer Wise, a German-born rabbi who was one of the preeminent leaders of American Judaism at that time, tried to develop a new Jewish liturgy for American Jews called Minhag America or the Custom of America. So just to give you a little more of the context, this was the 19th century when these immigrants from central Europe were coming over. They were mostly traditional in background, despite the kind of stereotype that German Jews were reformed actually at the time of immigration. Most of them were still traditional and Wise was trying to develop a Minhag, a liturgy that would be more appropriate to the American setting, give them something that they could maintain their worship practices but adapt it to an American setting. Over the next several decades, he also founded a string of organizations to serve the same purpose. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations founded in 1873. The Hebrew Union College, 1875. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1889. And you notice in all of these names that the idea was to create institutions to unify, bring together all American Jews. But by 1885, it was patently clear that Wise had not succeeded in bringing together all American Jews. What he had become was the leader of a distinct branch of Judaism that came to be known as the reform movement and that none of his institutions would be accepted by the emerging conservative and orthodox denomination. So this is just the period when these denominations of Judaism wise had hoped to do something that would bring together all American Jews. So you notice none of these organizations were called the Union of Reform Rabbis or the Union of Reform Congregations. But as was true in many, many other cases, many people didn't accept what he was trying to do. And so instead of creating it for everyone, it became a distinct group within American Jewry and other groups protested and separated themselves to form other groups within the American Jewish community. And so by the end of the 19th century, we see this crystallization of different denominations. Again, something that, although they came to exist in other parts of the world, the United States is really the place where Jewish denominationalism, this idea that there are different streams of Judaism, different ways of worshiping as Jews, this is where it kind of reached its full flowering due to the pluralistic nature of American society. But nonetheless, American Jews continued to pursue the elusive dream of unity. In the 1880s, for example, leaders of the Russian Jewish immigrant community were unnerved by what seemed to be the total chaos of religious life in the country's largest city. Humble marriage performers and ritual slaughterers were declaring themselves great rabbinic authorities and vying with one another for influence and prestige. If one did not like the opinion of one rabbi, there were plenty more you could try out. Dismayed by this turn of events, a committee of Jewish leaders imported a prestigious rabbinic figure, Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Vilna, today Vilnius Lithuania, to come and serve as the chief rabbi of New York, a position which, in effect, because New York was the largest and most important city, have essentially made him the unquestioned religious leader of East European Jews in America nationwide. Yet their efforts proved a miserable failure. As much as individual Jews might have respected the rabbis' training and knowledge, the immigrants were not prepared to surrender their freedom to express their religion in the ways that they deemed best for their new lifestyles. One of the things that he tried to do was to regulate kashrut, to make sure that all slaughtering of kosher meat was all done according to the same standard. But to accomplish this, he had to employ an army of shachtim, of ritual slaughters, and they put a little tag on all of the chickens. And so everyone had to pay more for their meat. And believe me, they did not want to pay more for that. So there were protests. Paula Hyman, our late colleague in Jewish history, of the 1902 kosher meat boycott that was staged in New York. So it gives an example of how the desire for freedom and to not be bound by rabbinic authority, as they had been in Europe, they actually likened this tax to the korabka, the Russian tax that they placed on kosher meat. And they viewed this as kind of like czarist oppression. So following their kind of belief in American freedom, they threw off also rabbinic authority. Not that they stopped being traditional Jews, but they didn't believe in the idea of a chief rabbi saying that everyone had to do the same thing. So by the time of his death in 1902, Rabbi Jacob Joseph was a dejected, ineffectual figure in American Jewish life. History then repeated itself in 1908 when East European Jewish leaders facing problems of education and crime in the immigrant quarter, brought together Germans and Russians, Orthodox in reform, socialists and Zionists all under the umbrella of what they called the New York Kehila, or Jewish Community Council, which would attempt to craft a unified agenda and direct Jewish life in New York in the style of the old European Kehila or autonomous community that I started telling you about. By 1920, it lasted for a few years, but ultimately it was unsuccessful and not viable, and by 1922 the group disbanded, concluding that in America it was impossible to have one overarching Jewish community structure. The outlooks and goals of American Jews were simply too diverse to be reined in under one central authority. So the lesson here is not to be too worried about what seems like a lack of unity in the American Jewish world. The contentiousness of Jewish politics is not necessarily a sign of communal breakdown, but rather can be seen as representing a healthy pluralism, one that forms the very basis of Jews' ability to forge a collective identity in a free democratic society. As we look to the future, perhaps we should try to be more aware of this fact than our predecessors were. We will be more successful in ensuring a Jewish future if we embrace the notion that there are many ways to be Jewish and that diversity is often a greater sign of strength and vitality in the American setting than forced unity. Okay, third point. There will be forms of Judaism and Jewish expression that we cannot even imagine today. Some of the contemporary expressions of Jewish identity that we see today strike traditionalists as frivolous and inauthentic. The current interest among many in Kabbalah, for example, Jewish mysticism, the influence of Eastern religion on Jewish expression, or even the new Jewish hipster culture propounded by Hebe magazine and other publications, are just some examples of contemporary Jewish culture that are seen as kind of out of, you know, very different from more traditional forms. And while I'm not specifically endorsing any of these contemporary expressions, I would say that we have to be open to the idea that the Jewishness of the future may look nothing like what we now take for granted. I draw this conclusion because I can safely say that little about the way contemporary Jews currently express their Jewishness would have been recognized as normative by the Jews who arrived here 350 years ago, let alone those who lived 100 or even 50 years ago. So I have a couple of examples. Take, for example, the central role of women in the practice of Judaism today. In the 19th century, American Jewish women could not even hold membership or vote within the context of most American Jewish congregations. Even though by the late 19th century they made up the majority of attendees at religious services. Women were generally limited to leadership in auxiliary organizations that were designed to provide for the material needs of American synagogues, but not to play a central role in governing them. By 1973, however, the reform movement had ordained its first woman rabbi, Sally Prezand. And in 1985, the conservative movement followed suit with the ordination of Amy Eilberg. Today, in the Orthodox movement, there have been innovations in many quarters to find new roles for women and to validate their religious experience and desire for leadership. And I would also mention in this connection the bat mitzvah, which no one would think today that it's particularly new, or that it's something that doesn't sit very naturally in all the movements, although it's different in each movement. There are bat mitzvahs in orthodoxy as well as reform, conservative, et cetera. But the first bat mitzvah that we know of in the United States was in 1922, was the daughter of Mordechai Kaplan. And he was considered a radical. I mean, this was something that nobody was doing. And actually, his daughter was bat mitzvah at the synagogue that he created in New York, a society for the advancement of Judaism. And it didn't catch on. Kaplan was way ahead of his time. By the 30s, it was starting to make some inroads in the conservative movement. But really, not until the 60s and 70s did it really