Mentoring Interns

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Aliza Kline

Aliza Kline is the Founding Executive Director of Mayyim Hayyim, and a member of the JOIN for Justice Board of Directors. At JOIN, we consider mentorship to be one of the essential aspects of leadership development, which is reflected in the structure of our legacy programs, the Jewish Organizing Fellowship and the Seminary Leadership Project. Aliza has developed a long standing internship program at Mayyim Hayyim. We asked for her reflections on what it means to be a mentor and how she has incorporated mentorship in her work at Mayyim Hayyim, developing Jewish community leaders.

“You should never, ever be bored working here” – I am not sure if the scores of interns who heard me say this over the years interpreted it is a threat or a promise. What I meant was that their time should be so well-spent, so challenging, so full of learning, working, messing up, trying again and finally accomplishment, that they would never feel “bored.”

I’ve heard of many cases where interns were encouraged to “shadow” to “observe” and “take in” their internship rather than expected to contribute to the organization. I am not much of a “watch from the sidelines” kind of person.  Who has the time?  I simply assume that anyone interested in interning with me or with my organization is ready to work hard, ready to learn, to take risks, to try new things and to be curious. I expect a lot. Like so many understaffed, mission-driven non-profits, Mayyim Hayyim needed these interns, and was ready to incorporate them into the professional team on day one. But working with an intern is not the same as working with a staff member.

Interns have learning contracts – or should. They need to be able to articulate what they are hoping to gain from the internship: general learnings and specific skills. I cannot promise that they will get that, but I can certainly work with them to match their needs with our work as best as possible. I can promise them transparency, exposure to the strategic thinking behind our organizational growth. As a supervisor, I am always ready to talk, but I almost never have the time carved out in my schedule. So that means the interns need to learn, early on, how to manage up. How to schedule the meetings, to come with their own agenda, to get the questions answered and to share what they’ve learned and when they are ready for more.

For an organization, interns can provide new perspective, new energy, more hands on deck. They are usually younger, which means they speak social media. When Hannah White, now on the team at JOIN for Justice, was Mayyim Hayyim’s graduate intern, she established our blog, she trained our board using Facebook, all the while honing her presentation skills and getting access to our top lay leaders.

For me, as an intern supervisor, there is a whole other set of benefits. I get to teach, to coach, to mentor. I get the thrill of working closely with someone eager to learn and help that person shape a career path. I get to set a level of excellence that they will carry with them in their next professional positions and I get to / have to model the kind of professional collaboration and support that I know will benefit us both and help the intern do the best work possible. It’s gratifying to see someone grow and evolve, to watch an intern afraid to make phone calls close a first campaign solicitation.  I find it energizing to help a rabbinical student articulate how she relates her work at Mayyim Hayyim to her personal relationship with God and to the spiritual leader she hopes to be.

Each intern brings a personal story, unique learning goals, and of course, gifts to share with our organization and with me, the lucky supervisor.

How has mentorship played a part in your career? What have you gained in your role as a mentor or mentee?

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Development Havruta: Fundraising Outside the Box

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Hannah White

This year, a new pilot project provided an opportunity for the Fellows to learn about the importance of organizing dollars in addition to their work organizing people to create collective power, as well as teach them new fundraising skills; the project also is meant to expand our capacity by bringing in new resources and building JOIN’s network of friends. Jedd Cohen spoke about his experiences:

The Fellows were matched in small groups of Development Havruta, modeling the traditional Jewish learning style of study in pairs. They were matched with community leaders, people with significant development experience who we wanted to provide more opportunities to engage in the organization and cultivate as donors or prospective donors. Each havruta group worked on individual projects; the Fellows looked to their community partners for strategic advice and support, and the community leaders had many more opportunities to interact with JOIN for Justice.

The Fellows are still working to achieve their development goals! Click here to make a donation in their honor and help them reach their goal.

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Nurturing Rabbis To Pursue Activism

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Hannah White

This article originally appeared on The Jewish Week, and profiles Seminary Leadership Project Alum Elana Rosen-Brown.

Rabbis for Human Rights launches summer social-justice fellowship for diverse group of seminarians.

Helen Chernikoff, Staff Writer

Knocking on strangers’ doors is never easy. That’s especially true when the knocker, a young cantor, finds her Hebrew getting tangled up with her Spanish. Which in turn makes it harder to persuade public housing residents — already weary of theft in their hallways and police at their peepholes — to open up.

But that’s exactly how Elana Rosen-Brown, 30, an ordained cantor and rabbinical student in the combined program at New York’s Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, wanted to spend this steamy summer. She got her wish when she won a spot in Rabbis for Human Rights-North America’s first class of rabbinical and cantorial fellows.

