lives
THREEPROFILES |
In this issue we visit three individuals working to reduce barriers in the Jewish community to help strengthen, enhance and revitalize the Jewish experience for all.by LIAM HOARE |
“Being a Jew means being part of a community that shares a purpose and shares a belief. It is about more than simply a framework that is keeping us together. It is about shaping and maintaining a community and creating a home.” |
NINA PERETZBuilding Bridges
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“Essentially, LivLuv is about enabling and empowering people to take control and ownership of their own Jewish identity,” Bloom said, “to be who they want to be and discover how they want to express that.” |
SHOSHANA BLOOMA Focus on AccessibilityS hoshana Bloom has worked in the British Jewish community since she graduated from the University of Birmingham in 2003, at organizations ranging from the United Jewish Israel Appeal to Britain’s Holocaust Centre. Over time, Bloom increasingly became aware of a part of the community that was, either intentionally or unintentionally, marginalized or excluded from the mainstream of Jewish life: those with intellectual cognitive-development disabilities. Today, Bloom works to correct that injustice. “A lot of organizations may think they are accessible because they understand that to mean physically accessible: whether people can get into the building or use the bathroom,” Bloom explained to me. “But a lot of the time, those organizations aren’t thinking educationally: about making their materials and resources accessible, their communication methods, the language of their marketing. These things are not written in a way that is accessible for people with intellectual disabilities.” “We need to also be looking at content,” Bloom said, and indeed, content was the main issue when Bloom reviewed practices at Limmud, one of Britain’s major events dedicated to Jewish learning and culture. Bloom has twice chaired Limmud, and in 2011, “one of my priorities was: How can we make Limmud more accessible? We were looking at the program and how to present it in a different way, to encourage presenters to be more accessible, and to increase opportunities for volunteering” for people with intellectual disabilities. With this in mind, Bloom founded and chairs Limmud L’Am to open the Limmud experience to people with intellectual disabilities. The aim of Limmud L’Am was not to create a kind of segregation. Visitors to Limmud in 2011 likely wouldn’t have noticed any differences at the conference, save perhaps for greater visibility of people with intellectual disabilities. Rather, in making a series of discreet changes to the program, such as including more introductory sessions or sessions that might involve crafts or music, the idea simply was to make the entire conference more inclusive and pluralistic, creating further opportunities for learning in a variety of styles. All of this has led up to her newest endeavor: LivLuv. From the Hebrew word “to blossom,” LivLuv aims to empower Jewish people with intellectual disabilities to take control of their Jewish identity. While LivLuv is still in an embryonic stage at the moment in terms of getting its organization set up, Bloom explained that LivLuv will bring together different components of her work under one banner. With LivLuv, Bloom will “write and create accessible resources on different aspects of Jewish life” so people are “able to find out a little more and make informed decisions about what they want to do or go on to access across the Jewish spectrum.” In this respect, she advocates for no particular strand of or approach to Judaism, since the ethos of LivLuv is to empower the individual, acting as a gateway to a scope of information, in a variety of accessible formats. Another critical part of LivLuv’s work, Bloom explained, will be leadership development, “creating leaders within these communities to become change makers.” Therefore, instead of Bloom being the advocate for people with intellectual disabilities, perpetuating the problem of disabled persons being voiceless, she will defer to being their ally. “Once people are aware of the issue, [they] are very interested in making their communities more accessible and inclusive, to ensure there are no walls.” This cuts across the religious spectrum — inclusiveness in this sense is not associated with one particular movement. Generally, there is a recognition that “we need to change in order to become a more fair, inclusive, and equal community.” “Essentially, LivLuv is about enabling and empowering people to take control and ownership of their own Jewish identity,” Bloom said, “to be who they want to be and discover how they want to express that.” For Bloom, her work with Jews with intellectual disabilities is not a personal matter. “People often assume that I have a family member” with an intellectual disability, she said, “but this is not the case.” Neither does Bloom frame this as a chesed (kindness) project or a mitzvah (good deed), for i nclusion “is not something we should do because ‘it’s a nice thing,’” she said. Rather, her involvement “comes from becoming aware of equal rights and human rights issues. Anyone should have the option of celebrating their Jewish identity.” ■ |
