Good Monday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we profile one of the key exhibits of the newly reopened Tower of David Museum, which recently underwent a $50 million renovation, and feature op-eds from Rabbi Joshua Rabin and Smadar Bar-Akiva. We’ll start with a report on new fellowships aimed to help Jews of color thrive in leadership positions.
While many Jewish organizations in recent years have actively sought to include Jews of color into their leadership ranks, that introduction has not always been seamless, reports Jay Deitcher for eJewishPhilanthropy.
In some cases, Jews of color in these leadership positions feel unheard, pigeonholed or misunderstood. To address this issue, a number of organizations have recently launched fellowships to prepare Jews of color for the specific stresses and challenges they are likely to face as leaders in the Jewish community, including the JewV’Nation fellowship, Jews of Color Initiative’s philanthropy fellowship and JIMENA’s Sephardic Leaders Fellowship.
All of these fellowships strive to create a peer community for Jews who may feel outside of the Jewish mainstream. Their programs provide mentors who have flourished in similar situations and help fellows develop relationships with other community leaders from all Jewish backgrounds.
All the representatives for fellowships that eJP spoke with reported that mentorship — experts who have walked similar terrain — was an important component of the fellowships . Each of the representatives also acknowledged that it was important to have Jews of all backgrounds involved, people who have committed to being allies, sometimes as mentors, sometimes as teachers and presenters, because many Jews of color may not have the connections and systemic resources that others have.
Sarah Levin, the director of JIMENA, told eJP that there are plenty of people in Jewish spaces who are pushing to grow as a community, which she sees as a positive step in itself. “I don’t know what the answers are,” she said, “but I know that we cannot stop doing the work. As long as there are Jewish leaders, whether it is heads of schools or board members or senior staff, who recognize that something needs to change, then we must keep pushing.”
Read the full story here.
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