Ex Post Facto

As I wrote the last section of my first chapter, I discovered that a few of the sources I was relying on to tell the story of the the 1946-47 Jewish Welfare Board Survey (AKA the Janowsky Survey, after its director) were quite tricky to analyze. Because I could not find minutes or records of several important meetings, I had to piece together the proceedings from summaries that were written later--sometimes weeks or months later. How, I wondered, had hindsight colored these descriptions? Could I trust that this was what actually happened?

All historical sources have their challenges. Sometimes it's a problem of omission: the authorship of a document is unclear, or materials are undated, or the subject is ambiguous. Sometimes it's a relational issue: where does this document fit into a broader context or story? Or, why does this document contradict other sources? Then, of course, there's the ever-present challenge of reading between the lines of every document for the silences and assumptions and things left unsaid. Depending on the extent of the issue or the relevance of the document, these challenges can be addressed. Dates and authors can be guessed at using context clues and comparisons to other dated/attributed sources. Ambiguity and contradictions can be mitigated by volume; consult enough sources and a clear picture might eventually emerge. The same could be said for records you suspect were influenced by hindsight--my problem, however, was that I did not have the necessary volume of comparable sources to balance out my interpretation. 

To get specific, this section was about the controversies that erupted after the Survey Director, Dr. Oscar Janowsky, advocated that Centers should be sectarian and that Jewish content should be "primary" in all Center activities. Over several pages, I outlined the various iterations of the Statement of Purpose that the JWB proposed based on Janowsky's survey. I highlighted the changes that were made as a result of opposition by, first, Jewish Center workers (represented by the National Association for Jewish Center Workers, or NAJCW) and, second, by a group of JWB lay leaders who hired Louis Wirth to conduct an "Independent Survey" of Janowsky's Survey in order to critique his emphasis on Jewish content. The changes to the Statement of Purpose were made in a series of meetings in 1947 and 1948, but despite my best efforts I could not find meeting minutes from most of them. Luckily, at the JWB's Annual Meeting in Chicago in 1948 the changes were discussed in great detail--and there was a stenographer who made a transcript of the entire proceeding! I was able to work backwards and determine how the final Statement of Purpose evolved from meeting to meeting. 

Unfortunately, what I lost in this process was any sense of individual agency. I was able to see changes agreed upon by the acting committee, but not who dissented and why. I also had to assume that the rationales for the various changes given at the Annual Meeting were actually the arguments made in those earlier meetings, and not rationales that appeared more palatable in hindsight. That's an important distinction to make when you're examining a controversy!

I also consulted a reflection written by Janowsky in the 1970s. While his memory of the events plugged a lot of holes in my accounting of the events, I struggled to trust his assessments of why things happened the way they did. Not only did I fear that the passage of time might have affected Janowsky's recollections, much of the controversy manifested as personal attacks against his politics and his scholarly authority. He certainly could not be blamed for remembering the events as being much more inflammatory or polarizing than they actually were, or for pinning responsibility on certain individuals that were especially unkind towards him in 1948. 

In the end, I relied on these documents to illuminate process and analyzed correspondence and other contemporary sources (reports, the meeting minutes that I did manage to find, etc.) to come to my own understanding of why certain changes were made. I think I made good choices about what information was "safe" to accept at face value and what was tinted by hindsight or agenda. I found myself really wishing, however, that I had a second reader to give their opinion. Up until this point in my educational journey, I've always read along with others--in courses and seminars, you learn as much from your colleagues' interpretations as from your own. This was the first time that I had to make an assessment all by myself, as the foremost expert on the topic. It's the scholarly version of becoming a grown up. As exciting as it is to be given responsibilities and independence, it takes a while to find your confidence and to stop calling your parents every ten minutes for their advice.  

"M"

When I studied abroad, we heard a lot from our program directors about the "W." Our first month, they told us, we would feel elated and endlessly excited. Studying abroad would be THE GREATEST TIME EVER, Argentina would be THE GREATEST COUNTRY EVER, and our lives would be TOTALLY AWESOME!!! They warned us that this intensity would fade in the second month as homesickness set in. We would eventually recover and recalibrate, and the experience would once again feel exciting and fulfilling (if not quite as AWESOME!!!). Towards the end we would slide back down into homesickness, as the novelty of the adventure fully tarnished and the frustrations of living abroad mounted. In the final month, anticipating our departure, the last round of drinking and sightseeing and travel would buoy our spirits and we would return to the US of A with stories about how studying abroad was absolutely the greatest. Up to down, back to up and down again before one last up.... that's exactly how it went for me. 

Writing the first chapter of my dissertation was the complete inverse. At the beginning I was so unsure of what I was doing, but slowly I got the hang of it and I climbed. I wrote an outline and began working through my argument. I wrote pages and pages of background context (based in secondary literature) about the evolution of synagogues and synagogue-centers, social work and then Jewish social work. I found a rhythm and made progress. It felt totally awesome, if not quite as intensely awesome as those first few weeks of running around a new, foreign city. 

