Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
Welcome to alumni, to students, to parents, to family members, to community members. We are so delighted to have all of you here tonight to welcome our special guest speaker, Nancy Kaufman, who is going to share with us around the topic of Jewish values and activism then and now. For those of you who do not know Nancy's story, Nancy has been active in a number of organizations over the years both as professional and in a volunteer capacity. Nancy graduated from Brandeis University or Nancy, should I keep that to myself?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
No, it's okay.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
Class of, I'll let you share it.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
1972.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
1972. But rather than continuing to have my voice be the one that's centering this conversation, I'd actually like to let Nancy tell you the beginning of her story and start us off with sharing from whence her values and the sort of beginning stages of her work and her activism has come. And then, therefore, without giving any spoilers, we'll get into the depths of her work and her time at Brandeis and everything in between.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
Okay, thanks so much, Stephanie. And thank you to all my colleagues at Brandeis. I always welcome the opportunity to come back to school and to speak with all of you. I know people are still joining in the queue, but as Stephanie said, I'm Nancy Kaufman, and I'm a proud graduate of Brandeis in 1972. I guess I would call myself a child of the 60s. I think I had activism in my blood from the time I was born. I grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, and I got a very strong conservative Jewish education at Kehilath Israel Brookline on Harvard Street, in its heyday, when we would go from the Edward Devotion School, stop at Irving's Candy Shop and then go over to Hebrew school and sometimes get kicked out of class because we had too much food in our desks.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
But it was a wonderful place. It was wonderful. And then it those days, as you can imagine, Brookline was a largely Jewish community, mainly Jewish, now it's much more diverse, which is very exciting to me.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I got a basic good Jewish education in Hebrew school and in my community. And then really, sort of started acting on my Jewish values and digging further into them. When I was in high school and I was very active in BBYO, B'nai B'rith Youth Organization, and became a leader in BBYO, one of my first trip to Israel, three weeks after the Six Day War in 1967, at a time when very few people I knew were going to Israel. Certainly, very few people in my family had ever been. And the way I tell the story is that I had gotten a scholarship to go, my family could not have afforded to send me. And then the war broke out.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And I said, wait a minute, and half the 100 kids were going on a leadership program canceled and people calling my mother and saying, you're not going to let her go. And I said, I made a deal, which was one of my first negotiations. I said, if the State Department says it's okay for me to go, I'm going to go. It was also my first fundraising experience because the trip cost $1000. BBYO was giving $500 scholarships. I didn't have the other $500 and I asked my mother if she would call her brother who then had a Brandeis connection, I don't know if he's on or not, later in life as a philanthropist board member. She said, "No, but you can call them." So I had my first fund-raising experience. I called and asked him if he would match that gift of $500. And he said he would but only if I agreed to speak about my experience when I got back.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So those were my early experiences. I actually went off to spend two years at NYU, New York University in the Bronx when there was a campus in the Bronx. But my then boyfriend became my husband at Brandeis, convinced me that I should come back to the hallowed halls of Brandeis. So I came back in 1970 in the middle of the student strike that was because of the Kent State because of Vietnam. So let me hold it there, and if you want me to continue, Stephanie, I can and tell the rest of the story.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
Absolutely. And one thing I'll say before we move forward, just so everyone knows, we will have time for an open Q&A at the end of things. If people have clarifying questions, if we use a term that you're not familiar with, please do let us know that in the chat. But for now, we'll really let Nancy's voice come through first and foremost. Before we go into your Brandeis stories, which I'm sure everyone is now on tenterhooks waiting to hear, I'd love to just ask you as I might ask of our students, so as a former Brandeis student, here you go, what would you say, looking back on those early years, what were some of the values that were already at play for you in your life?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I was a student of Pirkei Avot. I think I must have learned it maybe in eighth grade of Hebrew education or maybe Hebrew school. But I really took to Pirkei Avot. It just spoke to me. That's where I got a lot of the values that I hold dear to this day. Things like I'm not for myself. Who am I if I'm only for myself. What am I? If not now, when? I said, well, that makes a lot of sense. We're not responsible for completing the work but we must not desist from beginning it. Those kinds of, do not separate yourself in the community. These were short, little snippets. You didn't have to memorize all of Torah. But they really, really spoke to me. And they spoke to me in a very deep, in a serious way that I felt it was my responsibility to be partners with God and the repair of the world. That's what I was taught, that's what we're supposed to do.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And I took it quite literally that I was a partner in the repair of the world, and it really drove my entire life since that time. And I've always sought out the opportunity to combine my interest in social justice with a grounding in Jewish values and in Jewish understanding. So, those are the kind of driving forces I could go on and talk about etc, etc, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, and etc, etc, that many of you know. It was a real belief that this is a beautiful Torah that we have, the Oral Torah was really quite very powerful. I believed it and still do.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
Thank you so much. That's a beautiful answer. So you are in Brookline, armed with some bagels from Kupels or Kupels depending on how people choose to pronounce it. Words of Torah, words of Pirkei Avot. A little detour in New York, and then over to Waltham, over to Brandeis, coming in as the student protests are happening. So tell us about whether it's the protest experience or other sort of vignettes from your time at Brandeis. How did those values grow or change or increase and what was the impact of the time on campus?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
