When Bad Things Are Good

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

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

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

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

Pre-outlining

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foresight

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.”

— Program, 1950 Annual Meetings. Association of Jewish Center Workers Collection (MS-654), Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati, OH). Box 7, Folder 4.

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. 

As Jewish as Bagels and Schmear

One of the biggest challenges that the Jewish Community Center has historically faced is explaining how, exactly, it is a "Jewish" agency. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I wrote about how Oscar Janowsky used the Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) Survey of 1946-48 to convince JCC workers that they could not just run "centers for Jews"--they needed to have an affirmative Jewish purpose, otherwise they were segregating Jews from non-Jews without any good reason. Adding "Jewish" programs meant that they were contributing some value to the community, which justified having a separate institution just for Jews. Although JCC workers finally accepted Janowsky's recommendation, they never really identified what exactly having "Jewish content" or "Jewish programs" meant on a day-to-day basis. 

My second chapter examines another big controversy, this time between rabbis and JCCs in the early 1960s. Rabbis accused Jewish Centers of "secularizing" American Jews, and argued that the synagogue was where Jews should spend their free time. The JWB--the organization that represented and served American JCCs--had to defend the JCC, but they struggled because they also recognized that most JCC members came to the Center for basketball or nursery school and not to celebrate their Jewish heritage. For years, the JWB had argued that the JCC helped their members feel a strong sense of Jewish identity, but when the rabbis pressed them on how their program was "Jewish" they could not point to many specific programs. Part of the problem was the the rabbis defined "Jewish" as religious (the practices and traditions of Judaism) while the JCC workers believed in a more cultural or ethnic sense of Judaism. To them, hosting Jewish folk dancing or a Yiddish conversation circle was enough to identify the JCC as "Jewish." 

Yesterday, while reading through some documents about this controversy, I came across one of the first really strong statements from a JCC worker about what knowledge made an individual Jewish--and, by implication, what a Center needed to teach to foster Jewish identification among its members.

“For a person to be a Jew in name because he accepts it or is so identified by the general community, without really knowing what it means, is not too different from an individual being assigned a name and yet not knowing to which family he belongs. Rootedness for the Jewish individual requires that he must know who the Jewish people are, what the Jewish community is, what Jews believe in their varied forms, what values the Jewish heritage espouses, what are the problems and aspirations of his people, what was the Jewish past, what are the practices, customs, culture of his people — and most important of all, to determine how he can interpret his relationship to the Jewish group, how he defines his own Jewish way of life and how he functions and participates responsibly as a member of the Jewish community.”

— Manuel G. Batshaw, “Developments in American Jewish Life and their Implications for Jewish Community Centers," 1963

What makes this statement so exciting to me is how SPECIFIC it is! Batshaw's list covers mostly cultural knowledge and not liturgical, ritual, or biblical knowledge, but it provides a very clear checklist of what the JCC could teach to its members to help them feel a stronger sense of connection to the Jewish group. In one sense, this represents a change from the past because never before have I seen such a clear explanation of what the Center should do, but in another sense it's a continuation of the more secular and "civilizational" approach to Jewishness that the Center historically adopted. It's definitely more substantial, though, than being "Jewish" because you're in the same building with other Jews!

I'm not entirely sure how this will make it into my dissertation, but it actually helps me answer a very personal question that I've faced throughout this project: what do I personally think makes me (or anyone) Jewish? If I argue in the dissertation that JCCs fostered "Jewish identity," how do I define that identity? And how is my own experience as a Jew influencing my definition? Manny Batshaw has given me a nice list to work with, so that my starting point does not have to be as basic as "I'm Jewish because I eat bagels and lox and think Seinfeld is funny." 

