- Jews for New Orleans

Sharing a meal

Corps members live communally in their Jefferson Avenue house uptown

Shine

Purim Masks

Corps members prepare for Purim celebrations by creating masks

Churches

Planting trees in Central City

Rachel Glicksman works with residents to beautify the neighborhood

Civic Involvement

Celebrating Chanukah

Corps members welcomed coworkers and community members to their home

Action

Learning about Bayou Bienvenue

Alum David Eber teaches the group about deforestation in the cypress swamps

Churches

Highlighting the Jewish Community's Involvement in Rebuilding New Orleans

This site is hosted by AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps, which launched its New Orleans program in the fall of 2008. AVODAH engages young people in direct work on the causes and effects of poverty in the United States. This work partners Corps members with service providers and residents in low income communities and equips our Corps members and alumni to emerge as lifelong agents for social change, whose work for justice is rooted in and nourished by Jewish values.

Jew Dat: Navigating Jewish Life In New Orleans

Nov 5th, 2010 by Mollie Flink | 0

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, I never felt like it was difficult to be Jewish. I was fortunate enough to attend Jewish day school from kindergarten through high school. Every Saturday, I walked five minutes from my house to synagogue with my family. I had a dozen kosher restaurants to choose from or I could easily find vegetarian options in non-kosher restaurants. My Jewish friends, while they were not observant themselves, enjoyed coming over and hanging out at my house almost every Saturday afternoon. And I lived in a neighborhood with lots of families like mine where we shared many Shabbat meals and relaxing Shabbatot together.

Since leaving home, the only other places I have lived for a significant period of time were Israel and New York City, two places that provide a multitude of communities, restaurants, and synagogues from which to choose.

Photo courtesy of star-of-david.blogspot.com

Photo courtesy of star-of-david.blogspot.com

I have to say that New Orleans is the most exciting city I’ve lived in yet. It’s a beautiful city. I love the oak trees, friendliness of people on the street, warm weather, festivals, music, new places to explore, and genuine connection people feel to this unique city. All those things being said, one of the more challenging components of living in New Orleans for me is being Jewish. Rather than having an unlimited number of synagogues to choose from, I have five, only one of them being a conservative congregation, which is the most comfortable congregation for me. For the first time since I was 14, I have to drive to shul each week, which is another change. Instead of feeling confident that I will find something to eat when I go out to restaurants with friends, I’m constantly questioning what is in my food and wondering if my seemingly vegetarian dish is made with a meat or seafood base. And it’s not because I’m picky, it’s because this city loves to put meat and seafood in everything. For the first time, I also feel that I’m in a position where I need to explain my Jewish values and beliefs to those around me, including my housemates and co-workers. I don’t mean this in a negative way; in fact, I think it’s an important process for me to experience.

While being Jewish in the city of New Orleans isn’t always easy for me, I’ve found the Jewish community here to be intimate in a completely different way than it was in New York City, Chicago, or Israel. And that’s something I love about New Orleans. The first time I walked into Shir Chadash, the Conservative synagogue in Metairie, multiple people came up to me, introduced themselves, asked what I was doing in New Orleans, and welcomed me into their community.

I was even given an aliyah to the Torah! I also love that I’ve met almost all of the rabbis in New Orleans whether they are Orthodox, Reform, or Conservative. I think it’s amazing that Beth Israel, the Orthodox synagogue, and Gates Of Prayer, a Reform Temple, share the same building and are creating a park for their children to play in together. Recently, there was a lecture series about the Jewish perspective on life after death where three rabbis, one Reform, one Conservative, and one Orthodox came together to teach the community. Something that turned me away from places like New York City was the lack of dialogue and unity within the larger Jewish community. The New Orleans Jewish community may be small, but it has a unique intimacy that New York City lacks.

Despite the challenges of being Jewish in New Orleans, there is something special about it too. Even with these obstacles, I feel valuable in this community. While Jewish life in New York City seems convenient and easy, for now, I’m enjoying the struggle here. Because beneath that struggle, lies a Jewish community that functions as a cohesive whole, supports groups within it, and values each individual and what I have to offer.

