2015 in Review

This was a banner year for me, professionally. I received such generous support and was able to accomplish so much: I wrote three chapters, presented a paper at a major conference, conducted six oral history interviews, and did extensive archival research in New York and Cincinnati. Thank you to those who saw potential in my dissertation in 2015 and provided me with funding, resources, and time:

Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University

A.W. Mellon Foundation, Sawyer Seminar on "The Ghetto:  Concept, Conditions, and Connections in Transnational Historical Perspective, from the 11th Century to the Present," particularly Profs. Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter, Jr. who granted me one of the Seminar's pre-doctoral fellowships

Graduate Student Association, Carnegie Mellon University

American Academy for Jewish Research

The Jacob Rader Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives

Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, Temple University

Association for Jewish Studies and Knapp Family Foundation

My dissertation committee, Profs. Caroline Acker, Rachel Kranson, and Joe Trotter

I also had the opportunity to serve as a teaching assistant again this fall, and it was a badly-needed reminder that teaching (if not grading) is deeply fulfilling work. 

In 2016, I hope to continue building on the growth I made this year. My goals are to write at least three more chapters, earn a dissertation completion fellowship, send an article to a journal for review, and present at another conference. Ambitious objectives, but ones that I believe are realistic and achievable. 

Happy New Year! 

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?  

Forward, Flashback, or Stuck?

Although I embarked on writing chapter three with a point-based outline, a road map for how I wanted to build my argument, the journey has not quite proceeded as planned. Over two weeks and twenty-something hours of writing, I have generated several pages of content and several pages of "murdered darlings." I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that I've deleted a paragraph for every paragraph that remains. Two steps forward, one step back!

Why has it been such a struggle? I can't decide how the chapter should begin and end! Unlike chapter two, which began where chapter one left off and then proceeded quite logically in chronological order from a precipitating event through to the resolution of a controversy, the "open membership" debate that I'm describing in chapter three happened three years after the final major event that I describe in chapter 2, the JWB's 1963 Lakewood Conference. In addition to this chronological gap, I also want to use chapter three to fill in a content gap. The JWB made some important decisions in the years I covered in chapter two, but I left them out because they weren't directly relevant to the controversy at the center of that chapter. This left me with three options:

#1: Start with the 1947 JWB/Janowsky Survey recommendation on open membership and move chronologically forward in time to the 1967-69 JWB Committee on Open Membership in Jewish Community Centers, which reaffirmed that JCCs should accept all applicants for membership regardless of race or religion. 

Advantages:

1. Easy to write and simple for the reader to follow!
2. Follows the same pattern as chapter 2: beginning with disagreement over one of the Janowsky Survey's policy recommendations (in this case, over an inclusive membership policy)  and ending with the Committee that, between 1967-69 debated whether the JWB should uphold this  policy.
3. Clearly demonstrates change over time, particularly the rising influence of the Civil Rights movement on the JCC movement.

Disadvantages:

1. Rather than foregrounding the most important event, moving chronologically "buries" the moment of rupture in a longer narrative arc. 

#2: Begin the chapter with the 1966-67 controversy at the New Orleans JCC that precipitated the JWB Committee on Open Membership in Jewish Community Centers, then flash back in time to fill in the content gap, then move forward to discuss the Committee's debate and decision.

Advantages:

1. By instead beginning the chapter with the controversy at the New Orleans JCC--about whether to accept non-white, not just non-Jewish, members--all of the preceding decisions and events of the 1940s and '50s can be contextualized by how they contributed to the eventual controversy and debate in the late 1960s. It's a helpful way to distinguish what details can be relegated to the background. 

Disadvantages:

1. It's more complicated to write and puts a bit more of a burden on the reader to follow the chronology, even if it ultimately clarifies the argument. 
2. It makes the Southern context of the Civil Rights movement seem more important than the Northern context. Foregrounding how New Orleans, a Southern city, catalyzed the JWB to renew its debate about open membership diminishes how active the Northern Civil Rights movement was in the mid-1960s--and though JCCs were located in cities in both the U.S. North and South, the decision-making "center" of the JCC movement was the JWB headquarters in New York City. 

#3: Try to do both at once.

Advantages:

1. Experimental! You never know what will work best, so why not try every possible option.

Disadvantages:

1. Confusing!
2. Unproductive.

Always ambitious, I went with option #3. And that is how I ended up stuck in the cycle of writing and deleting.

I have now committed to Option #2, and it seems to be working well. I'm trying to be mindful of the disadvantages, so 1) I'm including plenty of signals to the reader about where the chronology is heading and 2) I'm incorporating evidence of how Civil Rights activism in the North also had an impact on the JWB's open membership debate. I hope that I can now proceed without too much deviation from my point-based outline: two steps forward, no steps back!

Drawing the Road Map

In a marathon work session last Thursday, I hammered out the outline for my third dissertation chapter. After I reviewed a large sampling of sources that described the JCC movement's response to Civil Rights activism and the urban crisis, I pulled out my colored pens and began to outline the temporal and political themes that I observed.  

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I began by identifying three distinct phases or "moments": a period I call the "open membership debates"; the "classical" period of the civil rights movement; and the urban crisis. The phases I pinpointed map neatly onto periodization that historians already use to distinguish between phases of the Black Freedom Movement: first, the early legal fights for equal rights in housing and education during the 1940s-50s (Shelley v. Kraemer; Brown v. Board of Education); then the national, legislative push for voting rights and equal hiring opportunities of the mid-1960s (Civil Rights Act, Economic Opportunity Act); and finally the rise of black nationalism and the urban rioting of the late 1960s. More critically, however, I observed in the documents that JWB staff and Jewish Center workers exhibited distinct attitudes and decision-making in each of these three periods. At the outset of the 1960s, the vast majority of JCCs accepted non-Jews (including non-white Jews) as full members of the JCC. Despite this "equal" policy, however, most Centers did not have African American members and did not serve non-white members of their community with any regularity. Centers used their progressive policy to avoid changing their practices,  and black community members recognized that although they could apply to join the JCC they were not necessarily welcome. By the mid-1960s, however, growing support for equal rights, equal facilities, and equal services pressured JCCs to explore how they could serve non-Jewish and non-white members of their communities as effectively as they served their Jewish membership. 

After I sketched out these transitions, I drafted my overall argument for the chapter and wrote some tentative claims that I would like to make in each section. In my first-year research seminar, my professor advocated for this process of "point-based outlining." Whereas a regular outline identifies the topics you plan to include in your paper (or chapter), a point-based outline models how your overall argument will build from a series of claims. In my experience, drafting a point-based outline helps you avoid summarizing when you begin to write--it forces you to select only the evidence and context necessary to support your claims. 

Armed with this point-based outline, I'm now ready to begin drafting sections of the chapter. I know that as I re-read, analyze, and argue my claims, the overall argument will subtly shift. In that way, the point-based outline is more like a hand-drawn road map than it is a legal contract. It's a tentative and flexible document, intended to be improved as I become more familiar with the landscape. As I proceed I will edit it to reflect new insights or counterarguments, making it more accurate, precise, and easier to follow. 

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."