2 Moshe Kornfeld University of Michigan the Chosen Universalists

Moshe Kornfeld University of Michigan The Chosen Universalists: Jewish Philanthropy and Youth Activism in Post-Katrina New Orleans Introduction I arrived at 6:00 pm with a bag of chips and a jar of salsa, the best potluck offering I could muster from the convenience store across the street. The email announcement for the event had read: “ALL are invited to join a ton of awesome groups who are partnering for this event! Moishe House NOLA, Jewish Newcomers, JGrad, Minyan Nahar, and LGBTQ Jewish NOLA are all so excited to get everyone together this Friday” (email correspondence, October 19, 2010). I had traveled to New Orleans earlier that week, and was eager to meet members of the youth activist community, a group that I imagined would figure prominently in my study of post-Katrina Jewish service, philanthropy, and activism. The home where the event took place, Moishe House NOLA, was the local chapter of an international not-for-profit agency dedicated to engaging Jewish young adults. The organization provides rent subsidies and programming budgets to select groups of young Jews living in cities around the world; in exchange, Moishe House residents host events for their Jewish peers. The sparsely furnished home, a second-floor duplex apartment, included a series of rooms in a row—a living room, followed by a dining room, a kitchen, and finally a large, carpeted den. The residence, presumably chosen for its expansive common spaces that could accommodate large groups, was located in the Irish Channel, an uptown New Orleans neighborhood. In the front room, a mostly empty space used for the storage of 2 bikes and shoes, the hosts had set up a table with nametag labels and promotional materials describing the various potluck sponsors. In addition to Moishe House NOLA, the event was sponsored by an independent prayer group called Minyan Nahar (“the river prayer fellowship”), a nascent and soon to be name Jewish LGBTQ group, and two Jewish-federation sponsored initiatives—the New Orleans Jewish Newcomers program, and JGRAD, which helped recent university graduates find jobs in the area. While the email invitation had indicated that the prayer service would begin at 6:15 pm, it was only around that time that attendees began to trickle in; friends greeted one another and newcomers were welcomed and introduced. No one seemed to mind that Naomi, the service leader, arrived forty-five minutes late with a freshly baked dessert. Shortly after her arrival, Naomi gathered the group in the den and began the structured part of the evening with a round of introductions. I noted at the time that the group included teachers, employees of not-for profit agencies, people passing through town, and a number of entrepreneurs—a woman starting a bagel business and a peddler of homemade popsicles. The crowd taking part in the service was not exclusively Jewish; two receptionists from the Jewish Community Center were in attendance as were a number of non-Jewish activists who had developed strong connections to the Jewish community. Over the next two years, I would often encounter these activists at Sabbath dinners, reading groups, and other events. The group was predominantly female. When it was my turn to introduce myself, I explained that I was an anthropologist studying social justice activism in New Orleans. Responding to this revelation, another attendee joked, “So, you are working right now.” And, of course, she was correct. This moment of introduction was both critical and strange. By introducing myself as an 3 anthropologist, I signaled my role as researcher and their possible roles as research subjects, a dynamic that requires the cultivation of both trust and distance. This need for a measure of detachment was strange for this particular anthropologist, who had spent a great deal of time in such contexts as a non-anthropological participant. After the round of introductions, the evening continued with a short prayer service consisting of selections from the Friday evening liturgy. The prayers and songs were sung collectively while those unfamiliar with the Hebrew words were encouraged to hum along. I swayed to the comforting melodies familiar from many years of synagogue attendance. This was not a typical service and did not follow a standard liturgy. The songs, poems, and prayers were selected seemingly at random by the gathered participants, who sat in a circle facing one another. The traditional service was deconstructed, reordered, and augmented from the melodies, prayers, and songs recalled by those present at the service in an act of liturgical bricolage. The service concluded as it had begun, with a round of introductions. This round focused primarily on the initiatives and organizations sponsoring the potluck and provided those who had arrived during the service with an opportunity to introduce themselves. By the time the service concluded, the crowd had nearly doubled, and the proportion of men to women had become slightly more balanced, though there were always many more women than men. I note that the presence of many more women was a typical feature of the Jewish youth activist community and of the service trips that I studied during the two years I conducted fieldwork in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. 