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Second Impressions of New Orleans

Oct 25th, 2010 by Ross Peizer | 0

After living in New Orleans for two months I’ve seen and learned about many of the challenges that I did not expect to be as present five years after Hurricane Katrina. I came down here during college to gut homes and felt really sad when I saw the home I worked on three years ago looked exactly the same. Falling apart, abandoned with no one living in it.

Driving through parts of the city I’ve seen blocks with one house rebuilt in between blighted homes or just vacant lots where homes used to be. In my job as Intake Assistant at Rebuilding Together New Orleans I evaluate homes of potential homeowners for the program and have learned that some of the homes I might think are abandoned actually have people living in them. I’ve seen people living in homes without running water and completely unfinished interiors because they have no other choice.

Photo by Ross Peizer

A house used to be here

It can be very hard not to take your work home with you, which is a struggle all of us in the social justice field are confronted with everyday. Fortunately, the positives in New Orleans can take your mind off of the challenges of helping rebuild. continue reading » »

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Questioning Community

Oct 25th, 2010 by Ora Nitkin-Kaner | 0

(Reposted from the Jewish Voices Pursuing Justice blog, October 18 and 19, 2010)

Questioning Community, Part I:

Last Thursday, I blogged about the sensation of walking through life as a visible and invisible privileged minority. I also wrote about how, within North American Judaism, Ashkenazi culture is often taken to be the Jewish culture; we ‘white’ Jews identify and define ourselves as religious ‘others’ within a Christian majority while often forgetting about those minorities within our own religion.

Yesterday night, I was asked to grapple with these same concepts from a slightly different perspective. I attended an event geared towards young social activist Jews. The evening contained all the hallmarks of such a gathering; a convivial and earnest atmosphere; delicious vegetarian potluck; and talking and thinking about justice, Jewishness, and privilege. Beyond my awareness of my privilege as a white, young, middle-class, straight,able-bodied North American, I also felt privileged to be a part of this meeting group of inspired and inspiring young people.

The 20-something Jewish community in New Orleans is small, and consists chiefly of transplants from elsewhere in the United States. For the most part, gatherings and get-togethers are dominated (numerically, at least) by current and past AVODAH Corps members. This means that any time I walk into a gathering of Jews, I feel at home, surrounded by people who – for the most part – share my values and my struggles.

My joy at belonging to this vital and close-knit community, and the fact that I have the option of surrounding myself with people like me, has allowed me to be oblivious. I never stopped to consider how it would feel for an ‘outsider’ – that is, someone who didn’t participate in AVODAH – to try to enter this community to find and define their own space. I never stopped to think about this until last night, when several individuals at our gathering were brave enough to express, in a room full of AVODAH alumni, how frustrating and alienating it has been for them to search for a space that isn’t dominated by AVODAH ideals and AVODAH alum. continue reading » »

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Sukkot Updates

Sep 29th, 2010 by Rachel Lee | 0

Sukkot is proving to be a time for both celebration and reflection this year. Minyan Nahar (The River Minyan), Moishe House and LQBTQ Jewish Nola sponsored a series of events in the backyard sukkah of David Eber (AVODAH ‘09), Yaeli Bronstein (’09) and Jordan Aiken (’10). Ranging from Sangria in the Sukkah to a lively text study with Rabbi Ethan of Shir Chadash, this sukkot has been a time for making new friends, reconnecting with old ones and revelling in the beauty of our city as Summer turns to Fall and we bask in the harvest moon.

On a more serious note, Yaeli has a fantastic post over at the national AVODAH blog about Sukkot and the right to housing that has been seriously undermined in post-Katrina New Orleans. She sums up the situation beautifully in this quote:

“It feels somewhat uncomfortable to intentionally remove ourselves from our sturdy, stable, stationary homes to build a short term vulnerable dwelling in our backyards. The ability to choose a fragile shelter as a transient all-in-one lodging comes from a place of privilege. My discomfort intensifies when I think of displaced Louisiana residents still dispersed across more than 5,500 cities nationwide. New Orleans housing prices have skyrocketed and there is a lack of affordable housing (particularly after the demolition of virtually all public housing in the city). Since the flood, the homeless population in New Orleans has doubled from 6,000 to 12,000.”