Well, I started the process when I was at NYU and continued it when I got to Brandeis. My boyfriend at the time was an activist in Brandeis. He started his freshman year there and was one of the people that was very involved in the student strike. In fact, I spent my 18th birthday at NYU taking over a building. But as an 18 year old that wanted to protest ROTC on campus. But it was my birthday and it was my 18th birthday and I wanted my mail. So I got one of my friend's boyfriend's to go get the mail in the mail room so that I could have my mail while I was sitting in the building that we were taking over. So I was always pragmatic. I always had a practical side.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
But when I transferred in 1970, it was right after the Kent State killings, murders, most college campuses had been literally closed down, finals had been canceled. And I came to live off campus. I got extremely involved right away in the Waltham group that my boyfriend had been a leader of. And I had told him that I'd only come to Brandeis if I have women friends, and I told him he had to introduce me to women because I wasn't coming unless I was going to have as wonderful of friends that I had at NYU at Brandeis, all of whom I still have today. And he did introduce me to a group of transfer students who had come after their freshman year. And I interviewed them and I said, okay, they'll be my friends. Some of those people have been my friends for almost 50 years.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And Waltham Group really became my way of doing my activism. And I was talking to Stephanie earlier today who said Waltham Group is still alive and well and active. I tutored in the Chesterbrook Housing Project. I did social action work through Waltham Group. The protests died down a little bit, although we kept marching in Washington. And my first trip to Washington was actually on a March against the Vietnam War. I'd never been to Washington. And we went to protest the war. It was also a very challenging time at Brandeis, and those of you who know the lore probably have heard the stories about the bank robbery and Susan Sacks and Kathy Powers.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I have two stories on that. One is that Susan Sacks actually stayed at my apartment. So I was sure the FBI was checking me out. And they got very wrapped up in sort of this radical, we need to seize our government and there was a burglary and an armory in Newburyport. In fact, I had my protests principles, I also had my fun principles, don't think I was only doing protests.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So I will remember, it probably doesn't happen anymore but over at where 128 is, it used to be the hitchhiking site, so if you wanted to hitchhike anywhere, you hitchhiked there. We were going to the beach and Newburyport, Plum Island on a beautiful Sunday and who was hitchhiking but Susan Sacks and Kathy Power. So we gave a ride to Newburyport. Little did we know we were abetting a crime, but the rest of that is history. You can google it. It was a very, very intense, very, everyone thought they were gonna change the world or we were going to have a revolution.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I was more into democracy and doing it within the realm of what was legal. As long as we took over buildings and did it appropriately, I was okay with that. But Brandeis was a hotbed of activism. It was amazing. It was an incredible place to do social justice and to really, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua said when he marched with Martin Luther King, "Pray with your feet." It was a way to pray with your feet. And so it wasn't until I got married, believe it or not, the week before I graduated, my friends to this day thought I was out of my mind, they didn't know why I was doing that. But I got married at the Student Union, Usdan, got married in the chapel and then had the reception at the Student Union, by Rabbi Al Axelrod, who was the Hillel Rabbi at the time.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
The combination at Brandeis of commitment to social justice and high quality academics, I actually became an English literature major, which I to this day, I'm thrilled that I did because I read things that I probably would never have read since. And for my independent study in Karen Klein's who I know isn't there anymore, I did the problem of evil in literature and we studied Job. And I did work on Job and on the Holocaust and what does it look like, what does evil look like. How do we define that?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
It was an amazing time and it was an amazing experience and I always, I've cherished it. I stayed in Boston for many years afterwards till 10 years ago when I came to New York for a job. And always loved it when any of my friends, faculty, colleagues would call me back, and was very proud of my 25th reunion to get the Alumni Award from the university. So, I feel a very close connection to the school.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
Such incredible stories. And on the one hand, there's the campus professional saying, dear students, please don't get ideas about picking up hitchhikers. But at the same time, there were all these little moments in this story in terms of your work as a social activist and involved in social justice. But also, it sounds like those things continued to be informed by those Jewish values that you brought with you to campus, and came up in lots of different ways in terms of some of the classes that you were taking, the wedding with Rabbi Al Axelrod, who we love dearly. And I'm wondering, what is sort of your memory of what Hillel and Jewish life looked like on campus at the time?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
Well, at that time, and I don't know now, I think you probably have a much more robust, Hillel was very tiny because there were so many of us who were doing our activism through social justice, which was our Torah. And Hillel was this tiny little, it was tiny. I'm thrilled at what's happened to the whole Hillel movement nationally since that time because it didn't have, in my day, the robust, amazing opportunity to do Torah and justice, to be honest. It wasn't until later that, I say now retrospectively, I will tell you, and it's all true. But it wasn't till much later when I ended up working in the Jewish community, which was 20 years after I left Brandeis that I started to put it back together and went back to those roots.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
