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David Lubell: If you're in a community that's looked the same way your whole life, then all of a sudden it's completely changing and the only thing you're hearing about the change is maybe on talk radio or rumors that are circulating in the community, they're not going to necessarily have a positive image. But then when they meet immigrants and hear their stories, their perceptions change.

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Rachel Burgess: Welcome to Trending Jewish. I am Rachel Burgess. And with me, I have my fabulous co-host and co-worker, Brian Schwartzman.

Brian Schwartzman: Hi, Rachel.

RB: Hi, Brian. We were trying to do this thing, the shtick from Seinfeld where the Newman and Jerry Seinfeld going with their horrible hellos and all this malice and hate. And we tried doing this and it just didn't... We're just too nice to each other.

BS: We're all friends here, yeah.

RB: We're just too nice to each other.

BS: So, for the first time, you live in a major, major city. How's the new digs going? 

RB: I am finally just moved into Philadelphia. So now I am... I moved to Mount Airy. And now it's very mountainous, and very airy, as composed to... Like the rest of the world. And then you are still out of the city now.

BS: Yeah, that's funny, your point about it. For the first time... A year ago, I moved out of the city and it's really the first time in my life I'm living in the suburbs with two kids, two cars, a big yard.

RB: And also thinking about two kids, we were actually just talking with our guest, David Lubell. And he actually has two kids the same age as your two kids. So I think that you both have a lot of the same challenges of... You have these little people now with little ideas. They're not just these cute bundles of baby anymore. They're little people that are trying to figure their ways through the world and... And I'm sure able to run around so they're hard to catch now.

BS: So excellent segue. Our guest, David, we're thrilled and happy to have him. He is, while raising two boys somehow, out trying to make the world a better place for migrants, immigrants, and refugees. And we could do a long, long introduction for him and run out of time, so I'll try to keep it brief. But he's the founder and executive director of Welcoming America. Did I just get the name right? 

DL: Yep, you got it right.

BS: Alright. So [chuckle] that's good. Maybe we'll leave in my doubt or not, based on... And he's the founder and executive director of Welcoming America, which brings a new innovative approach to making our cities and towns a more welcoming, open space for refugees and immigrants. And for his work, was just awarded the very illustrious Charles Bronfman Prize, which celebrates the vision and endeavor of an individual or a team under the age of 50 whose humanitarian work, combined with their Jewish values, has significantly improved the world. So it's hard to get more lofty than that. We're thrilled to talk to David about his work, about how Judaism influences and informs his work and approach to activism, and some of the challenging times we live in. So welcome, David. Thanks for being on our podcast. We're really thrilled to have you.

DL: Thank you so much for welcoming me. I appreciate it.

RB: So, David, I have a bit of a question thinking about... You gave this wonderful TED Talk, actually in Germany, and I think we have some more questions about your time and your work in Germany as well, but I think about the way you started out your talk. You said, "My parents told me, 'Don't talk to strangers.'" And then you go into your topic talking about welcoming the stranger. Do you find yourself telling your... Do you see yourself one day telling your children, "Don't talk to... " How do you talk to your children now? How do you give that lesson to them, now that they're kind of at that age? 

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DL: That's a good question. And, yeah, I struggle all the time to figure out how to bring my work into my house so that I'm modeling, welcoming to them and to my kids and also that they see that welcoming nature based on to others. But as far as these difficult, philosophical questions, I can't necessarily tell my kids to go ahead and just talk to anybody that you see either. [chuckle] So it's more how do you... How do you... If you're just told as a kid, don't talk to strangers and there's no recalibration later, it becomes more ingrained in your head that that someone who's kind of the other in your mind should never be trusted fully. And so my question for us is how do I start introducing the idea that people who are different than you, who are even maybe foreign to you, actually bring lots of positives into your life, and so you should step out of your comfort zone.