Check out the full post here and while you’re at it, take a look at these housing-related AVODAH placements: Rebuilding Together, GNOFHAC and Jericho Road.

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Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen?

Sep 15th, 2010 by Rachel Lee | 1

Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for a man to humble himself?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying on sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter––
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Isaiah 58:5-7

I read these words last year when I went to visit the AVODAH Bayit during one of their weekly programs leading up to Yom Kippur. The guest speaker was Rabbi Ethan Linden, a young, dynamic rabbi from Shir Chadash. His lesson was titled “Social Justice and Jewish Tests: The Moral Experience of Jewish Learning.” He warned us from the outset that the texts he had chosen were only 10 examples out of thousands of years of Jewish thought, and that he could just as easily have pulled quotes that proved opposite points. A rich discussion ensued, revealing a range of subtley different viewpoints within this group of young Jews who were in New Orleans with the common purpose of pursuing social justice in a Jewish context.

As we discussed this passage from Isaiah, my heart started pounding. I squirmed in my seat, unable to contain my physical reaction to these ancient words. I soon realized that my agitation was exactly the intention of the prophet Isaiah, as Rabbi Ethan revealed that this is the haftorah portion for Yom Kippur. “Isaiah is yelling at us,” Rabbi Ethan explained, “while we sit fasting, feeling deprived already, he basically lectures us, tells us that our fasting is not enough.” How had I missed this? Year after year I had the opportunity to take in the power of these words. Had the growling of my fasting stomach drowned out the admonitions of a prophet? “Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for a man to humble himself?”

I was immediately drawn to Isaiah’s searing portrait of hypocrisy. Not only does he remind us that it is an abomination to fast for one day and consider ourselves absolved of all sins, he pushes us towards a much more difficult path of righteousness: loosing the chains of injustice, setting free the oppressed, sharing food with the hungry and providing shelter for the poor wanderer. We must engage these tasks not only for one day of the year, but every day of the year, every year of our lives. I was struck by Isaiah’s ability to bring together two contrasting visions of social justice, giving both equal weight. He expects us to both alleviate the immediate effects of oppression on individuals (share your food, provide shelter, clothe the naked) AND to work to end oppression altogether (loose the chains of injustice, break every yoke).

continue reading » »

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Parashat Ki Tavo: A D’var Torah on Ki Tavo and the Fifth Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

Aug 28th, 2010 by Michal Boyarsky | 0
Photo by Rachel Glicksman.

Photo by Rachel Glicksman.

This week’s Torah Portion, Ki Tavo, begins with a description of the ceremony for bringing the first fruits to the Temple.  The farmer is to give the produce to the priest, who “set[s] it down in front of the altar of the Lord your God.”  The farmer then recites the following:

My father was a fugitive Aramean.  He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation.  The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us.  We cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression.  The Lord freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents.  He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.  Wherefore I now bring the first fruits of the soil which You, O Lord, have given me.

With these words, the farmer acknowledges that the fruits from the fields belong, really, not to any individual, but to God.  If God had not freed the farmer’s ancestors from slavery in Egypt, there would be no orchard, no fruits; indeed, there would likely be no farmer.  This ceremony is both a ceremony of thanksgiving, and a way to symbolically return the fruits to their real owner–to God.

In this week’s JTS Torah commentary, Rabbi Eliezer Diamond points out that these are the verses which we recount and interpret each spring at the Passover seder.  We don’t recite the narrative in Exodus, the “historical” account of what happened.  Why is this?

“The most compelling reason” for retelling and interpreting these verses of Deuteronomy rather than the narrative found in Exodus, writes Diamond, “is that [the verses in Deuteronomy] serve as a paradigm of what the retelling of the Exodus at the seder should be.  Recalling the Exodus is not intended to be simply, or even mainly, a history lesson.”  History lessons are factual and endeavour to be objective.  (Although we have learned, I think, that history lessons rarely succeed in their objectivity.  Nevertheless, they strive to be objective.)  History lessons are separate and distinct from our daily lives.