It wasn't that I wasn't, I was very actively involved in my synagogue and I went to a Jewish day school. It wasn't that I wasn't involved. It's just that I had had an eighth grade education when it came to Jewish texts. And then I had an activist high school time. And then like many of us, I'd say really after bar mitzvah, my family couldn't afford to send me to Hebrew college, I would have loved to have gone. You stop learning, which was terrible. But now we have all these unbelievable online and lifelong learning programs. But it really wasn't like that for a long time.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And it wasn't till I came back in 1990 to work with the federation in Boston as the head of the JCRC for Boston after having spent 20 years working in anti-poverty work and nonprofit work and government work, all influenced by my Jewish values, no question about it. But I didn't have the language. I didn't have the way to articulate why I was doing what I was doing. And it wasn't until I started really studying, I participated in the mayor program, I studied text at CJP with a scholar residence, had their Genesis program at noon time.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I was like a sponge. I think I was like a sponge because it had opened up to me. And Brandeis was such a gift to me and to the Jewish people. The fact that there was a Jewish sponsored university, I always thought was incredible. I think I took that for granted a little bit too much. And I'd urge everyone who's a student on this call, don't take it for granted, take advantage of all there is to offer in terms of learning and studying because I wish I had, I wish I'd taken one NEJS courses, which I didn't because I was too busy taking sociology, English literature, educational change and social change.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I caught up. I became a very avid adult learner. And always returned to Brandeis every chance I could for every event I could, which was always fantastic and wonderful. And actually had a conference at Brandeis to be involved. Brandeis students as well as young leadership from the community around 1992, I went to one called Return to Passion, how to turn your passion into action. And it was an attempt to bring together inter-generationally our community with secular organizations in the city for how we could take our Jewish values and really put our own faith into action.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I learned in my interfaith work that so many people in the Christian community really knew their texts, they knew their texts. We couldn't hold a candle to sit around the table. And so, in interfaith dialogue became more and more interested in knowing my own story, my own religion so that I could be at the table with other religions and learn about theirs. So, all that was given to me I think by my Brandeis education.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
It's amazing and it's sort of global nature, it's holistic nature, all the different things that we get from Brandeis. And I appreciate what you said of take advantage of it while you're there and while you have access to all of these things. And certainly Hillel has changed over the years. We're lucky to have a springboard social justice fellow. We're lucky to have lots of affiliate groups that work on different issues of tzedek and chesed and tikkun olam of justice and kindness and repairing the world both within the Jewish community and beyond. I think part of the strength of that that maybe offers the piece that perhaps was missing for you in some ways, was that articulation and allowing students to lean into that piece earlier on through Jewish learning and different opportunities like that.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
I always find that that articulation and ability to sort of discern one's path is kind of crucial as we're figuring out our next steps, after college, after grad school, after, after, after. So I want to ask you about the after of Brandeis. So you start out with your values and the sort of beginnings of activism in high school. You come on to the Brandeis campus and you're in the thick of it. How do you start to go pro? What did that transition look like?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
Well, it was interesting. As every good young Jewish woman at that time who was told by her parents you have to be a teacher, I did student teaching in Newton. I got a job my first year out of Brandeis as an assistant teacher in Newton where I had been the student teacher. And my husband then, my boyfriend and husband who was really a great second and third grade teacher and he was working in Acton, and I knew I'd never be as good at teacher as he was, I could tell right away. And that wasn't really for me. And yet, I had been programmed that I really needed to do teaching. I realized after one year that wasn't my calling, I wasn't going to be teaching.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And I was lucky to get a job my second year out of Brandeis at a adolescent counseling center in Newton, where I was doing all kinds of stuff working in the community and working with the board really as an administrative assistant. But as most of my career has been serendipitous, there was a man there who was doing his internship from Boston College School of Social Work in community organizing. And I quizzed him and I said, "You can get a degree in community organizing." He says, "Yeah, they have a master's in social work and community organizing." I went, really? And really started attaching myself to him and applied for and got a fellowship my third year out of Brandeis to attend the Graduate School of Social Worker at BC in community organizing, an NIMH, a National Institute of Mental Health scholarship.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And so from there, it was all, that's what I've been doing ever since is all forms of community organizing. I started organizing then, and my placements, I'd worked in north of Boston in Malden, Massachusetts, doing organizing. I started and ran at the ripe old age of 28, don't ask me if I knew what I was doing. But I was the first executive director of Community Action Agency, an anti-poverty agency north of Boston. I did that till my daughter was born. And Ronald Reagan was elected president. And I just like said, oh my God, I can't both have a baby and deal with Ronald Reagan being president and taking away all the benefits from people.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So, I took a break, a small break and then went got very involved in the Dukakis campaign for governor in 1981, 82. And went into his administration in 1983 as head of the deputy director of his Governor's Office of Policy. And did that and then worked as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. I then went to the Kennedy School for a year for a mid career, Master's in Public Administration. All variations on the theme of how do you make change. How do you make change in a community? How do you make change in government? Homelessness was my issue. I worked on it for eight years. And then ultimately, wanted to be closer to the line of where things happen and became Deputy Commissioner of the welfare department when I finished.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And then when Mike Dukakis wasn't going to Washington when he lost the election in 1988, and I wasn't going to Washington, I could have buried myself in a republican administration, I wasn't going to do that. And I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I had time, I had like eight months, I was still working as deputy commissioner. And I heard about a job opening in the Jewish community as head of the Jewish Community Relations Council. I had no idea what they really did. All I knew was is I was a fairly high level Jewish woman in state government at a time when it was mainly Irish Americans and Italian Americans. There weren't a lot of Jews either in the legislature or working in government. And became very aware of, by the way, my Jewishness during that time.