Ma’yan has now twice convened a group of Jewish educators to explore issues of privilege (which we define as a system of unearned advantages that benefit some at expense of others). Ma’yan has long been interested in and doing work around privilege—our feminist work is also work that is around confronting male privilege and straight privilege, our work on women and philanthropy in the early days of Ma’yan in the 90s was thinking through how women with economic privilege understood themselves. Our Director of Research, Beth Cooper Benjamin, Ed.D., wrote her dissertation on the intersection of femininity and racial and economic class privilege and I come from a background of training Jewish leaders to think critically about privilege and to take action to address and undo oppressions of all kinds, most recently with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.

Now that Ma’yan’s work has shifted to Jewish teen girls and their parents and educators, I have been reflecting on the craft of teaching. One of my education mentors is bell hooks who in turn holds up as her education mentors Thich Nhat Hanh, who emphasized a pedagogy of wholeness, integrating mind, body and spirit, and Paolo Freire who taught that “education could be the practice of freedom”. Freire encourages educators to “create strategies for what he called ‘conscientization’ in the classroom” (Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, page 14) which bell hooks then translates as “critical awareness and engagement” (page 14) which demands that every learner and teacher be an active rather than a passive participant in the learning process. This is what we hope to foster with the teens and the adults we work with at Ma’yan. This is critical to be successful in our new work around privilege.

As a feminist organization, this type of work is very much at home. As bell hooks comments, it was feminist classrooms where she first saw educators creating “participatory spaces for the sharing of knowledge” (page 15), rather then an expectation that students just absorb information the teacher presents.  But, the type of pedagogy that bell hooks promotes is even more demanding then your average critical or feminist pedagogy because it requires that “teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students” (page 16). This is where our work on privilege sits, as part of an educator's process of self-actualization and toward the empowerment of our students to grow into critical, curious, and committed adults.

At the first gathering on privilege, the professionals around the table were quick to articulate the challenges of addressing privilege. The challenges raised included the possibility that people could feel attacked and threatened or that by the nature of privilege being that it functions by clearing obstacles, and if those obstacles are not there for you to run up against, it can be difficult to recognize that they exist for others and therefore hard to identify and name.  As we explored the idea of privilege with the group, ranging from white privilege to straight privilege, class privilege to male privilege, we realized that we all had some work to do to hone not only our own understanding of privilege as a concept, but to explore our personal privilege and how that impacts how we move in the world—and how we teach.

As we reflected on the first gathering, we realized we can't effectively teach or address these challenges that we ourselves aren't comfortable with.   Before we even think about how we are going to bring this work into the classroom, we need to - gasp-  pay attention to ourselves. So our second gathering was designed to give ourselves the chance to do some of the foundational work that will allow us to succeed at eventually effectively addressing issues of privilege in our work. 

We used an exercise from Paul Kivel in which we bravely explored and exposed our own privileges. We addressed the spectrum of oppression, which runs from jokes to genocide, on which we plotted, for example, the sexism spectrum which included language we use to refer to women and girls, the way women are represented in media, undervaluing women’s work, domestic violence, and rape. We also practiced teasing out the often invisible details that are part of the stories we hear and tell about our own success, that are part of the "self-made man" myth that combine to invisibilize privilege and oppression (like the family members, governmental policies, the social norms, and the workers that are all part of allowing a business to grow from a corner store to a chain).

As we move forward, our work with privilege will have three prongs:

1. Privilege Advisory Group of between 5-7 practitioner-researchers who will meet once a month for 1.5 hours to analyze  research data from Beth Benjamin's observations over the course of this school year of a Jewish teen philanthropy program,  to generate ideas and insights about dynamics of privilege, to reflect on their  own practice, build a critical lens for identifying issues of privilege and develop ideas for use in  their communities. 

2. That’s Not Fair! Participant Group, composed of 5 organizations who will host a performance of That’s Not Fair! and participate in a “Privilege 101” workshop as well as a workshop on how to integrate issues raised through That’s Not Fair! ongoing in their community, classrooms, and beyond.

3.    The Judaism-Privilege Connection Group will develop, based on our research over the next 6-8 months, concrete ways to develop critical lens in youth, to address issues of privilege in Jewish content in the classroom, and in relationship to community service work. By Fall of 2010 we will develop lesson plans, workshops, pedagogical principles and professional development trainings.

We hope you will join us as we together move toward education as the practice of freedom.