4 The group then moved to the dining room, where two long plastic tables lined the wall and were filled with edible offerings, large disposable aluminum trays with food from a local kosher eatery as well as side dishes and salads furnished by the potluck attendees. The dishes were mostly homemade, wholesome, and vegetarian. In the middle of the room, an oval dining table was set up with homemade challah bread, wine, and desserts. We recited blessings over the wine and bread and then filled our plates at the buffet. I spent the next few hours mingling. I met Hillary, a recent alumna of AVODAH, the Jewish service corps in New Orleans. Hillary would soon leave New Orleans to spend a year working for a public health NGO in Panama. Over the next few years, Hillary would periodically return to New Orleans, a location that served as a home base for her during the years I conducted research. I met Ethan, a college senior who was taking time off from school to work for a Vietnamese youth empowerment organization that was established in the post-Katrina era. The organization coalesced when a number of young Vietnamese Americans living in Versailles, a Vietnamese American community in East New Orleans, successfully opposed the reopening of a landfill in their neighborhood for the disposal of post-Katrina debris. Ethan reported that the director of his organization saw Jews as a model immigrant group and sought Jewish employees as a result. These two individuals exemplify the group of energetic, ambitious, and progressive young Jews I met that evening. This group would play a central role in the ethnographic research I was to conduct in New Orleans. Top Down Grassroots 5 Perhaps the most striking feature of the potluck was the role philanthropists and philanthropic organizations played in bringing everyone together. The grassroots potluck aesthetic might mistakenly be associated with earlier countercultural and anti-institutional formulations of Jewish life (e.g. the Havurah movement, which dates to the 1960s and in which lay-led prayer groups provide alternatives to mainstream synagogues). While the event was hosted in what seemed like a private home, the residence was, in fact, a Jewish institutional space funded by an organization that was, in turn, supported by prominent Jewish family foundations. While the Havurah movement was named after the egalitarian idea of “fellowship,” Moishe Houses are named after the program’s original funder, Morris “Moishe” Squire, a wealthy patron who made a fortune as the owner of a chain of psychiatric hospitals (Sanders 2007). A 2007 profile written in Tablet, an online Jewish magazine, describes Moishe House as a project that emerged through the collaborative efforts of David Cygielman, a charismatic social entrepreneur, and the aforementioned “Moishe” Squire, an eccentric octogenarian who seemed to relish the opportunity to fund a free-flowing, home-based youth culture (Sanders 2007). In the article, Eli Sanders compares Moishe House and the Havurah movement: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Havurah movement took more of a grassroots approach, seeking to reinvent Jewish life using the terms of the counterculture movement. That meant college kids and recent college graduates— people mostly in their twenties, just like the Moishe House participants—leading their own non-denominational study groups and feminist services, and employing collective leadership stratagems… In a sense, the Moishe House movement is a hybrid of Hillel and Havurah, tailored to the lifestyle of the millennial generation. (Sanders 2007) Sanders is also quick to note that, in contrast to Moishe House’s philanthropic support, the Havurah movement “was never so lucky—or so dependent on outside cash. But it never had outposts on four continents, either” (Sanders 2007). Highlighting the centrality 6 of philanthropy and of wealthy funders is crucial for understanding contemporary American Judaism and American Jewish youth culture in an age defined by extreme wealth and by a donor class with disproportionate cultural influence. As the organization grew and Squire could no longer support Moishe House independently, the group became a 501c(3) not-for-profit organization and secured significant foundation support. Funders were attracted by the promise of reaching out to large numbers of young Jews who might not otherwise be engaged with Jewish institutions for what in the field of Jewish philanthropy was considered to be a relatively modest investment. Additionally, as the agency grew, it developed more standard policies to ensure that philanthropic investments were achieving their goals.

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