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And got very close to Kitty Dukakis, who I think most people know was Jewish. And we both spent a lot of time talking about where are the Jews. Why when there's a major social policy issue on the docket of state government that isn't about anti-semitism or hate crimes, the Jews aren't there. I really, really spent a lot of time thinking about it, talking to people about it, going around to synagogues saying, how come the churches are opening up their basements to the homeless and the hungry but the synagogue aren't. Talking to synagogues who thought because they were making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for shelters or something like that, that that was social change. And realizing no, no, no, that's not social change. Social change is actually changing the conditions that give rise to the issues that make it possible that people would be on the street homeless and hungry.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So I got very deep into kind of what are the causes of everything wrong in our society and everything that's broken. And felt very strongly and sort of got a real consciousness around if I ever could do anything to fix that and try to reconnect our largely suburban Jewish community that had moved out of the city westward, as we tend to do as Jews, to reconnect us to our inner city roots, that that would be something I could really throw myself into. And that opportunity came just totally serendipitously, and that's what I would say to students on the line. You never know where or when that opportunity is going to come. No one ever thought they'd hire me for this job because at my first interview that I went to, one of them said to me, "But you haven't been to Israel in 24 years. How are you going to do this job?" And I said, "Well, I love Israel, and I care about Israel, and I just haven't gone back because ...," by the way, I've been 52 times since. I got there.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
Would you like to lead a birthright trip with us when we can do that again?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I would love to. That would be really fun. I've planned a lot of non-Jews to Israel, and that's a lot of what I did in the JCRC. But one of the things that struck me, and I think it's an important realization I had is that when I was in government, it happened at the interview, it happened before the interview, I was working on a special message on chronic mental illness for state government. It was a bond offers, a lot of money for us to develop group homes for the mentally ill and mentally retarded. It was right after deinstitutionalization.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I remember Barry Shrage at the time, who was the head of CJP, and I know is at Brandeis now, who was my friend and colleague, cared deeply about services for the mentally ill and mentally retarded. He was the one who kind of found me in state government and kept talking to me about, "Well, the Jews, we care, we care." And I kept saying, "Really Barry, really, you just care for the Jews or you care for everyone that they have high quality group homes."
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And I remember him inviting me to come to the board to speak to the board of the Federation, of CJP at the time about the message on chronic mental illness. I said, "Great, where's your office, who are these people?" And I walked into the boardroom, I'll never forget it, it was probably in the mid 80s I guess. And I looked around the room and I knew a whole lot of the people around that table because they were democratic activists in Massachusetts. However, they never said they were Jewish democratic activists. They never took their Jewish values and say to the politicians that they were supporting, it was like two separate worlds. They had their Jewish volunteer work they were doing, and they had their democratic.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And I thought to myself, wow, if we could ever connect those dots, can you imagine how we could influence change and make change? If those people sitting around the table would both be activist Jews and Jewish activists, both, Jewish activists and activist Jews, we could actually make change happen in this Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And that's kind of what we started to do. Started to kind of stitch that together so that we created power and that we just thought, we could be a powerful force. And then when you join that, which I spent a lot of years doing, with other faith groups, and did the same thing with their clergy and their activists, both grassroots and, grass tops and grassroots, and you then go together to the president of the Senate or the governor or the Speaker of the House and you ask for something, for health care, for instance, we did, affordable health care, what they later called Obamacare really started out as Romney Care in Massachusetts under republican administration. People take notice.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
When you have a priest and an imam and a minister and a rabbi, and a whole bunch of lay leaders and volunteers come together and say, our religious faith values inform what we want to talk to you about, you know what, they listen. And we got passed the Affordable Health Care Massachusetts to that kind of coalition, which was very powerful. It all fits back, it's like a puzzle and it comes back together.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So I thought it would be in working in the Jewish community for four years and go back to a democratic administration in Massachusetts. But there wasn't one for 17 years. So I got hooked and became a Jewish communal professional. I still am and it grabbed me. And part of it was the ability to do Torah and justice together.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
I love that. I feel like in some ways that's such a classic story of someone starts working in the Jewish community because it is something they care about, but perhaps it wasn't the long term plan. And then lo and behold, they fall in love with the work and what it allows them to do. But it's so fascinating to hear your story, particularly being at Brandeis being based in Boston, the ways that some of those conversations continue to be alive, whether it's on campus or in the broader community, the language and conversation around social change and social justice work, moving away from models that are sort of performative or band aids and really thinking about what are the root causes, thinking about disability advocacy, that's a huge topic of conversation amongst many Brandeis student leaders now today including students within the Jewish community and beyond.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