‘‘This is all a little bit of us playing with this idea of what if there was a daily 10- or 30-minute virtual Jewish afterschool program for elementary school kids not going to day or Hebrew school.’’ |
SARAH LEFTONMaking Quality Time OnlineWhen Sarah Lefton was growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, she yearned for the sort of ancient yet modern, educational yet creative Jewish content she would later create with BimBam. “I grew up in a very small Jewish community in the south, a one-synagogue town in the Bible Belt. I had the best Jewish education on offer. I went to Hebrew school on Wednesdays and Saturdays, I had my Bat Mitzvah and my confirmation in the Reform movement, I went to summer camp,” she explained to me. But after college, Lefton found herself living in New York City and discovered, after falling in with a crowd of people who had a very different sort of childhood from hers — informed by Jewish day schools and gap years in Israel — that she was essentially, in her own words, “functionally illiterate.” Thus in her early twenties, Lefton took to devouring all the Jewish information she could get her hands on, including online material in the early days of the internet. At the same time, she was beginning her career in education and digital media at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, going on to produce projects for The New York Times on the Web, The Village Voice, Princess Cruises and several children’s toy brands. These two strands of Lefton’s life would meet, eleven years ago now, with the creation of BimBam (originally called G-dcast). What began as a labor of love snowballed over the years to the point where BimBam is now an established nonprofit media studio that creates and distributes fun, accessible, and smart digital media about Judaism for kids, adults, and families who want to spend quality time online. Lefton sees BimBam’s role as expanding the conversation about Judaism — a kind of onramp for the Judaically curious, taking people from a place of zero or minimal knowledge to wherever they need to go. Indeed, in the beginning, creating the content for BimBam formed part of Lefton’s education, too. She was teaching herself as much as she was instructing others. “I’m actually very transparent about the fact that I think everyone should have the experience I had, to be able to animate the parshah week by week. I couldn’t write it so I reached out to rabbis and educators whom I respected and found them all amazingly interested in collaborating on the project. I worked on the sound and visual production. It was an incredible education.” BimBam is based in Oakland, California, where Lefton now resides. She has been involved in countless other initiatives in California. After leaving the world of corporate tech, she joined northern California’s independent Jewish summer camp, Camp Tawonga, as its marketing director for four years. She has also been the president of San Francisco’s pluralist Mission Minyan, a board member of the San Francisco JCC, and a founder of the entrepreneurial project Jewish Fashion Conspiracy. But it is BimBam that consumes Lefton today. Over time, the project has found its audience, in part because Lefton was able to utilize her experience in telecommunications but also because it was producing content that, in her gut, she knew to be at once exciting and valuable. One noteworthy example is Shaboom!, an animated series centered around two magical “sparks,” Gabi and Rafael, who live in a playhouse in the clouds. As these characters learn about fixing the world, each short episode imparts a certain lesson or value such as gratitude and altruism along with Jewish knowledge like Hebrew words and songs. “If we could turn the screen off and do something else, we would,” Lefton told me, when I asked whether encouraging children to have even more screen time was the best thing for them. Her proposition is that if kids are going to be in front of a screen for an average of an hour and fifty minutes a day, why not try and make twenty minutes of that time meaningful and educational? YouTube contains a lot of garbage, Lefton said, but it can also be an amazing forum for imparting knowledge, be it about arts and crafts, cookery, or Judaism. As BimBam grows and evolves, Lefton and her team continue to play with form and content, from a follow-along video where the end result will be a homemade mezuzah constructed from paper to the holiday of Sukkot as explained with Lego stop-motion animation. “This is all a little bit of us playing with this idea of what if there was a daily 10- or 30-minute virtual Jewish afterschool program for elementary school kids not going to day or Hebrew school,” she told me enthusiastically.“This has been a personal dream of mine,” Lefton said, and through BimBam, “I can see it coming true.” ■ |
Liam Hoare is a contributor to Moment and writes frequently for The Forward, Tablet, and Slate. He is based in the United Kingdom and is a graduate of University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
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