Rock Concert

This past week, I have been writing a case study about the Senior Citizens Center established at the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood in 1973. As a result, I have been thoroughly rereading the minutes of the meetings held by the Y's Board of Directors in the 1970s. Although the Board devoted much of its discussion to its new programs for older adults, the minutes reflect that the Board was also concerned by declining participation in their programs for teenagers and young adults. They often discussed strategies to reengage lapsed members and recruit new ones.

One suggestion that arose again and again was a "rock" concert [puzzling quotation marks theirs, not mine]. Board members proposed a rock concert on three separate occasions in 1971 and 1972, without ever elaborating on what bands they could possibly get to play such a show. Neither did they reflect on the fact that teenagers may not be interested in an act or band that a group of middle-aged adults found palatable. 

In 1978, the Y actually did follow through on the strategy. In May of that year, the Y's Teen Supervisor, Stan Friedman, suggested to the members of the Board's Program Committee that they re-launch the Teen Program with a rock concert. The minutes recorded: "Members would be allowed to bring one friend. Again, a special invitation would go to the list of Jewish Teens. Stan said that a former gym member of the Y, Dennis Minogue, is now a band manager."

The concert was held in December, and in the intervening months the goal shifted from recruiting teenagers to recruiting college-aged young adults into a new Y program for this age group. Although staff member Martin Englisher reported to the Y Board that 110 people had attended the show, most were non-Jewish high school students who were not Y members. Englisher concluded, "It was felt that the concert, although it went well, did not really serve the Y's purpose."

Most remarkably, the rock concert continues to be an idea that adults suggest for teen recruitment and engagement. I texted a friend who works with teenagers in the Jewish community about the Y's history with rock concerts--admittedly, my description was hyperbolic--and she responded that this is an idea she still hears with regularity, despite rock music's precipitous decline in popularity in the 21st century.

The problem with suggesting a rock concert, besides its being freighted with nostalgia, is that it is not something that teenagers need. A rock concert is something that adults think teens want, and no one likes to be told what they should want or what they should find meaningful. With history on my side, I urge the adults who lead Jewish communal organizations to retire this strategy. 

Is VR a Useful Storytelling Medium for Historians?

This past Sunday, home delivery subscribers to the New York Times received a Virtual Reality (VR) viewer along with their newspaper. Meant to accompany the NYT Magazine's cover story, "The Displaced," the VR viewer gives the audience the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in the narratives they have just read. In the 360-degree interactive video, you follow the three refugee children featured in the print articles. To say you "follow" them does not do justice to the experience--your gaze does not follow their gaze. You are afforded the opportunity to take in the entire world as they see it, to look left when they look right. You see the children sitting on the truck bench behind them, the presence or absence of adults around them, the aid packages parachuting down from the sky above them, and the river beneath their boat. Of the decision to marry this subject with this medium, NYT Magazine Editor in Chief Jake Silverstein wrote: 

“We decided to launch The Times’s virtual-reality efforts with these portraits because we recognize that this new filmmaking technology enables an uncanny feeling of connection with people whose lives are far from our own. By creating a 360-degree environment that encircles the viewer, virtual reality creates the experience of being present within distant worlds, making it uniquely suited to projects, like this one, that speak to our senses of empathy and community. What better use of the technology could there be than to place our readers within a crisis that calls to us daily with great urgency and yet, because of the incessancy of the call, often fails to rouse us at all?”
— The Displaced: Introduction (November 5, 2015)

Uncanny is an appropriate word. When I finished watching the video, I burst into tears. It is a very different experience to see a life so different than your own than to read about it--you are able to visualize the extent and the scale of the crisis much more vividly. This pairs three intimate, emblematic portraits together with the mind-boggling vastness of the situation. You hear one voice describing the experience at the same time that you see the many, many others surrounding them who are (silently) enduring the same conditions. As a piece of journalism, it's incredibly effective. 