So it's just interesting to think about the ways that we create these legacies around topics that are important that we care about through the lens of different values and the way that we continue to see progress and growth as we move through time, and the work is ongoing.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I'm happy to, go ahead, finish.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
No, no, no, please.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I feel proud to have been one of the founders of what I consider the modern day Jewish social justice movement because at the time that I was involved, Barry's involved, we really did make this deal that he would be Torah and I would be justice. And that we would go around the community and say you can't have one without the other, and he would say you can have without justice, and I'd say you can't have justice without Torah. It was very, very important at the time that we did this because there were one side of the ledger, sort of the Jewish education, a day school, advocates, synagogue goers. And on the other side of the ledger, there's a whole group of people who were alienated. They were Jewish but they didn't really feel connected Jewishly. And social justice became their ticket back in.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And I think if you talk to Rabbis who were around then, they'll say that it really reinvigorated their synagogues in the work because what I realized as a community organizer is that the best gateways in the Jewish community, we have many gateways, we have Hillels, you have synagogues, you have day schools, you have a lot of gateways. And you want to maximize those gateways. So there should be all different gateways that people can enter. But when you enter, you want the message to be Torah and justice. You could choose one or the other or both but they can't be separated, they have to be integrated.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And so, I brought that to, nationally, got together with a few of my colleagues across the country and we started after several years of working in fits and stocks, the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable. Started with six of us. Then it was 12, then it was 18. It's now over 60 organizations, some of which didn't exist 25 years ago. And so, I feel very proud that, I think Boston really was the beginning of that. And tzedek hillel by the way, which was, I think Brandeis and Tufts were the two tzedek hillels in the Boston area at the time. This was early on, national hillel funded tzedek hillel coordinators. And we worked very closely with them.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So I think we see the sea change. It maybe hard for people to imagine that there was a time when it was sort of separate. What I would hear from people in the inner city, I'd hear from people when I wanted to stop these partnerships with groups in the inner city, I'd go around and speak about this to Jewish communities and they'd say, oh, but there's anti-semitism and what if they don't want us. I haven't been to Roxbury since my bubby was there 50 years ago. And I said, well, few things. One, you partner with people who want to partner with you. You don't have to partner with everyone, and you don't partner with people don't want to partner.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
But there's plenty of people who are living in homes in Boston to this day, by the way, with Mezuzahs on the doorposts of their house that they don't know what they are. And this is true because that's where we were. Their image of the Jewish community was one that abandoned them. That was what they thought. We left, we were asked to take a walk, we took a hike. There was busing, there was all kinds of strife and there was demographic changes. Some of it was legit, some of it was redlining. Some of it was the Jews would be willing to sell their houses to blacks but Irish and Italian at the time were not. It was very complicated. There's a book of people interested by Rabbi Hillel Levine and Larry Harmon, Lawrence Harmon, called The Death of the American Jewish Community. And it's about Boston. And it's very tough, it's very tough on the leadership of the community.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
But there's some important pieces in there around what happened. I can tell you that figuratively when I left Brookline in 1968, graduated high school, went off to New York, I never really came back. But let's say in 1972, when I graduated college and started reconnecting, everyone I had known, I used to say the nice Jewish boys lived in Mattapan and Dorchester. But by 1972, they were all gone. All their families had moved either south or west or north. So, what do you do when there's not one synagogue left in the city of Boston except Temple Israel on the river way? I mean, seriously, Hillel B'nai Torah in West Roxbury.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
No one really in the inner city when you've had all these incredible synagogues for years, you're not there, you're not around the table of the PTAs and the health care centers. So the normal places that people gather, so you're not meeting people of different backgrounds. So you have to create it. And that's sort of what we did at JCRC. We created partnerships with people in the inner city.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
Incredible work, and as I was sort of saying before, it's incredible how there is always more work to be done and we continue to work on the progress of all of the different things. I wonder, you spoke about hitting the ground running at Brandeis in a time that was particularly challenging, that was particularly fraught. Our students today, all of us are living in a time that is very complicated for a variety of different reasons. And each person might have an issue that is dear to them that is different from their family or their parents or their roommates or whoever it might be. We all have our different values, the things that we care about deeply and that light us up.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
What advice might you give whether to students who are figuring this out from a perspective of learning or those of us in the working world and everyone in between and beyond? As we tried to join in these efforts alongside you in doing justice and activism and really leading with our values in the world?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
Well, it's a wonderful question, Stephanie, and I'll answer it by telling the story of something that happened a year and a half ago. As I said, Israel was always very important to me. And obviously Israel became very fraught and continues to be fraught. I've given the speeches and happy to do another session on why I am a pro Israel feminist Zionist who cares about the rights of Palestinians. And I can be all those things. And so, I got very challenged. So when I left Boston, I left 10 years ago to become CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women in New York and just stepped down last summer.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
