Last night, my Motzei Shabbos plans took me to the cinema, where I saw Julie & Julia. For those of you living outside the world of popular culture, this is a film based on a book based on a blog. The blog was started in late 2002 – just around the time I stopped blogging my first time around – right around the moment when blogging jumped from being a niche phenomenon to a zeitgeist. (Coincidentally, Jewschool launched in December 2002, just a few months later.)
There’s a moment in the film in which Julie’s husband, despairing at the state of their marriage (crumbling under the weight of her cooking/blogging project), asks Julie why she blogs, why this has become so important to her. Julie’s answer had a lot to do with a search for individual identity and voice at a moment in her life when she risked dissolving into her bland, repetitive workaday existence. Last night, listening to this conversation on the big screen, I found myself reflecting on the same question relative to this here blog that you’re reading.
It just so happens that it was the second time in two days that the question had come up for me. On Friday, I had coffee with Ally Berenson, program director of Gesher City Boston. There were two purposes to this meeting. Ally and I were in USY together, so it’s always a pleasure to see each other and catch up. Since we both work in the Jewish community, we inevitably have a lot to talk about, but since I work primarily with teenagers and she works primarily with the 21-35 crowd, our professional lives don’t intersect as often as I might like. However, at the last Jewschool powwow (about a dozen of the editors & contributors got together for a real-life in-person meeting last month), Team Jewschool talked about exploring potential connections Jewschool could and should be making with other organizations out there in the Jewish world. I immediately thought of GesherCity. Now before all you bleeding edge anti-establishment hipsters vomit all over your netbooks, let me explain…

GesherCity defines itself thus:

GesherCity (ge’sher’sit’e) n. {Hebrish}: 1. The bridge to your local Jewish scene.; 2. Your connection to a city of people, culture and resources.

Jewschool defines itself thus:

Jew School is an open revolt. Offering the latest and greatest from the bleeding edge of Jewish cultural and communal life, Jew School’s more than just a weblog. It is an ever-expanding network of websites, projects, and events which promote critical thought and provide engagement opportunities for disenfranchised Jews alienated — and bored to death — by the Jewish mainstream.

So where’s the potential overlap?
Let me start by saying that I’ve never been a particular fan of GesherCity. The few events I’ve attended (mostly as a representative of Keshet, advertising our existence to young Jewish adults looking to see what’s out there in the Jewish community) have been full of people who, for the most part, were not interested in the same kinds of Jewish activity that I am. (That’s a kind way of saying there were an overwhelming number of women pushing thirty with that air of desperation that can only come from the particular combination of biological clock and overbearing mother, and a few wily men who know exactly how to benefit from that situation.) On the other hand, it was always important to me that Keshet was represented both to remind the core audience that the Jewish community isn’t (just) about breeding, and in case a misguided queer ended up in the room, we’d be there to let him/her/zir know that we have a place at the table too. (To be fair to GesherCity, they were also a co-sponsor of the Jewish Young Adult Writers Forum that I’ve written about on Jewschool in the past.
And it’s that philosophy that makes me want to pursue opportunities for Jewschool to get involved with GesherCity. At our coffee date (okay, I was drinking Passionfruit Lemonade Iced Tea), Ally asked me what Jewschool was really about, why we’d want to pursue some kind of a partnership. Why do I spend so much time blogging and commenting on this website?
I started to quote another piece from our masthead,

Jew School dares to be what others can not: It pries Judaism from the lifeless fingers of the Jewish establishment…

…and I saw her start to blanche. After all, GesherCity is the establishment. In Boston, it’s a department of the Federation!
But then I assured her that we weren’t simply trying to overthrow The Man. (After all, in my many roles in the Establishment, I am as much The Man as any one.) The quote from out masthead continues:

…and serves it up to the public with the insistence, “This belongs to you.”

Part of ensuring that Judaism belongs to all of us is making sure that our voices, the progressive, anti-inertia, anti-status-quo voices, are part of the communal conversation. I think it’s our duty to ensure we’re not just preaching to the choir (and the occasional Chabad shliach who’s assigned to monitor the Jewschool comments). In an age when thousands of young people are getting turned on to Jewish communal involvement through a free trip to Israel, it’s our duty to greet them on their return and show them there’s a place for them in the community at home — even if they disagree with Israel’s politics, or if they don’t have a great deal of Jewish knowledge at their fingertips, or if they aren’t interested in services or Jewish music or social justice, or if they’re only interested in services or Jewish music or social justice, or even if they aren’t considered Jewish by whatever part of the Jewish community they might have first wandered into…
Making sure the Jewish community includes all Jews, and the Jewish conversation includes all their voices and opinions is deeply important to me. Giving all Jews the tools to participate in the community and those conversations from a place of knowledge, comfort, and ownership is key. This has a lot to do with why I’ve made my career in pluralistic Jewish education, why I spent most of my volunteer efforts in Jewish inclusion work, and why I keep blathering on about my opinions here at Jewschool.
So I’m hoping that Jewschool will have a presence at GesherCity Boston’s kick-off event at the Roxy on October 7th. (I thought I’d be that presence, but I forgot that my brother is doing a book signing that night and family almost always trumps other responsibilities for me.) And I’m hoping that Jewschool and GesherCity will come up with some other exciting ways to bring a progressive voice into their activities and help progressive Jews find a place in the community. We’re talking about launching a social media cluster to bring together Jewish bloggers, tweeters, etc in the Boston area. If you’re interested in getting involved, let me know! If you have other thoughts about how we might work together (or, if it makes you feel better “how Jewschool might infiltrate and subvert GesherCity”), let me know that too.