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[♪ music ♪] [ELI talks Inspired Jewish Ideas]
[Abby Knopp Dignity of Difference: A Place for Everyone at the Shabbat Table]
[applause]
[Abby Knopp] Good morning.
Sasha was a little boy who came from Odessa, Ukraine.
He moved to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn just a few weeks before the beginning of the school year.
And Sasha was enrolled in a Jewish Day School.
The Jewish Day School was offering completely subsidized tuition,
and he got ready to go to school coming from a family that spoke no English at all.
One day his mother, Alla, got it into her head
that she was going to try and help her son make friends more quickly,
so she said, "I'm going to send Sasha with his favorite snack to school,"
pirozhki—some of us know those as knishes.
And she said, "If Sasha can hand out his favorite food to his classmates,
perhaps it will help him make friends more quickly."
I'm very sad to say that actually what did happen
was that his teachers berated him for handing out non-kosher food at school,
and his parents were called at the end of the day and warned never to do this again.
The sad truth is that our institutions today are not nearly as open
to diversity as I think we sometimes fool ourselves into believing.
The fact is that we are not—as Jewish professionals—thinking about this issue as much as we need to be.
And as individuals we are simply not practicing the values of hachnasat orchim,
which is welcoming the stranger,
or ahavat yisrael, the love of Israel,
to the degree that we must for our collective future.
Today I want to reframe the concept of Jewish peoplehood
as something that is intensely personal and close to home.
I want to talk about Jewish peoplehood as it relates to our next door neighbors,
as it relates to the woman in a wheelchair who might be behind us waiting to pay in the supermarket,
as it relates to the gay couple that might stop into our synagogue one Shabbat morning
looking for a Jewish connection.
So today I want to paint a realistic picture about who we are in 2012.
I want to ask us all to be more honest with ourselves,
and I want to offer up a few suggestions about how we might change what I see as a real issue in the Jewish community.
So let's start with some data.
The data that you see in front of you comes from the New York Jewish Community Study of 2011.
And it might surprise some of us to see
that almost half of the Jewish population of New York City
is what some of us might think of as non-normative Jews.
The study looked at some other subpopulations as well.
Just to mention a couple here, 5% of the Jewish households in New York
identify as LGBT, 20% of individuals are dealing with some form of disability
be it cognitive or physical,
and 31% of the Jewish households in New York reported
that they had sought some assistance for a disabled family member.
Taken together, I think you'll agree, that these populations are not the minority of the Jewish population.
They are rather the majority of who we are today.
"Well, New York must look very different," some of you might say.
Well no, actually, it doesn't.
As a matter of fact, nearly a third of the United States Jewish population
might be considered racially or ethnically diverse
and 20%, like similar to the New York population study,
report that they have a cognitive or physical disability.
And there are some researchers who believe that as many as 50% of Jews
are dealing on a very personal level with somebody in their family
who has some form of disability.
So let me ask you the question.
How many of you, now that you've heard those statistics,
do those data correspond to what you see in your day-to-day life
in your Jewish institutions?
How often do you see faces like this in your community?
How often are you at a Jewish film festival sitting next to a Jew of color?
How often do you go to Shabbat services, and there's a sign language interpreter in the front of the room?
How often do you go to your local JCC and see wheelchairs in the hallways?
Can you count these incidents on 1 hand? Maybe 2 hands?
Or are we more accustomed to seeing these admittedly beautiful lovely faces—Jewish faces?
Not long ago, I attended a conference on disabilities,
and I was very moved by a woman who was one of the keynote speakers
who talked about the fact that as growing up as a deaf girl in the Jewish community
she felt extremely excluded and unable to participate in programs or institutions.
As a matter of fact, her family was excluded from the Jewish community as a result
because they felt that if she couldn't participate
then clearly they couldn't feel at ease in the Jewish community.
That week I went back on Shabbat to my own synagogue,
and all I could do was think about her as I sat there.
And I thought, "This woman could not participate in my synagogue services."
I thought, "This woman could not meet anybody at the reception afterward
because there was nobody there who could interpret for her."
She was not a lip reader.
So the issue is that most of us are still dealing in the dark with this issue.
We're not asking the appropriate questions about diversity.
I want to say that there has been real progress, which as the New York Community study demonstrates,
that they began asking serious questions in a very complex manner
about diversity in their community.
But the study also offers stark evidence of how much less-engaged
non-normative Jews are in the Jewish community.
Just to name a couple, LGBTs are half as likely to affiliate denominationally
in the Jewish community, and they score very low on all measures of Jewish engagement.
Non-white Jews are 3 times as likely to score very low on Jewish measures of engagement,
and they are half as likely to send their children to Jewish Day School.
And Russian-speaking Jews maintain a very high level of Jewish identity,
but they are simply not engaged in a formal way in the Jewish community.
I'm proud to say that at the Foundation for Jewish Camp we're also doing research
looking at the issues of diversity in camper participation.
And what we found is troubling, and we know that there is work to do.
If you could see, 89% of camper participants right now—Overnight Jewish Camp—
are what one might consider normative Jews.
So we know that we have to do better.
So now what do we do?
How do we take the statistics that I've shared with you today and apply it?
How do we make change?
How do we get our communities to look more like the faces that you see in these pictures?
Well, one way is by asking the questions, do the research.
I encourage all of you who have some hand in your institutional research
to start asking questions about diversity.
Another way is by expanding our social networks.
Some of you may have read an article recently by 3 Jewish researchers
in the Jewish community—well-known—
and they wrote an article about social networks and the impact of our peers
in the kinds of choices that we make as Jews—and the Jewish choices that we make.
They recently did a study on, specifically, parents making the decision to send their children to Jewish camp.
So the researchers asked a question about Jewish camp,
and they found that perhaps the single most important factor
in parents choosing Jewish camp was what their peers were doing and who their social networks were.
So I'm going to end with 1 final story that I hope illustrates for you
how 1 individual can have the power to open up vast new social networks in the Jewish community.
About 10 years ago I had a friend from St. Petersburg, Russia
who came to New York, and when she arrived to New York
she got a job as an early childhood educator at a local JCC.
One Sunday the JCC participated in an education fare in Union Square Park.
And as she stood at the table answering questions and handing out brochures to young families
she immediately identified one young mother who was talking to her son in Russian.
And she—obviously they struck up a conversation.
And to make a long story short, very short,
what ended up happening was that within months of that first interaction
the JCC had created a new early childhood program
that integrated Russian language in music,
a new early childhood educator—a Russian speaker—
had been hired at the JCC, and 20 new families had joined the JCC.
We can only imagine how many more families
must have been connected to the Jewish community through these 20 families.
So I'll end with one final question,
"Why do we care about this?
Why do we need to care about diversity in the Jewish community?"
The answer, as I see it, is very simple.
It's who we are in 2012.
And if we're not serious about asking questions about Jewish diversity
and becoming more of an open community
then we are simply not creating Jewish communities.
To end, I hope that I've opened your eyes to the diversity around you.
I hope that each of us will accept the challenge
when we leave here and start thinking about this issue more seriously
and think of creative ways to create more open communities.
Thank you very much. [applause]
[♪ music ♪] [ELI talks Inspired Jewish Ideas]