But one of the things I did was very involved with, two things. One is the Women's March, which got very complicated as you know a couple of years ago. And the other thing that I'm very proud of is that I did was that we developed a feminist, we've worked on strengthening the feminist ecosystem in Israel. So we did a huge conference in Israel in March of 2018, bringing together 200 feminists from all sectors in Israel, everywhere. Haredi, Ethiopian, disability advocates, Palestinian, I mean, everybody, literally everybody. And we did a research study on kind of what the status of the women's movement was in Israel, what's happening with the women's agenda in Israel.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And then we followed that up with after this presentation of all the findings, that one of the things that came out is that there really wasn't a network bringing all these activists together. So we decided to develop a cohort of feminist leaders, 17 feminist leaders from literally all walks of life in Israel. And a year and a half ago, we brought them to Washington for our Washington conference, and have meetings with different people. One of the case studies, and I'm going to answer your question, one of the case studies I shared with them, which they were extremely interested, and you have to picture sitting around a table of feminists that are, one who is deaf, two Palestinians, two orthodox women, Russian, Ethiopian, Ashkenazi, Yemenite, Mizrachi, you name it. This is 70 people representing the entire society of Israel.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And one of the case studies I presented to them that I really wanted to was the Women's March. And I did it by having with me the chief operating officer of the Women's March, the chief of communications who happened to be Jewish myself. And I told the story of what happened around the Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory situation, and it's very complicated, I don't want to go into all the details. But it also can be applied to Israel, to Black Lives Matter, to a lot of different examples.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And afterwards when we did the feedback for the evaluation one of the Palestinian women, and then someone else said, and I've become now the, this is their favorite quote. We learn from Nancy that you can't walk away from the table. You need to stay around the table. As hard as that sometimes is, we need to stay around the table. Maybe there'll be times when we need to walk away, I'm not saying never walk away, but nine times out of 10, if you stay around the table, you're better off. To which, I was invited to go to the film festival in Aspen in the famous film festival when the Women's March film was shown. And it was a film about Tamika Mallory who was the person who was seen with ...
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And I accepted the invitation to be on the panel. Fortunately my board supported me. Both Linda Sarsour and Tamika were on there. And why did I accept the invitation to be in the panel? I accepted the invitation to be on the panel because in front of the 450 people who were gathered there, I wanted to be able to say what I said a few minutes ago, which is that I am a pro-Israel, feminist Zionist, progressive who believes in the rights of Palestinians. And that no one can tell me I can't be all those things. You follow my point. We had a panel discussion, it was very interesting.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
Now, if I had refused to participate, there probably wouldn't have been anyone representing the Jewish point of view. So what does that achieve? Then you're in front of an audience of 450 people and no one's speaking to the core issues that had been discussed. So, I offer that as an answer to your question, a long-winded answer, I'm sorry, Stephanie. But to the question of what I've learned in my career, I know who I am, I know what my principles are. And I would say the same thing with Black Lives Matter when we have that whole thing, also similar, I'd say now I know there are a lot of people worried about anti-semitism and the possibility in black lives and Palestinian rights and annexation. But I really do believe that we need to be very discerning and very careful about what we say is anti-semitism and when we say it, and what we need to do to educate people. And I could say a lot more about that but I'll let it come up in questions.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
Nancy, I could keep selfishly asking you more questions because I want to know more whether it's about your time on the National Council for Jewish Women or your political activism. I just want to know more and more and more. But I want to turn it over to our guests to ask some questions, which they can send in via the chat. And then we can start you off with those. So I'll give people just a moment to start with their questions.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
And one question to start us off. How do you see the current wave of Jewish social justice activism differ from your experience while at Brandeis?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I think it's now normative, and I don't think it was normative when I was at Brandeis, Jewish social justice activism has become normalized. It's part of the DNA now of the Jewish community. And whether it's being funded, not enough, but it's being funded, there are organizations, Repair the World and Avodah and Join for Justice, and incredible numbers of different organizations who are engaged in different ways in Jewish social justice, who have come together, the synagogue movements. You name it. And they maybe define it or work on it in different ways. But when it all is said and done, I think there's been, and I also think there's a much more serious commitment to Jewish learning and Jewish education around that.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So, like I was describing, you have social justice activists, and this goes back to the Civil Rights Movement. There are a lot of Jews who marched in the Civil Rights days, but they weren't really there as Jews, except for the rabbis to be honest with you. There were many Jews in Freedom Summer, there many Jews on freedom rights, but they weren't necessarily there as Jews. But now, we probably are there as Jews. And I think that's been really, really important to show up as Jewish social justice activists and know both the social justice work and what's Jewish about it. I really think there's been a sea change and it's very exciting.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
It's so true. And I think not engaging in just idle flattery, but I think you are among the people who we clearly have to thank for some of that normalization of this work on campus. I say that with true and sincere gratitude. We've got wonderful questions coming in. Oh my goodness, and how to choose them. And I hope people don't mind me announcing them by name, from Ruth. As an also 70 year old 1972 Brandon's graduate, I'm delighted to hear how you have evolved in your career and in life. So there's just accolades coming through. And another attendee asked, could you expand on your thoughts on how to reach out to the community and educate them about anti-semitism?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
Which community? The Jewish or the non-Jewish community?