DL: Not necessarily when you're walking down a dark alleyway, but certainly when you're in your classroom or when you're at Hebrew school or wherever you are where it feels like a good space for it, step outside your comfort zone. I want to... And see what somebody else has to offer when you make them feel welcome or when you reach out to them. So, yeah, that'll be the balancing act that I continue to do with my kids, but it's the balancing act that our society needs to do as well. We need to be able to address all the fears of the modern age, but still recognize that whether it's immigrants or anyone who's different than us in a time such as the one that we're in now, we have to remember that people who are different than us and that have entered this country is what makes it strong, what makes it special, but that has to be actively thought out. We can't just be passive about diversity. We have to actively welcome it.

BS: So for our listeners who aren't familiar, can you really talk about the organization you've created and what makes it's approach maybe a little different from others in confronting the challenges out there? 

DL: Sure. So Welcoming America, we're a national non-profit. We actually do now some work internationally as well. But basically our job is based around community, and we help communities around the country to figure out how to reach their full potential by becoming welcoming to immigrants, refugees, but also becoming more welcoming in general. And we kind of break that down into two categories. First, we help communities develop a more welcoming culture, and I can go more into how we help them do that, but a lot of it has to do with just bringing different stakeholders together and forming connections and having dialogue between longtime residents of a community and newcomers in a community, which often doesn't happen. There's other steps. And we work with municipal governments. We work with non-profits. We work with different stakeholders in the community to try to make the culture a more welcoming one and build understanding where there was previously fear or misunderstanding.

DL: And then the other piece is around helping communities become structurally or institutionally welcoming. And this is where we work particularly with municipal governments along with other partners. But that's the idea that, okay, let's look at... I'm in Atlanta, and the mayor of Atlanta wanted to figure out how to not to just be a tolerant community, but an actively welcoming one. And so we helped him put together stakeholders from different sectors, and especially the immigrant and refugee community, but others as well. To look at, "Right, when someone comes to Atlanta, what are all the barriers that they might face to being fully part of this community and fully successful in this community? And how do we, together, create a plan to reduce as many of those barriers as possible?" So a lot of policies have changed. Atlanta now has an office that focuses on this. And it's just one example of many. We work in over 160 communities now in the United States. We started with one. In 2009, we were working with one, so it's grown quickly. But that's, in a nutshell, what we do, is try to help communities transform themselves into fully welcoming places.

BS: Yeah. I was having some... I was getting the concept. I was having trouble really envisioning how this works. It sounds like in Nashville was one place where you had dramatic success. Can you go into a little bit more of the how this... How this concept, how it works? 

DL: Sure. I got into a little more detail there about a community that was maybe tolerant but not actively institutionally welcoming. And so, with the example of Atlanta, I got into that a little bit. But so we work with different communities in the United States that are in that type of a situation. Maybe tolerant, but in the modern age, that's not enough, in our opinion, and a lot of places agree. But the other piece, this piece here on culture change, we work... This is most needed in places that have had rapid growth in their immigrant populations and don't have a lot of experience, recent experience with immigration. And so Nashville, there's many communities like that in the United States. We've had the second wave of immigration over the last 25 years, the second biggest wave of immigration ever in our country. And so in Nashville, they were struggling with that. They had about a 400% increase in their immigrant and refugee population in the late 90s, early 2000s, and there has been a backlash to that. People in the long time community bought into the fears of immigrants and the idea that this was something bad for Nashville.

DL: And so it took a lot of time, but we used three basic ideas, three basic principles, to start to change that. And one was leadership; the idea that you could identify leaders from the religious community, from all sorts of different sectors of the community to come together and say, "We're going to make this community welcoming," but also to speak out in their various communities. So it's religious leaders have an ability to affect their communities. Business leaders, same thing. Political leaders, each have a role to play. So leadership is part of that in Nashville. Also, contact. And I talked about this a little before. People in neighborhoods in Nashville were not talking to their immigrant and refugee neighbors. And so fear actually tends to grow when you have people nearby, but you don't connect with them. And so we helped volunteers get used to facilitating dialogues and [inaudible] and dinners in basements of churches and synagogues. So basically, conversation in communities, there's conversations that broke the ice and helped immigrants and long time residents get to know each other and stop otherizing each other. And so that was a long process.