The sensation didn't last. All of that background information became oppressive and I could no longer see the forest for the trees. I had taken the "more is more" approach and now could not really figure out where or how to make it "less." Even armed with my outline, I felt unclear about how to connect the historical context to my own contribution, my analysis of my primary sources. 

I decided to keep writing. I hammered out the details of the past and constructed a narrative to explain how the 1946-47 Jewish Welfare Board Survey affirmed the sectarian commitment (the "Jewish purpose") of the Jewish Community Center. I reinforced the narrative with an incremental series of arguments about how ideological, functional, and communal disagreements between JCC workers, lay leaders, and the rabbinate pushed the Jewish Welfare Board and its constituent Centers to reject the possibility that agencies adopt a policy of nonsectarianism and to instead embrace a positive Jewish function. Once again, writing became fulfilling--I was building something. I believed that I had avoided just writing a laundry list of past events ("first this happened, then that happened, then that happened") and instead had drafted an argument and substantiated it with the historical narrative. 

The bubble burst when, at long last, I finished my draft. As I put it all together, I was so impressed with what I had accomplished. Eighty pages of history! The most I'd ever written! As I began to re-read it, however, all I saw was holes. None of the sections seemed to connect, and arguments appeared and disappeared without pointing towards any ultimate conclusions. I was humbled. I realized that I had made the same mistake as in previous research papers. Instead of incorporating the historical context into my primary analysis and using it to further support my claims, I front-loaded the chapter with thirty chunky, bloated pages of background information. My review of the draft also exposed a steady stream of sentences that provided too much detail, or not enough, or that were laden with assumptions. I filled the margins with comments and turned the pages bright blue. 

By the time I finished confronting and correcting all of the circles and arrows and question marks and strikeouts inflicted on the text, I could not clearly identify the point I was attempting to make in the chapter. It at once addressed everything and nothing. I sent my advisors 76 pages; only one page provided an introduction, and only one page offered concluding thoughts. I was crushed. I'd been so confident, I'd told my advisors to expect a thoughtful, well-crafted draft, and in the end I felt like I had delivered a mess... the very laundry list that I had tried so hard to avoid.

With two weeks of distance and hindsight, I've regained some perspective. While I haven't had the courage to reread the entire draft, I skimmed bits and pieces and it seems just fine. More importantly, I regained sight of the "first-ness" of the endeavor. That I generated 80 pages of coherent English in just a few short months is a remarkable achievement in and of itself, considering that at the outset I had no idea what I was doing. So I'm looking forward to receiving feedback from my advisors. I expect they will have a list of critiques, some of which I identified myself and others that I haven't anticipated. I know that I'm capable of fixing any issues or bolstering any weaknesses that they find, and so I'm ready to learn from their insight and to receive their advice on how to proceed. 

Now that I've stepped off the rollercoaster that was the "M," my hope is that the process of writing chapter two will more closely resemble the study abroad "W." If it's inevitable to have down moments, I'd prefer to begin and end on a high note. 

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

On June 15th, I finished and turned in my first dissertation chapter to my advisors (it is both the first chapter of the dissertation and the first chapter I have written). On June 16th, I threw some clothes in a bag and jetted off to South America for a week-long vacation. Here are some lessons learned over the past three weeks:

1. It is very difficult to work on two different projects--the dissertation and the blog--while on a deadline. For the past few months, I would blog before diving into writing my chapter. It was a balance: one hour spent on a blog post, then a few hours dedicated to drafting a section of the chapter. That balance fell away as my deadline approached, not because I was scrambling to catch up but because the chapter became the singular focus of my life for those two weeks. I devoted every moment of mental clarity to evaluating the structure and argument of the chapter, keenly attuned to omissions or unsubstantiated claims. There was no space in my thoughts for a blog post. My mind could not let go of the ideas in the chapter for long enough to focus on another set of ideas. I continued to make blog-worthy observations and I have a long list of posts that I want to draft this week, now that I'm phasing back into a routine dominated by research rather than writing. Stay tuned for those. 

2. Vacation is the best deadline. If you have to set an arbitrary date for completion, apparently it is very effective to set it for the day before you leave for a relaxing trip. I knew that I would not, could not work while touring around a city with my partner and in-laws, and so the work had to get done before leaving. Plus, I looked forward to kicking back and relaxing for a few days! I'm contemplating booking a trip in late August to incentivize myself to complete the second chapter. 

3. I miss blogging when I'm pulled away from it! As fulfilling as it is to convey the thoughts that have been rattling around in my head for months about how events in the past played out, most of my daily writing will only be read by my advisors (who will send it back and have me re-write it many more times before it reaches a wider audience). The immediacy of blogging, in addition to the informality and the more expository nature of the form, make it a most lovely addition to my daily writing output. Many scholars blog to share their research or to extend their academic debates beyond the narrow confines of their discipline and the ivory tower, but I think blogging also appeals to scholarly writers in the way an amuse bouche appeals to fine diners. It's a light beginning to a heavier meal, thoughtful and substantive but informal and, importantly, not meant to distract from the main focus. 

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I'm now back in New York, and I have several projects I'm balancing: an article draft, my second dissertation chapter, oral history interviews, and the "ghetto" corpus analysis. Not everything will get done in the five weeks I'm here but I feel invigorated by the city's energy... we shall see how far this momentum takes me! 