As soon as I finished watching the video, my first thought was, "Could historians make use of VR storytelling?" I believe the answer is yes, VR presents a really valuable medium for conveying past lived realities. Writing history is already an exercise in VR. As historians, we transport the reader to a past reality and help them connect with that lived experience. Narrative history already does what Silverstein identifies as the central benefit of this new medium: it "speak[s] to our senses of empathy and community." If VR can make journalism more vivid, immersive, and relatable, I believe it can also animate historical narratives. But so can standard documentaries. What does VR add? Or, perhaps more accurately, what would make historical VR worth the work? 

As I currently understand it, VR can best be used to demonstrate spatiality. I can imagine it being a powerful medium to convey what it would have been like to be a soldier standing on a battlefield, or to be living with ten other family members in a small tenement apartment. We can describe loneliness or claustrophobia, but wouldn't it be powerful for students to see a short VR video of just how close their bedmate would be if they lived in an 8' x 8' bedroom with their entire family? Or how densely packed (or scattered) soldiers were during a major battle?

These are just some ideas I've been tossing around since Sunday. I recognize that bringing them to fruition would require immense production budgets that are probably beyond the current capacity of most scholars and institutions. Nonetheless, I think it's a medium that humanists should begin to consider! I live by this great quote in The Historian's Craft that Marc Bloch attributes to his good friend and colleague Henri Pirenne: "If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life." We should embrace these new methods for storytelling and expand our potential as historians.

Tell me: Do you agree that VR is a useful medium, or do you think it's passing fad? Or do you have other great ideas for how VR could be married to traditional written histories?  

Civilization in Decline

Over the course of this year's high holy days, I sat through four sermons by two different rabbis at two different congregations. These sermons left me deeply frustrated. Each one predicated a plea for greater communal participation and affiliation on the premise that Judaism and the American synagogue are in decline and that Jews and Israel are under threat from anti-Semites and the many enemies of the Jewish state. These declensionist arguments reduce demographic and cultural trends in Jewish (and American) life to a binary of better-then and worse-now and obscure historical and contemporary homogeneity in the American Jewish community. While this doom-and-gloom portrayal provides a foreboding backdrop against which to inspire popular engagement, it is an ahistorical interpretation that precludes possibilities by narrowly defining the engaged Jew as religious, affiliated, and Zionist.  

The narrative of Jewish decline, translated to a line graph, maps a trajectory upwards throughout the 20th century until, as one sermon posited, a rise in "skepticism" and secularism correlated with a fall in Jewish identification. As my mother succinctly put it, "I remember hearing that sermon when I was ten years old." That was 1961, in the midst of an era that Jews now point to as the definitive highpoint of synagogue affiliation and participation in Jewish communal life. Decline is a weary argument, one that historians of American Jews spent the last quarter of the 20th century challenging with a narrative of synthesis:

“Over and over again for 350 years one finds that Jews in America rose to meet the challenges both internal and external that threatened Jewish continuity—sometimes, paradoxically, by promoting radical disconstinuities. Casting aside old paradigms, they transformed their faith, reinventing American Judaism in an attempt to make it more appealing, more meaningful, more sensitive to the concerns of the day.”
— Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (Yale University Press, 2004), p. xiv

Historians in the 21st century have gone even farther to complicate neat stories of ascent and descent, arguing that the preservation of Judaism and Jewish identity was always an ambivalent and contested undertaking [1]. To argue for decline is to look back into the past and ignore the many varied ways that Jews have historically engaged with their religion and peoplehood; since 1654 American Jews have splintered off the Reform and Conservative movements, imbued socialist politics with a distinctly Yiddish culture, rejected the synagogue in favor of small havurot and lay-led minyans, and revived a distinctly Jewish politics for the 21st century in the form of social justice programs like Jewish Voices for Peace and Repair the World. That many people no longer identify as Jewish does not detract from the strength and vitality of the community that remains.