become a much more mainstream phenomenon. So it's just another example of something that we just take for granted today but would have been almost unheard of even in the early 20th century. Okay, another example. When American Zionists began to agitate for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1898, they were shunned by the American Jewish leadership, which at that time was made up primarily of central European Jews and their descendants who had been in the U.S. for several decades and had acculturated to American ways. They were mostly of reform religious practice. Reflecting the reform ideology of that era, they felt that the Jews were not a nation but merely a religious denomination. Any other suggestion, they argued, opened up Jews to the charge of dual loyalty. America was their Palestine, the saying went, Washington or Cincinnati, depending on where you were a rabbi, was their Jerusalem. By the late 1930s, however, world events made the notion of a Jewish homeland more plausible and the large wave of Russian Jewish immigrants who supported the movement rose to a position of leadership in the American Jewish community, including the reform movement. Because of that, Zionism, despite all the predictions to the contrary, became a majority movement among American Jews and quickly took its place as the centerpiece of American Jewish identity. Today, more than 50 years after the creation of the State of Israel, it's more than 50 years, Zionism is a major force within the reform movement that once rejected it and reform rabbis spend a year in Israel as part of their training at the Jerusalem branch of the Hebrew Union College. Okay, another scenario. At the turn of the century, a leading Orthodox authority, Rabbi Jacob Wolofsky, known by the acronym the RIDBAZ, decried the giving of sermons in English as a sign of the decline and disintegration of Orthodox Judaism in America. By the 50s and 60s, Orthodoxy did appear to be in sharp decline and was widely considered a dying movement. Today, however, Orthodoxy is claiming thousands of Balechuva returners to the faith and is the fastest growing religious movement within American Judaism. Interestingly, the main prayer book used by Orthodox Jews has extensive English language instructions for the majority of worshipers who were not born into a traditional lifestyle. So it's just another example of how things turned out very differently than could be imagined 50 years ago. So given these examples, it is only reasonable to believe that when the 400th or 450th anniversary of Jewish settlement in America is celebrated, there will be forms of Judaism and Jewish expression that will be far from what Jews today consider normative. So will Orthodox Judaism have women rabbis as some Orthodox feminists have predicted? Will there still be distinctive movements labeling themselves Orthodox conservative and reform? Or will American Judaism have moved into a post-denominational phase in which individual expression becomes more important than group identity? Will Jewishness only survive as a religious faith as some have suggested? Or is there a chance that secular forms of Jewish identity will make a comeback? These are just some questions that scholars have asked in recent years about the American Jewish future, but I hesitate to even suggest the direction that Jewishness will take. We probably cannot even conceive of the ways Americans will be expressing their Jewishness a century from now. And that brings me to my fourth and final point, which is that the most significant movements for Jewish change and renewal often come from the peripheries of the Jewish community, rather than from the center. Despite the great deal of time, community leaders and professionals spend in trying to find ways of attracting unaffiliated Jews to become more active in the activities of the established Jewish community, history shows that it often works the other way around. I hate to say this because I know it disappoints all the people who work so hard to find ways of attracting Jews to be more active, but the great periods of renaissance that American Jewry has experienced over the last three and a half centuries have usually been sparked not by the established leadership, but by marginal figures who were deeply disaffected from the status quo and were looking for new answers, new ways to be Jewish that spoke to them in ways that the Jewish establishment was unable to. So a wonderful example of this is Henrietta Zold. If you know who she is, she was the daughter of a Baltimore rabbi, Benjamin Zold, who found the staid, materialistic surroundings of her father's Americanized German Jewish congregation stifling and spiritually empty. She was born in 1869, I believe, so this is the end of the 19th century. She was born early, I think born 1860. So in 1879 she was a young woman writing articles for the American Jewish press under the pseudonym Shulamit, and she wrote how religious services in her city were, quote, woefully neglected on Friday Eve when there is usually a ball at one of the principal clubhouses, and she didn't want to go there, she wanted them to be in synagogue. Elsewhere, she described them as suffering, quote, from a lack of intelligence and an indifference to literary pursuits. In her quest for a more robust Jewish spirituality, she became attracted to the new Russian Jewish immigrants who began to arrive in Baltimore in the 1880s. She was energized by their idealism, their seeming authenticity, and their desire to become American while maintaining much of their historic culture. She sought out their meetings they met in a literary society and she went there, and that is where she first learned about Zionism from them. As one biographer described Zold's outlook, the acculturated Jews at her father's congregation had the souls of bookkeepers, but the Russian immigrants had the souls of Jews. She was especially drawn to their Zionist outlook which she saw as a means of revitalizing what had become the thin meaningless religion of American Jews. Yet, Zold was hardly in a position to influence the masses.  This is the Anglo, the German press of the acculturated community for advocating what had become a taboo among the Jewish elite. As a woman, even those who shared her ideology kept her relegated to menial positions within the Zionist movement for advocating theoretical articles or taking leadership roles. By 1912, however, Zold decided she could no longer work within the confines of the existing Jewish organizational structure. She pushed out on her own and founded Hadassah, a women's organization designed to establish healthcare facilities in Palestine and also to demonstrate how Zionist work could enliven Jewish consciousness in the United States. The Jewish women who were looking for the same type of meaningful experience Zold craved for Hadassah eventually grew into the largest membership organization of the American Jewish world. One other quick example, the same thing happened in the 1960s when a generation of young people also rebelled against what they viewed as the shallow Judaism of their middle class suburbs where they grew up. Paralleling the energy of the protest movements of that period the movement for Jewish renewal helped introduce into American Jewish life new creative liturgies, rituals and forms of worship like the Chavoura which started as this very iconoclastic thing and now many many congregations of all denominations have their Chavoura service. It's an informal type of Jewish prayer group that stressed informality, egalitarianism and the use of music and other forms of creative expression. The same generation of young people was responsible for pushing the Jewish establishment to address issues like the plight of Soviet Jewry which had not assumed a very central place on the Jewish communal agenda before that time. The student struggle for Soviet Jewry a movement established in 1964 on college campuses made the plight of Russian Refusenix a kind of civil rights movement for American Jews. In the process it helped give American Jews a new focus along with American Zionism for understanding their difference and special mission in American life. What we learned from this is that in looking to the Jewish future we have to pay great attention to the voices outside the Jewish establishment. It is often with them that the future of Jewish community life rests. So in closing I hope these insights have given you a sense that although the questions and questions faced by American Jews today sometimes seem more urgent and severe than they have in the past they are in fact not all together different from those faced by previous generations. This in no way is meant to minimize the challenges Jews face today in navigating their place as a minority group in a very embracing American society but it does hopefully provide greater context for better understanding the dynamics that have shaped the Jewish experience in the United States and will likely continue to shape it over the next century. Thank you. I think this is