When the Writing Doesn't Come Easy

I spent all day yesterday trying to write a few short paragraphs about one document. It's a report from October 1946 that Oscar Janowsky gave on the progress of the JWB Survey, and it outlines some of the major questions that arose throughout the process of interviewing staff and Board members at hundreds of JCCs across the country. Several months ago I took extensive notes on the document, and so when I sat down to write yesterday I already knew the gist of the report. I decided to re-read it anyways, because it seemed important and substantial and like it was worth a second look. 

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In a sense, that was the correct decision. The progress report represents a pivotal moment when Janowsky realized that the initial, guiding question of the Survey ("what is the objective of Jewish Center work?") should have been "what is Jewish about the Jewish Center?" It's the first moment when Janowsky publicly shared his inclination that the JCC should have an "affirmative" Jewish purpose and should incorporate Jewish content into his program. This ultimately was what he recommended in his final report, and so this progress report is evidence of his evolution towards that belief. 

Re-reading the document was inspiring--what a rich, multifaceted text! I felt like every word should be carefully paraphrased or quoted in my chapter because it so flawlessly articulated why the Jewish Center needed to have an explicitly Jewish purpose. Then I started writing. I wrote a few sentences and deleted them all. I re-read paragraphs of the progress report and tried once more to paraphrase the main points. I deleted all those sentences too. Again and again I attempted to convey the questions that Janowsky raised without cutting and pasting them directly into my narrative. And again and again I became confused.

I finally realized that I had been seduced by discovery. My attempts to summarize Janowsky's arguments revealed a tentativeness--anecdotes stood in for arguments and analysis. My struggle was an extension of Janowsky's own effort to synthesize all of his questions and observations. The complexity that awed me upon my first re-reading was slowly exposed to be perplexity. 

This is not a knock against the author, nor a dismissal of the document. It's a comment on the way that narrative can trick our minds. Hunting for a good story, I perceived coherence where there was inconsistency. I liked Janowsky's anecdotes, I liked the narrative he created to argue for affirmative Jewish content, and I thought that both would support my own narrative explaining this historical event. Ultimately, I used the anecdotes and argument in my own narrative--I just had to moderate my claims to reflect their intricacy and not my own awe.  

Hiccups and Wheezing

While fending off a bout of bronchitis this week, I decided to undertake a major computer upgrade. The logic at the time was "heal the body, heal the hard drive." If I was resting the former, the latter was certainly resting too. And the best time to do work on your computer is when you're not in the midst of actively writing a dissertation chapter. 

I had been having problems with my MacBook Pro for a few months. My database and archival photos and oral history audio files filled up the last remaining storage space on my hard drive and I began getting a regular pop-up message from my OS that my start up drive was full. On a few occasions the entire computer shut down, unprompted, and I was lucky that nothing got lost. I knew I was playing with fire and about to get burned. After two months of research, I decided the most cost-effective solution would be to exchange my 320GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive for a 500 GB Samsung 850 EVO Solid State Drive (SSD). It cost me $200 on Amazon, and I took it to a local computer repair store and paid $170 for the privilege of blaming someone else if the transfer did not go well. 

Overall, I'm very happy with my decision. I decided to do a "clean install" of OS X Yosemite onto the new SSD and then move over my files. The benefit of this method, as opposed to "cloning" the old HD onto the new one, seems to be that you leave behind a lot of the small files and programs and metadata that invisibly begin to clog up your storage over the years. My computer now boots up faster and I am not experiencing the lags (spinning rainbow pinwheels) that I used to have each time I opened up an app. I've transferred every photo, audio track, movie file, and document that was on the old HD, and I still have 196 GB free! And I had no problems moving DEVONthink or Scrivener over--the dissertation re-appeared completely intact. 

The ONE problem I did have was with Zotero, my bibliography/citation management database. I'm confident that this was 100% user error. In my recent attempts to empty out the old hard drive, I may have unwittingly deleted the destination folder that stored that program's content. I was under the impression that it was being backed up both on the Zotero website and in my cloud backups. I somehow failed to implement either of those processes over the past year, and now it is too late. I'm bummed, but relative to the disaster that would have been losing my DEVONthink database (which has all of the archival documents and sources for my dissertation) I can't get too upset. It's a reminder to not make big computer decisions when you're too sick to triple check your backups. It's also an opportunity to re-build the bibliography with the insight gleaned over a year of dissertating. I'm using the tool differently and curating what I include to better suit my process. 

In summary, here is my Pro/Con list for why someone with a pre-2012 MacBook Pro should consider swapping in a new SSD:

Pro: For only $200 in parts, you can have a computer with the same specs as a new MacBook Pro retailing for around $1800. I also believe that my computer feels a little lighter to carry around, but I have no proof for this.

Con: You won't have a retina screen, and the place you take your computer to do the switch probably won't be able to replace those little bumps on the bottom of the chassis that you knocked off two years ago. They'll clean out the fan with the little can of air, but you'll still have a machine that has experienced wear and tear. I have also noticed that my battery life does not last as long.