Jewish Philanthropy and Youth Activism in Post-Katrina New Orleans
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The Chosen Universalists: Jewish Philanthropy and Youth Activism in Post-Katrina New Orleans by Moshe Harris Gedalyah Kornfeld A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) in the University of Michigan 2015 Doctoral Committee: Professor Stuart Kirsch, Chair Professor Ruth Behar Emerita Professor Gillian Feeley-Harnik Professor Deborah Dash Moore Professor Elisha Renne © Moshe Kornfeld 2015 DEDICATION To Rachel ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS While the analyses that constitute this dissertation are grounded in the dusty archives of Jewish institutional history and in the vibrant streets of New Orleans, this project first took shape in Ann Arbor as a result of the outstanding and ongoing support of my doctoral committee. I am grateful to my advisor, Stuart Kirsch, whose holistic approach to mentorship has helped me immeasurably at every stage of the process. I am continually inspired by Stuart’s thoughtful and efficacious integration of activist and anthropological commitments, and feel honored to have written this dissertation in conversation with him. I would like to express my boundless thanks to Deborah Dash Moore, whose keen and cutting insights helped me use my anthropological training to enter the Jewish studies debates close to my heart and to the heart of this project. Ruth Behar taught me to explore my own ethnographic subjectivities and to pursue the complex narratives woven together in my ethnography; if I have infused those aspects of the project concerned with potentially dry institutional histories with the vibrancy and urgency of debates about the very nature of Jewish life, then it is thanks to her. This project is as deeply indebted to Gillian Feeley-Harnik’s anthropological investigations of Judaism and Christianity as it is to her encouragement. Thanks are due to Elisha Renne for her engagement with the project and for the engaging conversations that helped me clarify and refine my goals at various stages of the research and writing process. I would like to acknowledge a number of powerful interlocutors who have all left their mark on this project. Joshua Friedman has exemplified the meanings of friendship iii and collegiality. Karla Goldman has been a tireless champion of this project and has helped me frame my interventions in relation to the history of Jewish progressivism. I am grateful for my conversations with Rachel Gross, and want to thank her, in particular, for welcoming me to the Princeton Religion in the Americas workshop, a wonderful weekly gathering led by the brilliant Judith Weisenfeld and Wallace Best. I am grateful to the members of this workshop for creating such a warm and generative academic space. I would like to thank David Akin, Lila Corwin-Berman, Jonathan Gribetz, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, and Vanessa Ochs, who have been wonderful mentors, colleagues, and friends. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all of those who shared their lives with me in New Orleans. To the lay-leaders and professional staff of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans, to the AVODAH staff, corps members and alumni, and to the many students and group leaders who welcomed me as part of their service trips to New Orleans, I owe tremendous thanks. I am particularly grateful to Joshua Lichtman for guiding me through my research in New Orleans and for our ongoing friendship. This dissertation could not have been completed without the collaboration and support of a number of organizations. I am extremely grateful to AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps and to Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice for allowing me to study their programs as part of this research. I would like to thank the Repair the World foundation for their support of this project. Additionally, I would like to thank the Association for Jewish Studies and the Berman family for awarding me the Berman Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Support of Research in the Social Scientific Study of the Contemporary American Jewish Community in its inaugural year. I would also like iv to thank the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving for their support of the writing phase of this dissertation. It was as the 2013 Lake Institute dissertation fellow that I was able to complete the majority of this writing project. My first exposure to anthropology came as an undergraduate at the University of Rochester. I thank Robert Foster and Ayala Emmett for their early and ongoing mentorship and for introducing me to the discipline. I would like to give special thanks to my wonderful family: to my New Orleans family, Liba, Ethan, Adin, Yona, and Liav, who were with me during fieldwork; to my New York family, Yael, Avram, Ravi, Nomi and Max, who were with me during the dissertation writing process; and finally to my Boulder family, Robert, Andee, and Jed, who were with me in these final few months of writing and editing. My parents, Deborah and George, instilled in me a love of Judaism, a love of learning, and a passion for justice. Your influence and your commitments have made an indelible mark on this project. And most of all, I’d like to thank Rachel, my partner in life and in thought. We are a great team and I could not have completed this dissertation without you. v TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES ix Introduction 1 Top Down Grassroots 4 Philanthropic Judaism 7 The Anthropology of Jews and Judaism 12 A Relational Approach to Universalism and Particularism 15 Why New Orleans? 20 Field Sites, Methodology, and Chapter Summary 27 Ethnographic Subjectivity 32 Chapter One: TikkuNOLAm: Asserting and Challenging the Jewish Philanthropic Status Quo 37 Introduction 37 Federating Jewish Philanthropy 42 Ecumenical Consolidation 47 Jews in Crisis 49 The Jewish Federation Response to Hurricane Katrina 54 vi The Emergence of Jewish Social Justice 61 Hurricane Katrina, Jewish Universalism, and Social Justice Discourse 72 Politicizing Jewish Philanthropy 80 Chapter Two: Rebuilding Justice: Jewish Philanthropy and the Politics of Representation 86 Introduction 86 Visualizing Jewish Aid 90 Challenging the Federation 93 The Politics of Jewish Aid 100 Jewish Activists and Critical Social Sciences 103 Forming the “Jewish Channel” 109 Chapter Three: Reciprocating Justice: Political Dissidence and Jewish Privilege 116 Introduction 116 The Jewish Establishment 119 A Narrative Approach to Jewish Social Justice Activism 122 Reciprocating Jewish Privilege 135 Chapter Four: In the Service of Jewish Identity 153 Introduction 153 Episodic Jewish Culture 156 The Rise of Jewish Service 162 Creating a Jewish Service Movement 167 Producing and Consuming Jewish Service Trips to New Orleans 177 Becoming Philanthropic Agents 181 vii Dismantling Jewish Service Learning 194 Chapter Five: Structure, Practice, and Agency in a Jewish Service Corps 197 Introduction 197 Activists and Philanthropists 200 Interfaith Connections 206 Creating Jewish Social Justice Norms 211 Philanthropic Contexts 223 The Bayit, Gender and Feminism 226 Conclusion 233 Chapter Six: National and Anti-National Intimacies: Zionism, Diaspora, and the American Jewish Mishpokhe 237 Introduction 237 The Jewish Diasporic Mishpokhe 242 The Politics of Avoidance 245 Re-centering Diaspora 249 Protesting from Within 252 Representation and Confrontation 262 Conclusion 271 Conclusion 277 Capitalism as a Cultural System 279 The Political Stakes 280 Update 281 REFERENCES 285 viii LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE Figure 1: Billboard welcoming travelers to the 2010 General Assembly 38 Figure 2: Picture of facade, conference hotel, 2010 GA 38 Figure 3: Promotional image advertising tikkuNOLAm conference 38 Figure 4: Major service and social justice initiatives in post-Katrina New Orleans 73 Figure 5: AVODAH presenter's map of the Jewish organizational world 121 Figure 6: Bench decorated by service trip volunteers 192 Figure 7: AVODAH curriculum overview, 2011-2012 219 Figure 8: Chart of organizations and their relative positions toward the state of Israel 241 ix 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 bikes and shoes, the hosts had set up a table with nametag labels and promotional 1 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.