on. Oh it is on. Why don't we open the floor for questions? Oh wait I'm going to come over wait. I'm the parent like many of us here of millennials and they're telling me religion is dead organized religion no one wants a part of it why should you belong to a synagogue your organizations are a waste of time and whatever and I was so upset and now hearing this it energizes me but do you have any tips as to how my daughter is involved in Hillel in college I'm not worried about her I'm worried about my son 25 thinks all of this is a crock what can we do to energize them? Right so it's funny because I give this talk about how these things come from the peripheries and they don't come from the establishment and then usually all the people who are active in the federations and so on come up to me afterwards and say so what can we do and you know it's sort of like the opposite of what I see has happened in the past you know I just think that of course we all want to do things and also not to downplay the tremendous role that all of the types of programs that I've mentioned have played but you know sometimes these things work in strange ways and also people's identities work in ways that you know at different stages of life somebody might appreciate something someone might rebel at one stage of life but then you know come around to something very different at another stage of life and in fact there are really interesting theories not only Jewish life but about immigrant life there was a famous historian of immigration called Marcus Lee Hansen and he had a theory called Hansen that was later called Hansen's law and he said you know the immigrants they were trying to get away from their difference they wanted to be accepted but then the second generation that didn't have that background you know that it kind of comes full circle and by the time you get to the grandchildren they're looking for affiliation so it all depends on your context so at one point in life depending on your background if your parents are trying to tell you you should do this you should go to Hillel you know so on those are often the times that people want to run away from those things because they want to experience what's out there but it may be that in another setting in another set of circumstances they will that you know it doesn't mean that it's not there or that it won't come back or that it's not a part of their identity it's just that just like in different periods of history the community is facing one you know set of challenges or another in individuals lives you see the same thing it's not just a uniform track but people are more or less engaged at different stages of life so I guess that's the best consolation I can give to a parent is that so much different than what you in America faced a hundred years ago I mean my parents have described to me when they were in their 20s they weren't members of synagogues so the whole idea of you know how do we engage young people in synagogue life or Jewish organizational life after they've left their parents homes before they become parents I think that's been an issue for a while that's right yeah that's what I'm I would agree yeah David you talked a little bit about Zionism and the effect of Zionism on Jewish experience I'd like to explore that a little bit more with you I'd like to understand what you're thinking is on Israel and how the existence of Israel is an impetus to the American Jewish community if it is because when you when you observe what happened in 1948 with the declaration of the state and then in 1967 and then other events like the rescue and 1973 and so forth those things provided a huge increase in the Jewishness of the American Jewish community and so I'd like to hear you talk a little bit about the impact of Israel and what goes on with Israel, Israel's future the risks that Israel to Israel's existence, what effect that might have on the American Jewish community so as I mentioned Zionism has become although in the early years of the Zionist movement American Jewry was not particularly enthusiastic about Zionism the older, acculturated American Jewish community and that was also true in Western Europe all of those communities but by the 30s Zionism was mainstream that most American Jews were avid Zionists and in the wake of World War II it came to play even a more central role in American Jewish identity because after World War II the United States assumed the mantle of leadership of the Jewish world with the communities in Western Europe decimated by the Holocaust America and Israel became the only two large Jewish communities in the world and American Jews were much more financially able and to play a leadership role and so supporting Israel became a major responsibility of American Jews so Israel and America played an interesting complementary role that there are many theories of Jewish life in America and of American Zionism that you can't have one without the other that Israel has needed the support of the diaspora Jews but American Jews have needed Israel and they give each other different things. I mentioned Henrietta Zold but she had some colleagues from the same period who were building on the theories of Ahad Ahm creating a kind of theory of what Zionism meant in the diaspora there was an argument one of the reasons people were against them originally they thought it meant you wanted to leave and go move to Palestine but what they said is no you can be a loyal American Jew but Zionism plays a role in that it's an anchor for Jewish identity and that American Jews need that to sustain their Jewish culture and to be a focus for their identity and culture as much as the Jews in Israel need the support of American Jew and so it's this kind of complementary relationship and I think that's kind of been one of the main ways of thinking about it since World War II and you know you see different stages where it becomes even more important certainly the 67 war was a major moment where American Jews rallied to the support of Israel that among this younger generation of Jewish activists who were leading this Jewish renewal movement Zionism especially through that war became a real centerpiece of more recent Jewish identity and I always think it's interesting how if you look at different ways that American ethnic groups celebrate their culture Israeli culture and Israel have become the way Jews in America celebrate their distinctiveness so for example in New York they have the Puerto Rican day parade and they have the Irish day parade but they don't have the Jewish parade they have the Israel parade the Israel has become you know when you send your kids to summer camp the way that they you know in many many summer camps of different denominations and so on Israeli culture learning Hebrew relating to Israel has become the kind of expression of what Jewish culture means for American Jews so it I can't overstate how crucial that relationship has been not just for supporting Israel but for sustaining how we have American Jews that was a very good lead into my question when I was young social action and just social justice was very important and a lot of my friends were involved in the civil rights movement and so forth and it seems to me that Israel has and that's thought of Israel and doing things has wiped out the Jewish social justice movements and I you know with the environment and so many other areas that Jews were very involved with and now it seems like all our efforts are going to Israel and I think that takes out a lot of young people who care about social justice I think that it's probably not as competitive you know much as a politician as you're perceiving because there still are great movements for Jewish social justice today there are organizations devoted to fighting hunger there are organizations there are all kinds of organizations devoted to Jewish social justice and in fact even some of the major organizations like the anti-defamation league I mean social justice is one of the key issues that we have to deal with the anti-defamation what I will say is that when you look at social justice and Zionism and also I would say that there's an aspect of Zionism that is bound up in social justice and that part of the vision of Israel among Zionist thinkers was that it was a place that social justice would be you know so this is a theme that's been developed within Zionism as well but still Zionism and social justice represent two aspects of Jewish identity one is more universalistic right so the social justice piece emanates mostly from reform Judaism when reform Judaism was crystallizing in the end of the 19th century they hit on social justice as a way of expressing what Jewishness meant that worked very well with also their desire to be part of a larger world it was a way of distilling the ideas of monotheism of Jewish religious thought and to apply it to action in the larger non-Jewish world so if you read the Pittsburgh platform of 1885 where reform rabbis laid down the principles of it stresses that social justice is one of the