By Craig Rosen

What a great beginning to a wonderful week as the San Diego sunshine welcomed all to the opening of the Symposium on Gender and Jewish Education.

Hundreds of attendees gathered in the Convention Center to be welcomed by Rabbi Laura Novak Weiner, chair of the Symposium. She marked this as a historic occasion bringing together many of the departments of the URJ for the first time. She introduced Lori Sagarin, the President of NATE who spoke on bridging the auxiliaries of the Reform movement (NATE, Union Youth Division, Union Department of Lifelong Jewish Learning, Men of Reform Judaism, and Women of Reform Judaism) and coming together to learn and study this challenging topic. We also had greetings from Robert Heller, the chairman of the Board of the Union who also spoke of this unique opportunity to bring together so many different people focusing on a similar topic.

Our scheduled keynote speaker Dr. William Pollack was unfortunately unable to attend due to illness – (we wish him a speedy recovery). He did send along some text for us to read and our morning session tomorrow will focus on those texts. I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say. While Dr. Pollack wasn’t able to be here tonight, the schedule was readjusted and our keynote for the evening was Dr. Gail Twersky Reimer, the founding director of the Jewish Women’s Archive. She spoke on the role of women in Judaism through a modern historical perspective. She focused on the theme of female comediennes, and presented a clip from the new documentary “Making Trouble,” which highlights the story of important Jewish female comediennes in our day. (Here a clip from the film)

I’ve always admired the work of Jewish Comedienne Gilda Radner and the clip that Dr. Reimer showed was a sketch from an old Saturday Night Live show where Gilda is playing a character who lights the Chanukah Menorah for her gentile friends. Most of us in the audience loved the sketch and thought that it was groundbreaking hearing the Chanukah candle blessing recited in Hebrew by a Jewish Woman on television. Dr. Reimer invited us to use the resources of the Jewish Women’s Archive to bring to the forefront the contributions of Jewish women to our society and the world.

Following the presentation, we had an opportunity to meet in affinity groups and discuss our assumptions on Gender and Jewish Education and our hopes for what we wish to get out of the conference. My affinity group (made up of Jewish Educators in mid size congregations) discussed challenges we have with some of our boys and girls, but at the same time we also spoke of our successes. It seems that many educators are actively engaged in and successful in retaining boys in their programs. Many reported that they have a large number of boys working as Madrichim (student teacher aides) in their schools. Others reported that there is equal representation of boys and girls on youth group boards.

I then challenged the group to tackle the issue of stereotyping that many of us fall into when talking about boys and girls/men and women. More on this in tomorrow’s blog…..it’s time for bed!