DL: Then finally, communications work. In a community that's fearful, often the messages that you hear about immigrants and refugees are inaccurate and wrong and exacerbate this fear. And so we wanted to get the stories of immigrants and refugees in Nashville that were contributing and shared the values of the local community. 'Cause it was there, but nobody really knew about and so we used billboards. We used radio advertisement, social media, whatever we could to tell the stories of shared values and contributions. And over time, it started to make a real difference. And actually there was a vote, a referendum that a city council person who at Nashville tried to make English the only language for government at the local level. An English-only law or referendum. And the people of Nashville in 2009 voted by a large margin against that. And we knew at that point that we had really shifted things. 'Cause before that the polling was really... A little time before that, it looked really bad, but Nashville came out the other end saying, "This is not who we are. We're not an unwelcoming community. We are actually a very welcoming community. It's time to get aligned with our values." A lot of communities that have rapid demographic growth are not aligned with their values and we can come and help them to realign. And it feels better for them to do that. And Nashville is now proud of being one of the most welcoming cities in the Southeast.

RB: When you talk about your work, even before you started Welcoming America, you did... I think a lot of this work that you were doing in Nashville actually happened before this organization started, I believe. So I'm kind of curious. You put a lot of your heart and soul into this issue of immigration and welcoming. And I'm curious, for all of the time and all of the conversations and a lot of the negotiations and a lot of the listening that you had to do in order to understand these different points of view, especially with all of your time being down in the South, what made this issue the... What made this cause be the cause that you needed to be on the ground and make some sort of change? As opposed to all of the problems that are happening in the world, what was it about welcoming and welcoming the stranger that really called to you so early on in your career as well? 

DL: That's a great question. I'm not from the South. I ended up there for a relationship. But I started my social justice, I guess you could say, career, I was too young for it to be a career when I started working on the issue of homelessness, volunteering at homeless shelters in Philadelphia. But in college I started working in community organizing and I couldn't connect as deeply as I wanted to with the immigrant community, especially the Latino community that I was working with in some of the places in Connecticut where I was doing my organizing. So that led me to Ecuador where I spent my year after college. And when I went to Ecuador, I knew I was going to try to teach English and to learn Spanish, but I wasn't really confident that I'd be successful. But I was really welcomed by this family. This host family that I was able to reach out to. And they really just treated me like I was one of the family and helped me get my sea legs on as far as teaching...

DL: The parents worked at the school where I went to and helped me understand how that worked. And the kids, when they went out I went out with them. They were always just... I was one of the family. And so I felt the power of welcoming through that experience. I learned Spanish, became a successful English teacher. I gained confidence that I needed to do everything that would come after that. And so I felt that power of welcoming. And so when we got back to the United States -- to Tennessee because of this relationship from college. And I really wanted to sort of pay back that favor. I wanted to make sure that people arriving in the US felt... Who I knew would feel disoriented the way I did and scared, could get a similar welcome to the one that I received. And so that's why I started working in the Latino community in Memphis. And it just kind of... It took off from there, I felt really at home in that environment. But there's a whole other story about how it led to Welcoming America. But I started as a community organizer in the Latino community in Memphis. And there's several steps that led to Welcoming America. But I definitely feel very at home in this field and happy, very aligned with my values in that we'd want to make sure that this country is welcoming to immigrants is something that all, in fact, everyone, something all Jewish people in this country, I think, should be getting behind and most really are, which I'm happy about.

RB: I find it fascinating how you're saying this, as I think that a lot of... Many causes that I think are initiated and the activists and the people we have out there that are trying to change the world, are usually kind of, I think most of the time, I think are affected by some sort of negative experience. And they're trying to prevent that negative experience from happening again. And it sounds like for you, you had this wonderful, positive experience that you just wanted to share with people. That's such... That's so... I can't even think of the words, but it just feels like something good, it's like sharing love almost, not to sound hippie-dippie.

DL: Yeah. Everybody's also felt what it feels like to not feel welcome. I've felt it in my life. We all have. And so, it's both trying to act on that positive experience but also not wanting people to have a negative one when they could have a positive one. So yeah, it's both, but yeah, the positive experience was the biggest part for me. Yeah, it's true.

