With antisemitism and unspeakable violence in Israel-Palestine forcing the American Jewish community to wrestle deeply with questions of identity and solidarity, the need for future-oriented conversations is clear. But how do we go about having them? Scholarship, art and aesthetics, strategic foresight, and ritual development all give us different tools through which we can begin to construct generative and imaginative frameworks of a Jewish future. Over the course of three weeks, we will explore some of these tools together, placing the work of Judeo-futurism in the context of Afrofuturism and other indigenous futurisms as well as traditional future-oriented Jewish liturgy. We will examine Jewish thinkers and leaders who are doing Judeofuturist work right now. And ultimately, we will get to practice types of Judeofuturist thinking and planning in an experimental community together around a shared focal topic of a common future impacted by climate relocation.
This session: For our final class together, we will bring together our insights from our first two classes to begin to imagine the impact of climate relocation on various aspects of American Jewish life, from Jewish education, art, liturgy, clergy, family and relationships, and more. We will finish our time together with a review of some existing efforts to reimagine and build expansive Jewish futures on longer time horizons and an opportunity to create some future-oriented rituals for ourselves and our communities.
Due to the cumulative nature of the content, participants are strongly encouraged to attend all three sessions:
Tuesday 5/13: Building Blocks for Judeo-Futurism: Orienting Ourselves in Past, Present, and Future
Tuesday 5/20: Building Blocks for Judeo-Futurism: Surveying the Landscape of Judeo-Futurism
Becca Leviss (she/her) is a current candidate for a Masters in Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School, where she explores the intersection of religion, ethics, and politics, especially in community building and civic engagement work. Her current studies focus on the ongoing relationships between Black and Jewish scholarship and activism, and how those insights can inform critical frameworks for imagining a future for Jewish identity and a pluralistic democracy. She spent her past summer with Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) investigating how their model of faith-based organizing teaches and encourages civic empowerment and engagement while countering ideological extremism. Prior to her time at Harvard, Becca helped build the fundraising team at Protect Democracy – a leading nonprofit in the US democracy movement – where she managed institutional giving and major gifts. For more information on Becca's framework of Judeofuturism, see this podcast.