great tasks of Judaism in the modern era so you have to realize that that was a particular historical moment where they like I said just with people having different stages of life that was a particular moment when they were looking to integrate they were looking to say how can we take our Jewish tradition and apply it as we move into this larger world Zionism is a movement that stresses more Jewish particularism and so there have been moments when that was what Jews wanted to express for one reason or another first of all in times of persecution but you know it's no surprise that at the end of the 20th century as many Jews became more integrated they were looking for ways of retaining their particularity so the more and more Jews became part of American society they grew more and more concerned not about how do we fit in but how can we stay different people didn't worry about that much when they were new immigrants but when their children are not doing Jewish things they want to find ways of staying true so Zionism had a particular appeal I think part of the appeal of Zionism to those thinkers I was mentioning as an anchor as I said is that it was different than the actual experience of American Jews it's funny I teach in my class when I lecture on American Jewish history I have an assignment I have them think about the Holocaust and Israel as what I call two flash points of American Jewish identity and my question to them is Israel is another country it's not the experience of American Jews it's on the other side of the world it's a totally different type of Jewish experience and the Holocaust didn't happen in America and both of these things are not things that happened in America that don't so why are they the two overriding symbols that Jews cling to and thinking about what it means to be Jewish and I think my answer is that the more and more Jews became integrated they are looking for things that symbolize a Jewishness that's different from what they're actually experiencing so they want to hold on to a sense of themselves as an organic separate community that is disappearing in our own experience so Israel as I said it provides kind of an anchor a way of keeping in touch with a sense of what it means to be Jewish that's no longer that present in American Jewish life the Holocaust I think and why there's so much thinking and writing about the Holocaust is because Jews are not particularly persecuted they're very well accepted they're part of more sort of insiders than outsiders in many ways and yet they don't want to give up that sense of part of what it means to be Jewish is to be an outsider to be persecuted that's a very central aspect of how people think about Judaism so by keeping in touch with these symbols it sort of answers some of the needs that American Jews have so social justice I'd say it's still there but it all depends on what situation Jews are in sometimes they want to express their connection to the larger non-Jewish world and that's still even though Jews are very much there there are still many times when they want to express that maybe it's less than what it was in 1885 and with Israel and things like the Holocaust those come to the fore when Jews want to show that they're different than other Americans so it just depends on what situation when these things so I wouldn't say they're necessarily opposed to one another but they just come out in different situations that was a very long answer sorry along with that the issue of into marriage is a big concern and is there anything that you have from the past that could make us a little more optimistic about the future well you know in some ways I tried to stress continuities in what I was talking about and that many of the problems we have are similar but there are certain things that are obviously each historical period has its own challenges that are new intermarriage is something that on the scale that it's existing today has never really been like that in the early 20th century there was a study done in 1908 of New Yorkers and which groups were marrying outside of their own group and Jews were the lowest of any immigrant group Jews the only group that married outside of their own group less than Jews were African Americans but Italians Germans every other immigrant group had more so my point is there was a very low single digit level of intermarriage in the early 20th century and it grew a little bit after World War II but it really started to assume more greater proportions in the 70s 80s because it followed the path of integration Jews even though Jews were Americanized in the 20s and 30s they still lived in separate neighborhoods they mostly socialized with other Jews it wasn't until they started moving to the suburbs living among non-Jews going to college working you know all that had to happen first so it took another generation and then you start getting the high intermarriage rate so it is unprecedented in that degree the only thing that I would say is that you know and this is something constantly debated by sociologists and some have argued that it won't necessarily lead to the conclusion that we assume that we're basing our assumptions on past trends and because it's so unprecedented there's an assumption that intermarriage automatically leads to communal disintegration you know assimilation, decline but you know there's some reason to have hope that it doesn't always necessarily lead to one predictable outcome that it can actually be something that leads to heightened engagement that sometimes it creates a situation where the non-Jewish partner non-Jewish origin and the Jewish spouse become more engaged in thinking about Judaism and they more self-consciously become members of the Jewish community but it's just an example of that they're always trade-offs certainly in many many many cases that's not the case the only thing I can say is just that I've learned not to always assume that things will work in the future the way they have in the past and that all kinds of unpredictable things can happen I have a question I wanted to ask you about you're talking about needs that Jews have one of the things where I'm not sure if the past can help us all that much is in what used to be the Jewish need for Jewish community and you know I know affiliation rates are low but there are different ways that Jews can affiliate but I guess what I'm really thinking about isn't so much replacing community with individualism but replacing what I would call real communities with virtual communities I mean I have three children who are millennials and several of my children believe that they're members of Jewish communities even though it's online you read about the phenomena of people today not traveling to bar and bot misfas but instead having bar and bot misfas streamed and they feel that they're actually there now maybe this isn't a bad thing you know you can make the argument that there isn't a wedding and so on bar and bot misfas where they can't physically be there but isn't to me there's something about a virtual community that I think is different than being part of an actual physical community I'm wondering if in any way the past can help us in kind of shaping these new virtual communities that we seem to have well I mean it sort of goes back to what I was talking about at the opening of my talk which is we tend to judge things that are happening around us what we know from the past but sometimes that's not very helpful because we aren't yet conscious of the fact of how transformative what's going on around us is so my guess is that those are extremely I mean just the changes in technology alone that we're experiencing will result in a very very different culture that we can't even understand in another 50 years and I would be very surprised if it didn't have profound influences on Jewish identity I mean also just the amazing number of all kinds of opportunities to connect I mean there are people there are Orthodox Jews who do dafyomi through texting and stuff now you know which is a daily study of the Talmud page there are scholars working on how internet is transforming Jewish identity in America so yes I just think it's hard for we tend to judge things by our previous standards but yes I totally think that that will likely have a very transformative impact any other okay well then we're going to bring this evening to a close and I want to thank Eric Goldstein so much for being with us my pleasure one thing we know the next president of the United States will not be Jewish but they will have a Jewish son-in-law yeah no matter which one it is that's true right thank you all for coming our next event is October 6th the annual Daniel Pearl World Music Days concert this year we're bringing in from Brooklyn Dan Sacks who is an independent rock musician who is frontman for a group called the Leon they take Sephardic folk songs and give it a kind of rock edge to it Dan will be here performing in the black box at the quick center those of you who have ever been in the black box know it only seats 120 people so reservations are absolutely a must Dan is coming up and performing with an original member of De Leon, Amy Crawford who will be on percussion and keyboard it should be wonderful evening of again Sephardic music mixed with rock I can't even describe his music to you it's wonderful they have three CDs out I've listened to them the last one was recorded in Mexico City it should be a wonderful evening in a black box free of charge and we hope as many of you as possible will join us good night