No, recalling the Exodus is no history lesson.  Instead, it is “an attempt to understand how our own lives are rooted in that experience,” suggests Diamond.  In choosing to recount, interpret, and discuss Deuteronomy 26 (the opening of Ki Tavo) rather than the book of Exodus at our Passover seder, we are choosing “memory over historiography.”  When we read Exodus, we read about “what actually happened.”  We give ourselves a history lesson.  “The choice of Deuteronomy, on the other hand,” says Diamond in his brilliant D’var, “implies that the exact details of the Exodus story are less important than the meaning of the Exodus saga for each subsequent generation.”

Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  The media has busied itself with stories, specials, slideshows, documentaries, photographs, and articles in commemoration of the anniversary of the hurricane, and we can be glad that the country has not forgotten the tragedies that took place and are still taking place in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

But there are many ways to tell this story.  There is the historiography of Hurricane Katrina.  The history lesson, the equivalent of Exodus in the Torah.  This is the story written by the authorities, the local and national government, the Army Corps of Engineers, the police force, the public housing agencies.  According to this story, New Orleanians are optimistic about recovery.  Almost two-thirds of public school students in New Orleans attend charter schools.  Community health clinics are alive and well, ensuring that their clients remain the same.  More restaurants are open now than there were before the storm.  New businesses are springing up at a higher-than-average rate.  Three-quarters of the population has returned as of July 2009.  The Saints won the Superbowl, and I, Michal Boyarsky, watched my first football games.   According to a recent Times-Picayune article, the latest Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 74 percent of people surveyed were “upbeat” and 70 percent were “happy” with the direction of recovery efforts.

Then there is the memory of Hurricane Katrina, the equivalent of the opening of Ki Tavo, Deuteronomy 26. Countless photographs offer visual proof of the destruction and the spotty recovery of the last five years. Rachel Lee recently blogged about the ways in which New Orleanians are still struggling to get back on their feet, five years later.  My friend Allison writes in her own blog about her memories of Katrina and the nightmares she sometimes still has about finding her dead cat stuffed in a shoebox in a drawer.  Jordan Flaherty, a local journalist, published an article in the Huffington Post about the ways in which recovery efforts have been “shaped by systemic racism.”  The fact that three-quarters of New Orleanians have returned since the storm means that approximately 100,000 people are still displaced.  The BP oil spill has devastated the lives of many families and even whole communities, not to mention the environmental impact.  Even the statistic about charter schools and the story of public school education in New Orleans has another side to it, as Mallory’s insightful blog posts have illustrated.

And there are people’s memories, in the stricter sense of the word.  Several AVODAH placements are engaged, among other things, in recording people’s stories and preserving individual and collective memories of Hurricane Katrina.  On the Rethink website you can learn more about the students involved in the organization and their experiences in the New Orleans public school system. The Innocence Project of New Orleans records the profiles of local exonorees, and Ressurrection After Exoneration (RAE) also records many personal stories.  While we’re on the subject of the wrongfully incarcerated, Dave Eggers’ book Zeitoun presents the compelling narrative of the Zeitoun family and the horrors they went through after Hurricane Katrina. The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank serves to collect and preserve people’s memories of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

People’s stories are everywhere.  They are in the vacant lots, the blighted homes, the ill-paved streets.  There are stories in the low-cost health clinics where I worked, in the Mardi Gras parades, in the Superbowl victory, in the Sunday second-lines.  In the year that I lived in New Orleans, the communities that I worked and lived in were home to many of the kindest, most patient, and most generous people I have ever met.  When folks could have been rolling their eyes at my ignorance, they explained things to me.  They shared their stories with me despite the pain that it caused to tell them.

These are, as Diamond notes in his D’var about Ki Tavo, the “attempt[s] to understand how our own lives are rooted in [this] experience.” This is what we spent our year in AVODAH doing.  This is what the Jews 4 New Orleans blog is about.

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The Depth of the Wound

Aug 26th, 2010 by Ora Nitkin-Kaner | 0

Sixty-two year old Orlando* moves through space gingerly. On blood pressure and anti-seizure medications, Orlando has lost his appetite, and with it a great deal of weight. Five months ago, he would have been considered a large man; now he’s gaunt, and his hands and feet seem too big for his body. Despite this physical diminishment, Orlando’s stature remains intact—so much so that when he walks through his New Orleans neighborhood, the youngsters whisper about him in awe.