Early Lessons

As I described in my last post, my entrée into oral history was a solo pursuit, albeit one aided and abetted by the published wisdom of more experienced practitioners. Between books, websites, Amazon reviews, and some old fashioned trial and error, here are a few of the lessons I have learned so far:

1. With equipment, less can be more. When I first decided that I would like to incorporate oral histories into my dissertation, I assumed that I would need an expensive recorder and microphone. While I am sure that these technologies would improve the sound quality of my recordings, I have been very satisfied with the low-budget, low-tech equipment I ended up purchasing. I selected the Olympus WS-822 GMT Voice Recorders with 4 GB Built-In-Memory because, for under $100, it offered sufficient memory, a built-in USB, and had a 4.4 (out of 5) star rating on Amazon. Having done almost 20 hours of interviewing with it so far, I can attest that the memory is indeed quite capacious. I often have multiple interviews stored on the device at once, because I do not delete them until I have two copies on my hard drive, one in cloud backup, and two audio copies burned to CD-R. It has a feature where you can save recordings into folders, and although it's a simple A-E folder system that cannot be renamed or re-ordered, I find it offers just enough organization so that I don't make silly mix-ups. The built-in USB is probably my favorite feature, though, because I simply drag and drop files onto my Desktop as soon as I finish an interview. Finally, the battery life is excellent--though I replace the battery after every 2-3 sessions because all of the advice I've read says that it pays to be paranoid. 

I pair the recorder with the Olympus ME-52W Noise Canceling Microphone. Amazon suggested it when I selected the recorder, as one of the "frequently purchased with" items. I'm very, very happy I spent the extra $13 and would highly recommend it, with a few reservations. I have found that, when clipped to my interviewers shirt, it picks up both of our voices quite nicely. My voice is strong and I am careful to speak up and enunciate when I ask my questions, but the mic has also successfully captured a few lower and raspier voices. The noise canceling feature is difficult to evaluate because I've predominantly used it in quiet office environments, but I still think it does a decent job of buffering out background noises. My biggest reservation is that the lapel clip on the  mic requires some agility--the clip is quite tight and the grip is not ergonomic--and several of my interviewees have struggled with attaching it to their shirts. Overall, however, I think it's a bargain and definitely worth trying out!

2. Don't ask for more consent than is necessary. After reading Doing Oral History, I decided that I needed a "Gift of Deed" form from each of my interviewees. The form asked interviewees to release their copyright claims (to the audio and transcript of their interview) to me and to an archive where I would eventually donate their oral history. I decided on this for two reasons. First, it's a "best practice" in oral history to make interviews accessible to the broader public by giving them to a library. Second, the book was written for someone seeking to do a large oral history project on a broad topic (and not, say, as a small part of a dissertation). In that case, the whole project would be designed with an archive or library in mind. After my first interview, I realized that a "deed of gift" form was too much, too soon. Asking people to release their copyright was an intimidating and legalistic request, especially for the small possibility that I might donate the oral histories in the future. I would like to do this eventually, and think what I have collected would be of immense value to academics in many disciplines, but for now my focus is on gathering what's necessary to write my dissertation. The informed consent that I ended up drafting makes clear that my questions will relate to only a few topics (participation in or relationship to activities: at the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood; within the Jewish community of northern Manhattan; or in other venues that attempted to create or improve interethnic/interracial relations amongst neighborhood residents), and then clearly states how I will use the interviews:  

“​Your taped interview and transcript may be quoted directly, paraphrased, or used to interpret historical events within Avigail Oren’s dissertation project and related research studies (such as articles, conference papers, and presentations).”

I think this is the right balance of information for an ethical informed consent; it allows people to make an educated decision about what they will say or discuss on the record, but does not discourage a good conversation by burdening the interview with the potential judgement of a future public (that may or may not materialize). I have verbally told each interviewee about the possibility of donating their oral histories in the future, and when the time comes I will work with an archivist and my interviewees to properly and ethically make their materials public. 

3. "Why?" is better than "How?". It seems obvious, but the hardest part of this project for me has been accepting that people don't necessarily remember the historical events that are important to me and my dissertation. Memories are solidified as narratives, and details often fall out of stories over the course of time. I have heard some really beautiful and compelling stories, many of which are historically very interesting, but they only tangentially answer my questions about how something happened. When I press for details, people often just cannot remember. My friend, who has several years of experience with oral history, suggested that I incorporate more "why" questions. For example, if someone cannot remember an event you offer them details and then ask "why do you think this happened that way?" Or, "why did you/he/she/they make that decision?"  The idea is that people remember their motivations and interests more vividly than they recall the particularities of an event. I've only had one opportunity so far to incorporate this strategy, so I will have to report back on its efficacy.

I could not have done this project without the advice and support of books, the internet, and friends, but, as with any pursuit, there are some things you just have to learn by doing it!