When talking about colour photography from back in the day, Alex Webb doesn't seem to get the same recognition at least in some circles as the likes of Saul Leiter, Ernst Haas, Fred Hertzog, and of course the ever divisive William Eggleston. Perhaps it's because he's drawn to locations that aren't quite as hip as a 1950s New York street scene, or that he's photographed with their inky black shadows where one can lose themselves. Invite questions that aren't easily answered in a quick fire response on a forum. For almost 40 years, Alex Webb has been creating vibrant colour photographs of sometimes enigmatic and serendipitous moments in places that are at once both familiar and yet alien to Western eyes. Part street photography, part phone journalism and with a dash of fine art. If you're not familiar with the photography of Alex Webb, this monograph, The Suffering of Light, is an excellent overview of the first three decades of a photographer whose images are both complex and rewarding. How's it, how's it? Alex Webb started his career in the mid-1970s and by 22, he was already a magnum non-Ami. Now despite being evidently well thought of by the likes of Magnum at the time, Webb himself didn't really feel that his photography was going anywhere quickly. He strongly felt this pull of travel. He wanted to get away from New England and as far as possible with where he was from. He started taking trips to Mississippi, the US-Mexico border and to Haiti. This change in location and seemingly was the shot in the arm that the young Webb needed for his photography. At this time, he was still photographing predominantly in black and white but slowly, slowly a sense of colour was beginning to develop and is what Alex calls an emotional response to the places that he was working in. It was in Haiti in 1979 that Webb says that the penny dropped for him and he finally started to see in colour. The first thing that springs to mind when I look at these photographs is that they feel more kind of real and earthy than somebody say like Fred Herzog for example but at the same time they don't feel real. They feel almost unreal and this is an idea that I'll get to in a moment. They do make me feel like I'm viewing something that's genuine.  Now neither body of work, both Webb's or Herzog is contrived but I feel with Webb's photography I feel like I'm an active participant in the image rather than just a static observer. The scenes draw me in, they wrap around my consciousness with their trademark shadows and the frames within frames within frames. At its most basic framing is the concept of taking a frame within a frame so this this roundel within the bridge is is framing the surfer and of course because of the iron work there it almost looks like a gun sight which I really love the idea of so that's it in a very basic level and we could all of us do do that in some way in our photography and like a lot of these concepts is exceptionally simple the idea is simple but execution is everything and it really helps to go from practice and develop an eye for these things. It's wonderful to have an example of a photographer who talks about his process honestly and and it's one that I'm sure a lot of us can hopefully you know relate to. He says that he simply wanders with his camera to allow that camera and his experiences to lead him where they will. I only know how to approach a place by walking for what does the street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk and then watch and wait some more trying to remain confident that the unexpected the unknown or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner. This seems to explain his ability to capture those moments because it becomes about being alert to his instincts. Quite often when people ask well-known photographers how they work and what they look for the answer is somewhat of a letdown it's not something like a rule or a quantifiable system it's a feeling it's a gut reaction or it's a vibe. Quite often the answer is I don't really know what I'm looking to photograph until I see it. Throughout Webb's photography you can feel and sense this idea of instinct leading him while each image feels carefully composed and thoroughly thought through they have this kind of reactionary feel to them the occasional blurred figure how a scene feels like it was just sensed out of the corner of our eye and we wheeled around to try and catch it that world that exists at once both next to us and behind us but that we can never really see fully with our own eyes. I hope that if you draw anything from looking at these photographs irrespective of whether you're aware of Alex Webb's photography or not that you appreciate how important that little voice inside all of us can be the little nudges and hints our instinct give us that you don't have to be a supremely talented photographer or have decades of experience you simply have to occasionally follow Obi-Wan's advice to let go and trust your feelings there's a technique in Alex Webb's photograph that is reasonably easy to understand the basics of but it's very difficult to master and once you've kind of sort of see it it's going to help you enjoy these photographs and and other people who use this technique in a far deeper way and talking about layering and framing that's not a massively hardcore technique and and there's one that most people can use in one form or another basically layering means you take the foreground the middle ground and the background and have them all work together to tell a more involved story if you think about it like a Wes Anderson thing there are there are horizontal planes that move away from you if you have something in each of those planes telling its own story when you put them all together in the same frame it makes the whole thing feel more alive and interconnected it gives it a real sort of depth layering is a fantastic way of really bringing an image to life and and this is a great example that that i'm very fond of we have the foreground here these two kids sort of dominating the foreground here they're slightly out of focus and then in the middle ground we have these three figures here this kind of guy's sort of in between ever so slightly of course then there's the the guys in the background now each telling their own individual little stories here at the front these two kids maybe they're siblings or something but maybe you know this guy sort of said look the photographer's trying to take some pictures you know get get out the way get out the way and you know this guy's obviously quite interested and the way sort of connects to the background is or the middle ground is that you have these guys here who are quite clearly interacting with with what's going on here and this this guy's looking at at Alex Webaz as this gentleman here on the edge of the frame so if we if we sort of chop all of that out there's still some interest going on here as is there is there but when you bring the two together it just makes a bit more sort of story coming through and of course then you have these guys in the background who are not really paying attention they're not involved in the story at all but one of the things that I really like and it's most likely just completely serendipitous is but there is a limb here which I'm not sure if you can see particularly well but here in the book it's going to I'll put a bigger version of this up on screen this limb here echoes this arm here so it's like they're both pushing something away and and I really like that because it sort of brings the whole thing almost full circle that's sort of coming around and that there's a really good example of layering sounds like a lot of theory and stuff and I don't really want to use the word theory because it sounds like a boring you know sort of textbook talk and and it's always best I think with these sort of things to look at visual examples and if you are looking for more I don't think you can do much better than Alex Web when you boil it down it's helpful to remember that street photography is most about failure you know Alex himself he said it's 99% failure and success however you want to define it can be a mysterious and exploratory eye concept Alex Web doesn't claim to know why he happened to have his camera to his eye the very moment a young boy jumped off of a wall in a little Mexican border town why he happened to turn a certain corner and walk into a particular barbershop in Istanbul what I particularly enjoy about Alex Web's photography and the way that he uses color is the way that he pairs color