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
It didn't say explicitly so answer whichever question you like.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
The issue of anti-semitism now is very complex. I'm on the Leadership Council for something called Integrity First for America, which is the group that's suing the neo-nazis From Charlottesville, which had its third anniversary yesterday I believe it was. And I'm doing that because I feel really strongly that we have to hold accountable these people who in the name of white nationalism believe that Jews will not replace us, and that that is probably the most serious threat we have to us as Jews in that we have an enormous partnership that we should have with the African American community. If you haven't yet, Steph, you probably have done a trip to the south, I don't know if you have with your Hillel, but if you haven't, it'd be a great trip once we can travel again.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I did one with my synagogue in November to go to the Equal Rights Memorial, Bryan Stevenson's Museum and Memorial and to go to Montgomery and Selma. And I'll tell you, walking over the Edmund Pettus Bridge was hopefully someday the John Lewis Bridge, but I really did have chills. But when you go to the Equal Justice Memorial and you see the, basically those you've seen it, they look like tombs, hanging tombs of everyone who had been lynched over a period of years with the names if they have the names and the communities. And then you think about the Holocaust memorials, that we all have. And you realize that we all have trauma, every ethnic group has trauma.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And I think about, for instance, the African Americans over the years that I took to Israel, who would walk through Yad Vashem and walk through the Children Memorial and go, "I didn't know, Nancy, I just didn't know." So education becomes very important. Both and. We need to educate people about our trauma, but we also need to be educated about what we did, because it is not over yet, both for Native Americans and for African Americans. I've done a lot of reading particularly recently and it's horrible what we did as a country so.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So I think the anti-semitism, mainly the most heinous anti-semitism has been white nationalists. That's not to say that there aren't people who talk poorly of Jews. I do believe that because we get very hysterical as a Jewish community and we hate it when anyone says anything bad about us, but there's words and then there's actions. And the actions, the killings, Pittsburgh and Poway, people being killed because they're Jews because they welcomed immigrants to this land, is very different than, and I would say and this will be very controversial, but I'll say it anyway, than a Tamika Mallory who I met with several times, and I will honestly tell you I do not think, I'm going to just say this, that she is an anti-semite. I do believe she knows very little about Judaism.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
She grew up at the knees of Reverend Sharpton, Al Sharpton at a time when he didn't know very much about Jews. I still have trouble watching him on TV. He did do to teshuva. When the father of her child was killed in the street, it was the Nation of Islam who came to her family's assistance, and only the Nation of Islam. I'm not excusing it, Farrakhan is a crazy ideologue nut as far as I'm concerned. But if you unpack it and you start talking to people as human beings, it is interesting what you find out. Similarly with Linda Sarsour. So, these are people I actually got to know. And I'm not excusing it and I'm not saying it's right.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
But I am saying that I had many experiences early on in the height of Louis Farrakhan when he was giving speeches at UMass Amherst and he was giving speeches at in Boston, where some of my colleagues were chasing after him having press conferences, putting him on the front page of the newspaper. And I was talking to my black minister friends saying, will you denounce him because I think it'd be better if you denounced him than if we as Jews denounced him. And because of the relationships we had developed with those black ministers, they were willing to do that because, as I said to one of them at one point, no, I said to someone running a community health center, African American woman, I said, "Well, what do you think of Louis Farrakhan?" Over a lunch date. And she said, "Nancy, I don't think about Louis Farrakhan, I think about hungry children going to bed at night."
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So it's very complicated, and it's unpacking this, and it's not about sound bites, that's what I would say. It's not about sound bites. It's about really understanding where these things come from and what's at the root.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
It sounds like really at the core of it for you, it's a question of learning and education and humanization of the other, whether that's about the issue of anti-semitism but also flowing in other directions as well. I think that's a beautiful answer. I'm going to offer up two questions just paying attention to the clock, that are sort of along the same lines. So, one person asks, a current student, do you have recommendations about activism during the pandemic? And another person also asks, for undergraduate students who want to become involved in Jewish activism and community organizing in general, where and with whom do you recommend we get involved? So two questions from current students about what they can do here and now both specifically in this moment as well as I think in a long term way.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
Well, let me just take the first one for us and say, since I'm no longer representing a 501(c)(3), I'm going to tell you exactly what I think. November, November, November, the election, get involved, get involved. It will make a difference who is the president of the United States. And I really mean that very deeply. We have an unbelievable ticket with Biden and Harris. And there's so much work to be done between now and November to write postcards to make calls.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
We're in a pandemic, so you have to do it, but you have to, there's plenty of opportunity, join Swing Left, join Move On. They're just making it easy. You could all be involved from the comfort of your homes, wherever you are sheltering or when you come back to campus. There is plenty, plenty to do. But to me, there is no more important thing right now for our country than for us to have leadership because the fact that we have five million Americans who've had corona is an outrage. And I'll say to anyone who will listen, and the number of people died is an outrage, and the mishandling of this embarrassment for the United States of America. So, to me, that is the activism you need to do.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
And then the second one, tell me again?