It would be logical to assume that the reason for these whispers is Orlando’s CV: Orlando entered the Louisiana State Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison, at age 20. He was wrongfully convicted and deposited in prison for a murder he did not commit. Twenty-five years later, in 1993, he was exonerated.

When we’re presented with a story as stark and spare as this, our imaginations—supplemented by images of prison gleaned from books and screens—try to get a sense of Orlando’s life behind bars. But I’d challenge anyone to dream up a situation like the one Orlando confronted soon after his arrival in prison: after an inmate and his lover murdered a recently arrived 16-year-old behind a prison building, those who witnessed the murder were told ‘wherever the blood stops, that’s where you start digging’.

The horrors of prison brand the imprisoned without regard for an inmate’s innocence or guilt. Human nature dictates that the more suffering we see, the more compassion we feel. And, when the branded body is an innocent body, our pity and our compassion is tempered by respect. We admire those who have withstood undeserved disaster. continue reading » »

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A Year in Blog Posts (And What’s Next)

Aug 17th, 2010 by Rachel Lee | 0

As the second year of AVODAH New Orleans comes to a close, here are some updates on your friendly neighborhood Corps Members (and intrepid bloggers).

Rachel Glicksman, a native New Yorker, blogged about falling in love with a new city, hosting a pumpkin parade for her placement organization and helping to build a community garden. She will be working at Challah for Hunger, a national organization with over 30 chapters, which raises money and awareness for hunger- and disaster-relief, through the production and sale of challah bread. She will move to Austin for the next few months to help start up their national office, and hopes to eventually be located in New Orleans.

Rachel Lewis wrote of her first Mardi Gras, “it is a season that acknowledges the tensions it produces and deems it possible to exist within them, deems it acceptable to extract joy amidst the many problems that plague New Orleans.” She also blogged about the formation of an independent minyan and studying Genesis with a housemate from a very different Jewish background. Rachie plans to stay in New Orleans at her placement organization, Orleans Public Defenders through the High Holidays. Beginning this fall, she will be a fellow at Yeshivat Hadar, an egalitarian Jewish learning institute located in New York City.

Five weeks into her AVODAH year, Tina Wexler wondered “How can I not fall in love with the magic of the oaks draped in Mardi Gras beads and greenery, houses whose front yards are practically flowery jungles, the warmth I feel everyday when I go outside? How can I not mourn the loss of cypress swamps while marveling at the natural phenomenon of the bayous?” Tina blogged about present-day exonerees working for justice and how the historical exoneration of Jews from Egypt is a window for fewing current struggles. Tina is planning to work in clinical research in New York City next year, and is applying to medical schools.

continue reading » »

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Five Years Later: Still Struggling

Aug 17th, 2010 by Rachel Lee | 0
Photo from the Times-Picayune

Photo from the Times-Picayune

As the fifth anniversary of Katrina approaches, local media is taking stock of progress in the city. The Times-Picayune ran an editorial entitled “New Orleans is a Happy Place to Be” in response to a new report from the Kaiser Foundation. Over at the Louisiana Justice Institute blog, Lance Hill has a very different interpretation. He points out what the Times-Pic neglects to mention: there are large racial disparities in the recovery. Compared to whites, African Americans in Orleans Parish…

  • are more likely to say that both their own lives (42% vs. 16%) and the city in general (66% vs. 49%) have not yet recovered from Hurricane Katrina;
  • are more than twice as likely to be living in a low-income household (61% compared to 24%);
  • are more likely to report having had trouble paying for food or housing over the past year (both 31% vs. 8%);
  • are more likely to report being uninsured (25% vs. 10%) and to have had problems paying medical bills (29% vs. 13%);
  • are substantially more likely to report worries, such as the 64% who say they are very worried their children won’t be able to get a good education, compared to 18% of whites, and 59% who say they are worried health care services might not be available when needed (vs. 21% for whites);
  • are more likely to see the city as a bad place to raise children (51% vs. 35%).