with shadow not only do these shadows help to intensify the colors within the frame they bet they are also creating spaces where we are sort of left to fill in our own parts of the stories much like in the images of Desiree Dolrin there are swathes of dark where the unknown images and things can dwell it's arresting to see the world like Alex Web photographs it at once both so familiar and yet not really how we experience it with our own eyes to be confident enough to purposefully hide things from us in those shadows and almost ascent our senses with the color both real and imagined of his world if you're interested in discovering more photographers and seeing how they can make you feel I'll link to a playlist that I've created for you at the end of this video Alex Web is an extremely prolific photographer and he's published 17 monographs now this is great but it does mean that it's hard to know like you know where to start if you're looking to to buy some of his books and I often fall back into music mode when I discover a new photographer who has an extensive back catalog and go for something that's the greatest hits first unlike in the music world it's quite difficult with photographers monographs especially the earlier work or their lesser known work because they go out of print and then they cost a fair bit to invest in to seeking out books like the suffering of light which give an extremely wonderful introduction to a photographer's body of work is a great way to expand the scope of your library without jumping too heavily into a particular photographer discovering new photographers is one of the greatest pleasures I put a playlist up on screen for you right now that has some photographers in there whom I'm sure are going to excite you go and check it out thanks ever so much for joining me here today and I look forward to seeing you again soon


Now, and I'd like to thank Barry Edmonds for giving up his time today. Barry's from Nottingham, University of Nottingham. He's worked there for a number of years, and this was through a recommendation of our last chair of Elsig, who worked quite closely on her PG Sir with Barry. Maybe you'll talk about some of that, Barry. I'd like to hand over to Barry and we'll have... Do you think about 20 minutes or 30 minutes of view, Barry? I think probably about 30 minutes. OK. And then, so, store up your questions, stick them in the chat area, and let's settle in. Barry, please feel free to take it away. Thank you. OK. Yeah, hello. Welcome. Thank you for joining me today. So my name is Barry Edmonds from the University of Nottingham. The work we're going to talk about today came about in actually my previous post. I started a new job yesterday, but up until then, I was the programme lead for the university's student digital capabilities projects. And today, we're going to consider some of the data and the sort of strategic thinking that have been needed to develop that body of work to support the student digital capabilities of our undergraduates. What do I mean by digital capability? Well, in our context, we're largely talking about the GISC framework for digital capability, which comes about from their building digital capabilities service, which is a subscription service. And their framework can be compartmentalised in many different ways. Here, I've broken it down into 15 distinct statements, distinct areas of digital capabilities that might be digital wellbeing. So looking at your sort of health, your safety, relationships, work-life balance, or it might be data literacy, the capacity to create and manage access using digital data. So that gives us an idea about what I mean by digital capability. Although as we'll see throughout the presentation, that slightly changes in our instance. So today, I'm talking about a sort of broad spectrum of things that have happened. And we feel that the success that we've had to date has resulted from the integration of sort of four different types of activity that's allowing us to take forwards a comprehensive programme for students that's adopted across the university. And while addressing the university's strategic priorities, meets the students' needs, but also sustainable over that longer term. So as I'll take you through the presentation, you'll see I've used symbols on most of the slides to indicate what kind of activity was going on. And those can be the strategic alignment. So that's sort of like real buying from the university itself. Stakeholder engagement, where we've gone out to consultation with individuals or schools, for example, data collection and delivery of student-facing resources. And I would suggest that these four strands of activity are really the sort of first key takeaway for this presentation in that all four are needed to make sustainable progress. And I guess the second key message of this presentation is that change requires time. Our story, as you can see on this timeline, begins back in 2018. And in fact, it's still very much a work in progress. And to be fair, even before 2018, there were projects, ideas, individuals that paved the way for our stories to begin. They just fall out the remit of the story that I'm telling you today. So I'm going to start by providing a brief recap of the first stages of that timeline, work that was undertaken by my colleague, August Both Newell, who was my predecessor as the program lead for digital capabilities projects and then was promoted to Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at the University. So you can see in these early days, the timeline indicates a mix of high level university buy-in and stakeholder engagement activities along with some data gathering. And overall, I would say that the success of this first period came from having funded posts to deliver an evidence based approach to educational enhancement. So back in 2018, a number of things happened one being the funding that was available for certain posts. So we were able to fund five faculty level digital learning directors. So a sort of a digital champion of a senior academic within each of the faculties to really promote the digital agenda to share good practice across the faculty and across within a faculty and across faculties. And the second post of funding being for the program lead role, as I say, that was Elizabeth Newell in these early days. And up until yesterday was myself, I've just changed jobs. And I guess another sort of thing that came about was at the same time, careers and employability service. We're working to identify which professional competencies should be articulated through the curricula to increase the employability of our graduates. So those would be, as you see on this slide, professional communication, coordinating with others, self-reflection, but also digital capabilities. So in the autumn of 2018, we subscribed to JISC's services, the two services that impact the Building Digital Capability service and to the Digital Experience Insights service. And in the first instance, we used the Building Digital Capability service and in particular tool that they have, which is a sort of a series of questions called the Digital Discoveritl and it asks about a person's perceived sort of confidence capability in each of those capability areas. And we run that with current students, current of 2018, I should say. And during the process of collecting that data and over the winter, we decided to run a similar survey with some of our alumni. We created a bespoke survey for those, but based on the questions in the Discoveritl. And so we reached out to alumni who graduated in the past five years and asked them essentially what digital capabilities are needed in a workplace and which of these have been developed at university and what support would have prepared them better for the workplace. So we take a look at the data that we collected during this first phase. Of around 1200 students completed the Discoveritl and students, you can say, felt most proficient in capabilities of digital identity management, digital sort of ICT proficiency and digital communication. Plus at the other end, digital capabilities where they help these proficient being digital participation, creation of digital learning activities. Those are activities to support the learning of others and digital research and problem solving. And then you see the spread of scores throughout the rest of the capabilities. Now, with our alumni data, we had three hundred and seventy five alumni respondents that completed our bespoke survey. And we asked them, as I said, what is important to your job? And you can see here the top three capabilities that are identified as being important to their jobs, being ICT proficiency, information literacy and data literacy. Whereas the three things that they thought were least important to their jobs being digital participation, that sort of participating in networks, digital teaching and digital identity management. However, what is striking with this data is not so much which ones they thought were most important to their jobs, but the