And yes, it's true that there has been a decline. But is it really so serious, so worthy of alarmist sermons? A Portrait of Jewish Americans, the 2013 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, did indicate a decline in Americans who identify as "Jewish by religion" (as opposed to by birth or a sense of shared peoplehood). This decline was measured, however, as a percentage of the total US population. In terms of raw numbers, there seem to be more Jews by religion now (4.2 million) than there were in 1957 (3.9 million) when the best comparative data was last collected. In the past 20 years, the Jewish share of the adult population of the U.S. has remained fairly stable [2]. I couldn't find good data on synagogue affiliation, but if we can accept that there is a connection between interest in Jewish education and rates of Jewish identification or affiliation, there's also not much bad news when it comes to enrollment in Jewish studies courses in American universities. A 2014 survey of members of the Association for Jewish Studies revealed that almost 50% of university professors who responded indicated that their enrollments have stayed the same over the past three years [3]. Yes, there are still 30% of respondents reporting declining enrollment, and yes, declines outnumbered increases 7% to 4%, but as Historian Jonathan Sarna noted in his Presidential Address to the 2014 AJS Conference, "That is not exactly an indication of imminent catastrophe." [4]

So, we are not where we were in the heyday of the mid-twentieth century--but I think that's a good thing. Yes, an estimated 60% of Jews belonged to a synagogue in the late 1950s [5], but the 1950s were also a time of stultifying conformity, racism, and male chauvinism. It's a difficult decade to romanticize. Instead of looking backwards with nostalgia, I urge anyone trying to write an inspiring high holidays sermon to see the particularities of the present and, when turning to the past, to evoke the enduring beauty and meaningfulness of Jewish practice that has ensured our continuity for 5775+ years. 

Shana tova.

[1] Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University Press, 2005). 

[2] See Chapter 1: Population Estimates in: Pew Research Center, A Portrait of Jewish Americans. October 1, 2013. http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey. Accessed September 24, 2015. 

[3] Steven M. Cohen, Profiling the Jewish Studies Profession in North America: Highlights from the Survey of AJS Members. July 15, 2015. http://www.ajsnet.org/surveys/AJS-2014-Full-Survey-Report.pdf. Accessed September 24, 2015. 

[4] Jonathan Sarna, AJS 2014 Presidential Address. December 14, 2014. http://www.ajsnet.org/plenary2014.htm. Accessed September 24, 2015.

[5] Jack Wertheimer, "The American Synagogue: Recent Issues and Trends," American Jewish Year Book (2005), p. 10.

1969, or 2014?

“Today our nation is moving towards two societies - one black, one white - separate and unequal. Reaction to summer disorders have quickened the movement and deepened the division. What white Americans have never understood and what the Negro can never forget is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it and white society condones it. A study of the aftermath of disorder leaves disturbing conclusions. Despite the institution of some post-riot programs, little basic change in the conditions underlying the outbreak of disorder has taken place. In several cities, the principal official response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weaponry. In several cities,increasing polarization is evident with continual breakdown of communication.”
— "Analysis of the Problems Encountered by Jewish Community Centers in Acting on the Urban Crisis," William Kahn (Executive Director, St. Louis JCCA)

Downtown St. Louis in 1969.  Missouri History Museum.

It's depressing to read this and consider how little has changed in St. Louis over the past 45 years. I found this statement in the published transcript of William Kahn's keynote speech to the Jewish Community Center Action on the Urban Crisis Conference. The Jewish Welfare Board conducted a survey in 1968 to learn how JCCs were reacting to the urban crisis. Even after the results were published in December of '68, the organization still felt lost. Leaders wondered, how could they best guide agencies towards effective programming to address urban poverty and racial discrimination? The Public Affairs Committee of the JWB called a conference together on March 25-26th, 1969, and invited executives and representatives from urban JCCs to come to New York and discuss their successes and their struggles. 

William Kahn was incredibly progressive, and under his leadership the St. Louis JCCA mounted one of the most well-organized responses to the riots and disorder of the summers of '67 and '68. While no one expected him to change the world, or for the JCCA to single-handedly defeat racism in St. Louis, how can we not despair over this evidence? It's unfair to say they failed--in fact the JCCA did make a big impact on many black lives in St. Louis. I'm just left unsure about what to learn from this parallel. I've long believed that change happens at the margins, and that you have to believe in baby steps, but I've never been particularly idealistic either. It's so easy to swing towards cynicism when you see history repeating itself.