Bill Quigley, Davida Finger and Lance Hill paint a different picture of New Orleans at five years after Katrina in their Katrina Pain Index 2010. “The challenges of post-Katrina New Orleans reflect the problems of many urban and suburban areas of the US,” they write, “Katrina made these more visible five years ago and continues to make a great illustration of the US failures to treat all citizens with dignity and our failure to achieve our promise of liberty and justice for all.”

One particular failure that is highlighted in the Pain Index is the Road Home, a federal program that was supposed to compensate homeowners for their losses. A federal judge just ruled that the Road Home program’s method for calculating grants discriminated against Black homeowners. This case was filed by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (an AVODAH placement) nearly two years ago and the ruling comes too late to repair the loss of most homeowners who participated in the program.

Even as mainstream local media overlooks some of the remaining impact of Katrina, local independent media-makers have recently released some important new works examining the legacy of the storm. Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena 6 is the work of local journalist Jordan Flaherty. Filmmaker Luisa Dantas offers the long-anticipated documentary Land of Opportunity, which examines the way social issues in post-Katrina New Orleans illuminate the challenges we face as a nation.

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Healing Our Schools, Healing Our Earth: Rethink Visions for the 10th Anniversary of Katrina

Jul 29th, 2010 by Mallory Falk | 0

This summer, I had the opportunity to work with a group of brilliant, creative kids. My placement, Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools, runs a summer program for public school students from all over the city. For six beautiful weeks, we had an absolute blast. We played round after round of The Great Wind Blows, a game that involves lots of running and knocking people out of chairs. We made pop-up books about school gardens and wrote fantastical stories about shrimp po’boys. On the last days, we said weepy goodbyes – wiping up tears with big wads of toilet paper – and wrote each other appreciations.

Corps Member Mallory Falk with the Rethinkers this summer.

Corps Member Mallory Falk with a group of Rethinkers this summer

In some ways, the Rethink summer program is like many other summer camps: the icebreaker games, the art activities, the early morning pump up chant to get everyone’s blood flowing. (“P-O-W-E-R we’ve got the power ‘cause we are the Rethinkers!”) But the thirty kids that came together this summer are working extremely, awe-inspiringly hard to create change in their schools. This August marks the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Many schools are still closed – fenced in and boarded up, with slanted signs announcing the first day of class: August 18, 2005. Many schools are still struggling to provide students with a quality education.

With this in mind, the Rethinkers spent their summer coming up with a vision for the 10th anniversary of Katrina. Their vision grew out of deep thinking and discussion. Every morning, they sat in circle and explored the issues that most affect them: violence, re-segregation, school food, the oil disaster. Every afternoon, they used art to further investigate and respond to these issues. As they delved into challenging material, they expanded not only their critical thinking but also their leadership skills – working as a community to identify problems and come up with solutions. In the end, they created a dream for 2015 and developed twelve recommendations for how schools can start making this dream a reality – practical, measurable, first year steps on a path to peaceful, healthy

On July 15, the Rethinkers presented their vision and recommendations to school officials and the media at their fifth annual news conference – wowing everyone from the superintendent of the Recovery School District to national reporters. Their vision is both simple and profound: peaceful schools that resolve conflict by repairing harm rather than simply punishing offenders. Beautiful cafeterias with fully equipped kitchens and fresh, tasty, local food. Oil-free schools powered by renewable resources like sunlight, wind and water. (This piece of the vision, perhaps the grandest and most groundbreaking, received high praise from the Huffington Post.)

The Rethinkers have already made tremendous progress in the New Orleans public school system. Their accomplishments include getting sporks banned from cafeterias, designing a 21st century green school bathroom (now adopted into the master facilities plan for all new schools), and laying the groundwork for a pilot restorative justice program at a local elementary school. (The program, starting up at Langston Hughes Academy this fall, calls for major Rethinker involvement.) The Rethinkers are not only creating change in their schools but are also creating change in themselves; they are more confident speakers, more compassionate listeners, more conscious human beings. Here’s to another five years of success. Read on and stay tuned.

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