The new program signals the increasing importance of Jewish activism — long a phenomenon of the foundation and nonprofit sector — in congregational life.

“These issues of poverty affect us all … I want to learn how to act in solidarity as a Jewish community with other organizations outside the walls of the synagogue,” said Rosen-Brown, who is working an a East Harlem community organizing group, Community Voices Heard. She also said she wanted to learn how to apply to a synagogue the techniques and structure of the East Harlem community organizing group she’s working at, Community Voices Heard, where the leaders are also the members.

Rosen-Brown is not only immersing herself in New York City government policies like “participatory budgeting,” in which residents vote on proposed public projects, but she’s also learning from veteran activist Carmen Pineiro how to talk about those policies with the low-income population that CVH serves.

Last Monday morning, Rosen-Brown was doing her best to emulate Pineiro’s direct, no-nonsense delivery inside a housing project whose halls, redolent of old garlic and roach spray, also bore evidence, according to Pineiro, of illegal activity (in the overhead cable conduits that had been split open to store drugs).

Rosen-Brown’s “shpiel” — Pineiro’s word — got shorter and stronger as she went, earnestly angling her face and right foot into however many slim inches of space she was granted between door and frame.

At the end of the morning’s outreach efforts, Rosen-Brown and Pineiro had talked to several residents about participatory budgeting. A voice floated out from deep inside one of the small apartments: “Fight the power!” Out in the hall, Rosen-Brown pumped her fist.

The widespread tendency of American Jews to identify Judaism itself with activism has been well documented, and over the last 15 years has supported an expanding social justice sector including veterans like international aid organization  American Jewish World Service and newcomers like Challah for Hunger.

This consensus is not without its cracks, however.

Political conservatives don’t like Jewish social justice groups’ generally liberal solutions to problems; religious conservatives object that it tends to not see rabbinic law as obligatory, said Jonathan Neumann, a 24-year-old Tikvah Fellow from London who is researching the history and modern usage of the concept of “tikkun olam,” or “repairing the world,” and hopes to write a book about it.

Today’s seminary students came of age in this environment and had access to Jewish social justice programs in high school and college. More of them than ever before are determined to create activist pulpits and know they will find congregants who share their values.

“There are so many students who are trying to figure out how to integrate these issues into their rabbinate, and there aren’t many training opportunities,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the executive director of RHR-NA, a partner, founded in 2002, of the original Israeli group.

Of the rabbinical schools at HUC-JIR, the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Yeshiva University, only the Reform movement offers a for-credit course bearing directly on social justice, called “Leadership and Social Responsibility,” although students at all three seminaries have access to social justice work through internships.

At RHR-NA, Rosen-Brown and the other fellows spend three days of their week at their internships and the other two at the organization’s Chelsea offices. There, they study: Talmudic texts, for example, that address the sale of human beings and the redemption of captives are paired with a talk from an expert on human trafficking. They also learn from clergy already in the field; reflect on their experiences with a psychologist and begin the work of transmitting their new knowledge by writing sermons with future congregants in mind.

“The text studies we’ve been doing here have been consistently revelatory,” said Michael Langer, 27, a student at YU’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary who is working this summer at the Women’s Prison Association, which serves women with criminal justice histories.

About 16 students from all of American Judaism’s denominations vied for the four slots available in the fellowship’s pilot year, Rabbi Jacobs said. Funding permitting, Rabbi Jacobs plans to double the program’s size next year.

“I was worried that doing this work would make it impossible for me to do my pastoral work, but seeing a congregational leader who has very successfully interlaced the two was very inspiring,” said Adam Zagoria-Moffet, 23, of JTS.

The fourth fellow, Seth Wax, 31, is a student at non-denominational Hebrew College in Newton, Mass.

Social justice training for clergy may still be in short supply, but when Rabbi Jacobs was in rabbinical school at JTS in the late 1990s, there was hardly any available at all.

Back then, Rabbi Jacobs has written, everyone “humored her” when she said she wanted to devote her rabbinate to social justice. If you want to do that, they said, then why be a rabbi?

It was around that time, when most Jewish social justice groups were eking out an existence on the margins of the community, that the Nathan Cummings Foundationmade a conscious decision to help build the social justice movement in the hope that it would help revitalize American Judaism. The foundation seeded new organizations, funded established ones and created the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, its program director for Jewish Life and Values.

Other funders joined in as Jewish leaders and laypeople, primed by the success of such organizations as City Year and Teach for America, spread the movement, Rabbi Rosenn said.

The Reform movement founded its congregation-based organizing arm, “Just Congregations,” in 2006. Uri L’Tzedek, a prominent Orthodox social justice organization, was created in 2007. AJWS takes a rabbinical student delegation to work with its partners in developing countries.

