Writer, Editor, and HistoriAn
I found plenty of helpful, interesting information about the Charleston JCC in the archive last week, but I also amassed a collection of the most endearing, charming names:
Flo Fleischman
Pinky Portugal
Arch Lugenbeel
Wally Butterworth
Rabbi Raisin
Puggy Solomon
And one of the best sign-offs I've ever seen on a letter...
"As ever, that tubby bundle of lard, Arnie."
This week I have had the distinct pleasure of working at the College of Charleston's Addlestone Library. As one of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture’s Charleston Research Fellows, I have been sifting through documents in three collections in the Jewish Heritage Collection. I hope to find archival sources within the papers of the Jewish Community Center, the Jewish Community Relations Committee, and the former-JCC Executive Director Nat Shulman that will allow me to add another Southern perspective to my dissertation. I'm curious about how the Charleston JCC dealt with integration and open membership, and whether the agency provided vital recreational and social services to diverse constituencies within their communities. Adding this case study will not only help broaden the geographic scope of my dissertation, but it will also situate my national story within another local context and help me make stronger comparative claims.
This week, I made it through half of the material in these collections, and I will be here another week finishing up. Charleston is a beautiful city, and I'm in no rush to leave!
I also had the opportunity to present my research to a group of Jewish and religious studies faculty members and community members on Wednesday. I spoke about the controversy over open membership at the New Orleans JCC in 1967-8, and how that demonstrates the complicated feelings that Jews had about sharing their private Jewish spaces with non-Jews and African Americans. Even those who supported Civil Rights and legal equality for all minorities--basic liberal values--often felt conflicted about relinquishing their Jewish spaces, because they worried that it could prevent the survival of an American Jewish identity. My curiosity about Charleston stems from this case in New Orleans. Did the Jews of Charleston feel similar anxieties, and did that prompt them to act in similar ways? Or did the local contingencies of this city make for a very different outcome here? After my talk, I was asked so many good questions by the attendees. It was heartening to see that many were making the same connections--about funding, Federation and communal politics, and racial politics--that I have tried to make within my dissertation. Several long-time members of Charleston's Jewish community also provided me with helpful names of people to contact, and shared with me their own memories and impressions about the JCC. It was an immensely fun and fulfilling experience, and I'm very thankful to the College of Charleston's Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture for inviting me to speak.
On Monday, June 5, 1950, a group of conference-goers filed into a room to participate in a session entitled "The Need for a Central Archives." Attendees were in Atlantic City for the Annual Meetings of the National Conference of Jewish Social Welfare, the National Association of Jewish Center Workers, and the National Council for Jewish Education. For five days, Jewish communal workers and educators could sit in on panels and lectures, visit with colleagues at meals, and contribute to committees that were charged with guiding these professional fields. The Conference Program was filled with practical panels like "Dynamics of Inter-Relationships in the Marital Counseling Process," "Characteristics of Youth Programming in the Synagogue-Center," and "Jewish Music Activity in the Center." Professionals could learn how to improve their practices and processes and could gather new ideas for programming--it was all directly applicable to the present. The Conference Program, however, described "The Need for a Central Archives" this way:
“The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the need for preserving institutional and organizational records and archives in the fields of Jewish community organization and social work, as well as methods of making them available for historical, social and professional research.”
This panel was forward-thinking. It pushed Jewish communal workers and educators to consider their legacy. How would future Jewish communal professionals learn from the past and continue to improve the field?
My dissertation could not be written without the foresight of the men (sadly, yes, all men) who led and participated in this conference session. As they went back to their agencies, Federations, and associations, they implemented filing systems (executed by women, their secretarial staff) to save and preserve the history of their work. Their forethought means that historians can now study how these organizations made decisions, big and small, and how those decisions had an impact on the communities they served.
From the Collections of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati, OH).
I was rifling through a folder of documents this morning when this little card fell out. It looked and felt like one of those small, folded name cards you would pick up at a wedding to locate the table number at which you will be seated. Before the age of email forwarding and "sharing" across social networks, it seems that you would place one of these cards at the top left corner of the paper(s) you wanted to share and then stapled through it to hold the packet together. You can faintly see where the staple was removed from this particular item. What particularly struck me was the language on the card: "I believe the attached may be of interest to you." Although the mechanism by which we share attachments is very different today, the digital transition did not significantly change the words we choose to describe the interaction! I'm pretty sure I've seen the same statement used when I've clicked a website's "email" button to send my friends articles or job postings. I'm a stationary fanatic, and this little find has me fantasizing about printing up some of my own attachment cards to keep on my desk...
My ten-day visit to the Center for Jewish History was incredibly productive. Despite being in New York for two weeks, time felt limited and I took the "smash-and grab" approach to archival research. I know I generally grabbed photos of relevant and valuable documents, but it will take me a few weeks to read through them all in detail and see if my first impressions were correct.
I photographed around 1500 pages of Annual Agency Budget Files from the records of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York (UJA-Federation). This humongous collection was just recently processed, and I'm one of the first historians to go through and see how JCCs like the Y of Washington Heights Inwood, Educational Alliance, and Bronx House negotiated annually with the Federation's Distribution Committee. This process was highly regimented throughout the 1950s and '60s. Executive secretaries (god bless them) saved all the important paperwork related to the application, including agencies' initial budget proposals, the Distribution Committee's announcements of annual allocations, and thorough accounting worksheets for each fiscal year. These files are thus a great way to ascertain the health of each individual agency throughout the tumultuous years of the urban crisis, because they report figures like: membership numbers; income from dues; number and kind of programs offered; number of full- and part-time staff; and size and condition of facilities.
While incredibly rich, these budget materials are also dense and tedious. I am going to have to give myself a crash course in accounting, which is a foreign language to me. I've always been better at spending money than keeping track of it! Ideally, the experience will familiarize me with organizational budgeting, which is a useful skill to have.
I'll end with a pitch for the American Jewish Historical Society archivists' excellent blog, This Can Go Back to the Archives, which chronicles the processing of the UJA-Federation records. Susan and her team highlight some of the most dynamic and intriguing documents from the collection, and I'm always surprised by what they dig up!