second set of bars, which is to what extent they thought those skills were developed on their course. I think it's quite striking that we see alumni thought that their degree had not really prepared them that well for the level of capability. Of any of those capabilities there to do their jobs. And now I'm going to see this slide. It really does strike me how low we're hitting on those percentages for developing digital skills, you know, particularly for information literacy, data literacy. You would have thought we'd be developed to a high degree during the normal course of studies. But it's obviously something that's lost along the way there. What we're teaching doesn't really have a workplace alignment. So we took those sets of data and shared it with the schools, faculties around the university, through a random consultation and intended to help academic colleagues determine where they saw or where they saw the gaps in the provision where they could do better. To address that balance. And I guess it would have been easy at this stage to work with small groups of early adopters from those consultations to implement small scale local school-based changes. So the early adopters, I guess, such digital champions. As I said, the plan was to implement changes across curricula, across the whole of the university. And so we took a different route. And what we ended up doing was writing a white paper that led to 16 recommendations being made to the university's teaching and learning committee. Now, this is a high-level committee that reports basically only to the university executive board. So we took a different route to the university board sort of outlining what we thought, what changes we needed to make in the institution to, for say, the development of those capabilities. So that graduates do come out of their degrees feeling better able to do their jobs. And so then we moved things there along the lines of offering Microsoft Office certification to students and developing creative skills with Adobe Creative Cloud or computer programming. And so along with that sort of white paper sort of recommendations of actions that we could take, we also requested that we dedicated teaching and learning subcommittee comprised of staff on students, external stakeholders be established to support us in advocating for student digital capabilities across the institution. And the first task of this steering group was to divide a scoring matrix to help prioritize those recommendations that we've made, which ones are gonna be most cost-effective, easiest to implement, and develop a delivery plan essentially. Okay, so the steering groups established and they're off now looking up those recommendations and how we can best make use of them. Meanwhile, we look at our other subscription with JISC, which is the Digital Experience Insights Survey. This survey is a national survey managed by JISC that can be conducted with teaching staff, professional services staff, postgraduate researchers and obviously undergraduates. Each institution gets their own report but can also benchmark themselves against other institutions that buy into the service. The survey addresses some ways and attitudes to work in digitally and the support for riders rather than what digital skills and individual holds. And we can see here, we completed this in spring 2020. In fact, we completed it right before we went into lockdown. So it almost provided a sort of a useful benchmark for ways of working online before everyone was forced to work online. So it's sort of a nice benchmark. This is how everyone was feeling pre-pandemic at the university. I'll come back to this later on in the presentation. So we move on to delivering change. In summer 2020, we now look at starting to deliver resources to help our students. So we've learned many lessons since March 2020 about supporting students who've experienced business as usual at the university, coming into lectures on campus and then having to transition to lockdown learning. But we knew that we had a whole cohort of learners coming in a new session that were going to be anxious about starting a degree that was largely online and we needed to meet their needs. So rather than focus on digital capabilities at this point, we decided that we just needed to create a resource that welcomed new students and explored the ideas of learning online. And so we created a micro website covering the basics of what we felt all new students would need, like what teaching would look like that year, so it might be blended, it might be all online, how to join teams meetings, sort of a warm handshake at the beginning, sort of say this is what digital means and how you're likely to experience it in that first semester because we didn't know at the time how long we were going to be in that situation. That went down really well with the new starters, got 30,000 views, but it was really sort of a stop-gap measure intervention before we returned to our digital capabilities work. Meanwhile, the steering group for digital capabilities has been working through those recommendations and I've come up with a delivery plan. The delivery plan sets out three work strings, three working groups of individuals that would work towards providing digital capability to our undergraduates and those three working groups were the digital students that aimed at first year students, the digital researcher, which is midterm students, aimed at sort of the skills and competencies that you will need to deliver, for example, a successful research project. And finally, the digital graduate which is really looking at the employability of our undergraduates, so focusing on sort of mid to final year students. Actually, as we work through the year, we realise we don't need that digital researcher working group as a separate entity and they sort of get brought into the digital students and we look at now at sort of two working groups, focusing really on the first couple of years of undergraduates, a study called the digital students and then finally the digital graduates will pass up expanding their horizons of our undergraduates. So the digital students, we can move there fast forward to autumn 2021 and the digital student working group have been working all year to produce a Moodle module available to all students initially at new students, sort of taking the place of the Student Guide to Digital Learning Micro-Site, but now with a suite of resources and competency statements that they could work through to self-assess and reflect on their digital proficiency. We've got buy-in from faculties and schools, hold dedicated sessions during induction weeks to promote these resources. So if we think back to those capabilities I mentioned earlier, there were very much statements in a broad sense and you can see that capability sort of language being used here on the sort of the bold quote at the top of the page.  So very, very precise so I can send and receive messages using university email. And we set the module up so that students could tick each of the competencies that they felt they were good at and those that they couldn't tick there were resources available by little interactive learning packages that they could go and learn as they format an email for example and then come back and tick the appropriate competency to say that now they feel confident that they can do it. So that's the way the digital student got to last autumn and they're now working on delivering resources for the rest of that first year and second year experience for students with the view to making new resources live at the start of this new session in September. Because we now have more than those in capability statements we have lots of competencies we decided to represent our competencies as a sort of tube maps showing how different capabilities or competencies interplay with one another so a real nice visual representation for students and that sort of echoed throughout the Moodle side so they really appreciated that. The digital graduate meanwhile I say were focused on employability so in this instance digital student is very much sort of activities that you could undertake to support your learning in your curriculum with the idea being that students could go there of their own free will and do the resources or an academic might point them to those resources when a particular skill is needed whereas the digital graduate were focused on sort of extracurricular opportunities for learning and development that expand the students thinking beyond that of their normal curriculum so our plan is to offer interventions to undergraduates some in the mid stage to sort of final year that remedy weaknesses that our alumni have identified particularly thinking sort of like non-stem subjects here might benefit from you taste the sessions on the artificial intelligence or programming and coding how big data can inform decision making in a business workplace and then picking up on one of the weaknesses which is around digital learning activities or digital teaching which is where