And in May, community organizing training group JOIN for Justice hosted what it called the first Jewish summit on the subject, offering a “clergy track” attended by both leaders of the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and a group that called itself the “Orthodox caucus.”

“It’s great that people find their way to human rights through their own personal stories, but there must be a way to be a bit more proactive instead of waiting for everyone to go through their own journey without support,” Rabbi Jacobs said.

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Rest and Celebration

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Hannah White

In the course of the JOIN Fellowship year, we offer Jewish Organizing Fellows many tools to build their organizing skills. At the 2012 Siyyum/Graduation, Helen Bennett spoke eloquently about the need for rest and celebration in the life of an organizer in addition to harder skills. In this clip from the Siyyum, you can hear Helen’s story – with special appearances by Anna Lifson and Natalie Russ.

How do you incorporate rest and celebration into your work?

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Power, Privilege, and Identities (Matter)!

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Asher Bruskin

Why do I organize? Is there something that links my Jewish identity or the larger Jewish community to organizing for justice? How can Jews come together to organize around shared values?

Working as a community organizer both within Jewish and non-Jewish communities, I look to Jewish texts and concepts as I wrestle with answering these questions. There is the commandment to act when you see someone else being wronged, and our obligation to repair the world. In Exodus, we are told that we should not oppress the stranger, since we were once strangers in the land of Egypt. While these have been helpful and comforting, I’ve always felt like there were other questions that these responses didn’t address:

When I notice an injustice, how do I know when and how I should be acting? How can we make sure that our community is vigilant in identifying acts of injustice when privilege often masks them? How can we all live by a shared sense of values when we continue to disregard the benefits of privilege, a system that rewards some at the expense of others?

Before moving to Boston to be a JOIN Fellow, I spent two years working with AmeriCorps VISTA and the Department of Public Instruction in Wisconsin. My second year into the program, I attended a training on racism. During the training, we were asked to identify if/how our racial identities gave us power. When it came time to talk with a peer at my table, I expressed that it was really hard for me to move past thinking of myself as being powerless in most situations, as a transgender and queer person. I also struggled with the concept of my own racial identity as an Ashkenazi Jew, where there were always little reminders about how I didn’t fit into White Christian culture. So there I was grasping so tightly to my marginalized identities until one of the trainers rephrased the question, “Are there ways that you benefit from racial privilege?” It hit me – I had set up a false binary, where I let the pieces of my identity that rendered me feeling marginalized disregard the ways I benefit from my privilege. This was the first time that I really thought about my whiteness as being separate from my other identities, and it blew me away.

I had gone into the training wanting to be an anti-racist ally, but hadn’t been willing to acknowledge the fact that my white privilege has been actively benefiting me all my life. I needed to be pushed to understand that the multiple layers of my identity actually hold different types of power, that my queerness in a society that privileges hetero-normativity and my Jewishness in a Christian nation, can’t be a stand-in for a universal understanding of what it feels like to be oppressed. I also made the mistake of thinking that by experiencing some forms of oppression, I wasn’t as culpable for being complacent in continuing to perpetuate other forms of systemic oppression.

So, how does this all relate to the original questions about how the Jewish community can act collectively towards justice? The piece that feels so integral is a shared awareness of how we, as individuals, fit into systemic power dynamics and the way those inequalities play out in our interactions with others. Until we make it a norm for us to accept that we don’t earn privilege, we aren’t fully working towards justice. For us to empower and engage all members of our Jewish communities, we need to understand and name the power dynamics that simultaneously highlight and disregard different voices and perspectives within our communal narratives. When we talk about White Jewish solidarity in the Civil Rights Movement, let’s not forget that our Jewish communities have always and will continue to include Jews of color. When we make assertions about economic power within the Jewish community, we should look both outward and inward, holding up the disparities facing Jews of wealth, middle class Jews, and working class and lower income Jews. When we speak of intermarriage rates as a way to assess whether or not Jewish community is thriving, I urge our community to reframe our focus and affirm the many ways we can each identify with and live Jewishly, without reinforcing privileged hierarchies of the one “right” way to create Jewish families. When we celebrate the times when we acted in the name of justice, let’s make sure to also hold ourselves accountable to the things we need to do better.

JOIN has taught me to embrace complexity and to hold the tension in situations where binaries give way to shades of grey. JOIN has also taught me to embrace difficult conversations and to move beyond my scope of comfort in order to grow and embrace change. In love and humility, I want to be held by and held accountable to others in the Jewish community and our collective obligation to work toward justice.

Asher Bruskin is a JOIN Alum ‘10-11 currently working as Keshet’s Boston Community Organizer. He is a 26-year-old white, trans, masculine, queer, able-bodied, middle-class, Midwestern Ashkenazi Jew living in Jamaica Plain, MA.

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