By Eva Wyner
This week we had the opportunity to spend meaningful time with Professor Reimer, who plays an integral role in crafting the Nachshon curriculum and works intimately with fellows who are selected to participate in the graduate school fellowship. He began his lecture by tracing Jewish migration to America. Through an interactive discussion, we were able to understand how, when and why organizations came to fruition in order to adequately serve American Jews. This first piece of the day’s program provided each and every one of us with an understanding of our own history, as we set off to service Jewish communities in America. Professor Reimer expressed that “Israelis are masters at telling their own stories”. In contrast, as American Jews, we lack a collective narrative, since our own individual narratives are fractured and dissimilar. While we share many lived experiences, American Jews do not share a monolithic history often causing disunity.
After learning from each other our family histories and stories of Jewish migration in America, we subsequently thought about the evolving needs of these communities today. While the lecture on Jewish migration shifted into a conversation about graduate school, each of us was left with the imprint of this conversation as we were posed with the question of how can we, as aspiring Jewish professionals, confront the issues that American Jews are facing today. Fortunately, the Nachshon Project provides us with tangible steps and guidance in order to think about this question in theory and in practice.
After a day spent thinking about our own individual futures, later in the day, we had the opportunity to hear from Dr. Passig, a futurist himself. To pull out one glaring statistic from his presentation, he hypothesized that by the turn of the Century, there will be roughly 4-6 million Jews in America and 20 million Jews living in Israel. Ever since our conversations with Professor Reimer over these past few days, this statistic has lingered with me. I begin to question my loyalty and commitment to the success of American Jewry and whether or not moving to Israel is the only adequate option? Through my personal confrontation with this question, I have transitioned into finding ways to change the strategy used in order to effectively engage American Jews in order to challenge this statistic. As secularism looms over America, Jewish communities have to find ways to adapt to these rapid changes in order to ensure that the story of American Jews carries on.