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
The second one was I think a sort of longer view of it, as people who are current students are eager to get involved with Jewish activism and community organizing and so on, who would you recommend that they go to, how would you recommend they get involved?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
For those of you who are going to be seniors, I'd recommend either doing a year after college with Avodah or Join for Justice and do a fellowship in community organizing with Join for Justice, which is based in Boston, or with Avodah that's based in several places around the country or Repair the World. All of those would be opportunities to learn community organizing. I would say ask your Hillel staff to think about what you might do in your own community. I'm sure there's plenty you could do right in Waltham, Massachusetts. And I'm sure there are grassroots organizations doing grassroots work. Certainly doing work, when you can go back, lobbying around state issues and I'm sure your JCRC, my successor, Jeremy Burton would be glad to be a resource or Aaron Golnik who's the state government affairs person.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization is something the Jewish community has been extremely involved in, and I'm sure they would welcome your participation in that. But I think that the important thing is never go it alone. Don't go it alone, to always join in partnership. There's always someone who has been doing the work. As a Jewish community, we tend to reinvent the wheel a little too much. We tend to think we have the answers. And you know what, there's probably someone else out there doing incredible work that you could partner with. So the Waltham Group is doing amazing work.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So, I would suggest that you take a look right around you in your immediate environment and see where you can make a difference. Not to mention right on your own campus, I'm sure there are opportunities for working on racial equity and social justice.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
If I can just add a plug in there for that question, come and talk to Hillel, we're happy to help you figure that out too, and make those connections and do the work. One final question that maybe we can just give a brief answer to, but I think it's an important one given your work, what are your thoughts about the future of Jewish women's organizations like the NCJW and Hadassah, which has been in decline for a while, where can younger women go to take action and not feel like they need to first save the organization?
Nancy K. Kaufman:
Well, I'd like to think that I helped turn around NCJW from sort of somewhat of a quiet more of an organization to a really vital one. And actually a former staff member at Hillel was my successor, of Sheila Katz. And it's doing a great job. There isn't an NCJW in Boston but I'd look NCJW whenever you get out there in the world because they're in 60 communities across the country, it's intergenerational. They're doing amazing advocacy, amazing work on getting out the vote. So I think it's alive and well.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
There's also Jewish Women International that has a fellowship, it used to be the old B'nai B'rith Women. I can't really speak to Hadassah. Hadassah is different, Hadassah is mainly a women's Zionist organization, it supports a hospital in Israel and a very important organization. People used to say, what's the difference between Hadassah and NCJW? It's completely different. NCJW is 125 year old organization. Was the place to go for smart women who didn't work out of the home but weren't allowed to be quite frankly on the boards of their synagogues and their schools and of anything. And so they came to NCJW because they wanted their brains. And I think it's become one of the best advocacy organizations in the Jewish community.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I moved from New York to Washington, which is why I finally stepped down was because I really didn't want to move to Washington. I came to New York from Boston spending my whole life. So, I wasn't going to move to Washington after that. But I felt it was the right thing to do. We consolidated our offices in Washington. I think it's strong. I think it's effective, and I think it's working on issues of reproductive justice and the courts, two of the biggest issues I work on. And I think doing great work.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
So there's plenty of places you want to get, the wonderful thing about the Jewish world folks is that there are many gateways. Just enter one. Enter one. Whether it's Hillel on campus or when you get off campus, it's any. Spin the wheel. It'll be where you feel comfortable, where you like the issues, but there's so many ways to put your Jewish values into action. And it's just such a rewarding, wonderful thing. So, I'm really happy I accidentally fell into doing it. And I would urge you all to do it either as volunteers or as professionals, both and. But don't separate yourself from the community. It's an opportunity.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
That feels like such a spectacular place to end.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
I can't hear you, Stephanie.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
How about now? That is such a beautiful and uplifting reminder and I think maybe we'll close it there. There were some requests from some of the folks in the audience for your contact information. So if possible, we'll send that out after the fact. Before we close, a huge thanks to Institutional Advancement, the Office of Alumni Relations, our Hillel Associate Director of Development, Celine Ginsburg, who joined us this summer. And Nancy, thank you to you for spending this time with us. You began your work in the trenches and we the community are excited to join you there and to continue this work alongside you.
Nancy K. Kaufman:
Thank you, Stephanie.
Rabbi Stephanie Sanger-Miller:
Thank you so much.