you sort of create resources to help others learn we set up a set of resources for peer mentoring which actually is piloted already and is live and I guess one of the challenges that we are going to face with the digital graduate is that it's extracurricular it seems to be something you do on top of your degree is that there's likely to be very low uptake on those resources and so we won't meet our target of helping our students become more employable but fortunately the university has an excellent mechanism already in place called the Nottingham Advantage Award which is led by the career service whereby students can reflect on their extracurricular activities and be evidenced to gain 30 credits towards their university transcripts and we're going to use this approach to promote our digital graduate offering to students so we'll set up a Moodle site with resources that students can engage in with no requirement that they do so but with the option to then complete some form of assessment through reflective writing for example presentation that will then give them the extra credits to their transcripts and we're hoping that this approach will really open the doors to the digital graduate work package resources to a wider array of students final part of the presentation now of entitled feeding back and looking forward feeding back and looking forward well earlier I mentioned that we ran the digital experience insight survey on the eve of the pandemic in 2020 we also ran it in spring of 2021 so mid-pandemic and so I'm just going to address what we did with the data that we collected there because I'm not touched on that yet I guess some context is required here in summer 2021 the university published a educational student experience strategic delivery plan which is I guess it should be fairly self-explanatory activities work packages that the university needs to take to ensure that we're delivering the highest quality education as part of this plan they listed key pieces of work that were going to be priorities for the university over the next two to three years this list comprised of 25 distinct work packages so how to improve welcome and induction weeks engagement with the student voice how to make the best of our states and infrastructure so in considering how to make recommendations based on digital experience insights data which as I said earlier is about attitudes to working digitally the support that we provide people to work digitally this digital experience insight provides a real key insight into how these work packages might go ahead and we undertook a mapping process of the data that we received from insights including sort of quantitative data or open text comments and aligned them to the 25 work packages and we're actually able to map across 18 of those work packages and I'll just give you a few examples of how that data could have some impact so the first example is our work package which is looking at the business case and procurement processes for video and lecture capture systems so this work package in the ASA Action Plan will determine what services we offer going forward and which providers we choose to select so when asked in the insight survey experiences of lectures our students reported that they made use of recorded lectures to a significantly greater extent than the rest of the sector and this is one of the key benefits of the insights data is that you can benchmark yourself against other HEIs or Russell Group Universities for example so this data then enables us to ask a whole host of questions so what accounts for this uptake in usage compared to the rest of the sector was it that we responded quicker in providing recorded lectures was it the way that we transitioned to online learning was it down to the existing infrastructure that made adoption of recorded lectures possible was it the choice of our service provider that enabled these things and these are questions that the work package leads for the ESC Action Plan will need to address and having this data on hand will help them make their decisions and help them to ask questions like those that I've just posed I will skip over this next one I'll do this one so as to reflect on sort of positive aspects of teaching online in the survey SAF and students so in the ESC Action Plan the teaching, learning professional development work package because it's on initiatives to raise the quality of our teaching and during the last two years all staff had to adapt their teaching styles quickly adopt new skills and technologies into their repertoire excuse me and as we saw earlier sorry excuse me as we saw earlier our students make greater use of recorded lectures but actually most of those recordings that our students viewed were of live online lectures so a recording of today's session for example so what did our staff think of delivering those online sessions and recording them well our Insight States cleaning case that while some enjoyed this experience of teaching this way and benefitted from the training that we gave them some had less well and require further assistance so having this kind of data available to us from the survey allows us to present professional development team for example with such data so that they can identify the best ways to reach out to those staff to ensure that students get the best learning experience should they just be delivering live sessions and recording them and making them available or should they be pre-recorded lessons these are questions for that work package needs to consider so we wrote individual reports for each of the work package needs dating that we aligned data to and set them the task of telling or responding with how they're going to respond to this data with their own work package and that we've managed to secure that there are proper governance structures reporting back to ESC the Education Student Experience Board that they will respond to this so not only we've collected the data we've shared the data we've ensured that then there are governance structures in place that they will now have to respond to the data that we've shared with them so that our data can have impact forward meanwhile time moves on again and in March 2022 we delivered the insight survey data again sorry the insight survey is again in March so can we call this post-pandemic probably not getting there we are returning to almost the university it'll be interesting to see whether the attitudes have changed over the course of this last year but that is a discussion for a future meeting so this is the digital learning journey that we've gone through so far at the University of Nottingham as I said our aim was to deliver a set of digital capability program of resources that will be applied across the university and hopefully embedded in curriculum we are still a long way from doing that I've touched on some of the resources that were produced so for the digital students and the digital graduate work packages and actually where we're at with those is that they are discrete pieces of work that students can go to and have a look at in their own time with no pressure although we are advocating that faculties and schools promote that and embed it in their curriculum as much as possible so if you go from working with individuals on small scale changes that was one approach we could have taken we've adopted this strategy of creating a universal resource that everyone can access and then asking schools to pick that up and embed it where they can the ultimate aim though is that over the next two to three years we get enough momentum behind these resources and packages that actually the resources that we've created wholesale just get moved into curriculum or point it at least embedded from our central website into individual modules at the university but we're still a long way away from that there are as I say small pockets of early adopters that are embracing our approach for example here we've got a colleague Jezz Turner in engineering as a professional competencies module as part of his engineering degree and is directly referring back to our digital student resources and awarding students with credit for reflecting on that process we have students doing research projects in the final year reviewing our digital student module getting feedback from other pharmacy students for example about the importance of digital capabilities the importance of the digital student module so we are slowly starting to make waves across the university so that the central resource does become more visible within schools and faculties and finally so another sort of example of how we start that way this sort of spreading we've got placement students now using our resources to reflect on the learning that they've undertaken whilst on their year-long work placements and directly relating that back to the competencies that we have on our digital student module I will leave it there thank you very much everybody I'm sure we can go back and look at individual slides or questions as they arise in the follow-up questions