BS: You mentioned Ecuador. It sort of made me think. I grew up in Queens, New York, which is just a center of immigrants and immigration. There's more languages spoken in that municipality than any other municipality in the country. My closest friend from junior high school was born in Ecuador. I actually attended his wedding in Quito, which was an incredible experience. So just having immigrants from all over the world was part and parcel of growing up for me. I was a print journalist, I'm used to... There is a question at the end of this. I'm used to seeing both sides of a lot of issues. This was one, an issue, I've always had a tough time relating to the other side on. I've always felt that within security constraints and practicality we should be as open and welcoming as possible. But clearly there is another side that I've tried to understand and I do. I have conservative friends that have sort of framed it as an issue of rights like, do people from all over the world have a right to come to the United States? And if not, then how do we think of it? I was just wondering how you frame this whole issue of immigration and how you approach folks who might have a different perspective than you on it.

DL: Sure, so, yeah... There's definitely... Immigration is an emotional issue. It brings out emotions on both sides, stronger than a lot of other issues because it's about identity and about security and about all of the things that... Yeah, just a lot of different emotional hot buttons are laden within the issue of immigration. And so what I've found is that on the issue, because it's such an emotional issue, when you're really feeling emotional it's hard to feel empathy for the other side and so... My experiences in community, and community, in the end you have to make it work, and communities... The reason I work in over 160 communities is because when someone arrives in your community, most people realize that, "Well, people are here, we're going to make this work." And the welcomers in the community, which are usually like just maybe 20% of the community are welcomers already, kind of predisposed. They're going to be supportive and they're going to say, "Of course we should welcome folks that just got here."

DL: 20%, this is based on a lot of polling, not just the United States around the world, 20% of people are saying, "No, we shouldn't welcome these people here. Why are they coming to the community, they're making it worse." And my focus isn't in that 20% 'cause it's very hard to change their opinions. That's a whole another methodology and it's very time intensive. But the 60% in most communities that are confused about the issue and don't have a strong opinion but are in the middle and fearful but also recognizing that this is part of what makes America, America. And so, our work in the end, a lot of it is about trying to mobilize people who are welcomers to help convince that 60% in any one community that immigrants are a benefit.

DL: But, you also have to have empathy for people in that middle 60%. If you're in a community that's looked the same way your whole life, which a lot of the communities that we work with have, in the South and Midwest, then, all of a sudden, it's completely changing. And the only thing you're hearing about the change is maybe on talk radio or rumors that are circulating in the community, they're not going to necessarily have a positive image. We work with people like that, but then, when they meet immigrants, and hear their stories, their perceptions change. And I've seen the light go on in a lot of people's eyes that way. If we didn't reach out to those people and have empathy for them, we wouldn't be able to get them to start to change. But you can and we do. And we will continue to.

RB: I'm curious also, when you talk about welcoming the stranger. It's an interesting phrase and it is used actually fairly heavily throughout Jewish text of, "Be kind to the stranger because you were once a stranger in a strange land." Is that a coincidence that that's the kind of phrasing that you use? Really, I'm curious how your Judaism actually plays into the work that you do.

DL: Sure. I grew up Reform and at the Passover seder every year, hearing about our experiences with strangers in Egypt. The idea of welcoming the stranger is such a central part of Judaism. "Welcome the stranger" is also the idea of just having empathy in general, which is also something important in Judaism. It's always felt... Since I moved into this area of work, it's felt very aligned with my values as a Jew. When I do this work and I talk to people in my family about it, they understand because this is a core part of our value. So there's the values piece like through the Torah, through lessons, but then there is also this historical piece, the fact that we were strangers, not just in Egypt, but we've been refugees and immigrants very recently and it didn't always go well either. We weren't always, "Welcome to the United States." Some of us were turned back from the United States during World War II. And so we are not far away from the refugees that are arriving, or, in some cases, not arriving from the Middle East or other places now. We have a moral commitment, in my opinion, to be true to our values as a people, but also be true to our history as well and not forget that we relied on people to welcome us. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. But now it's our turn to live up to our... When history calls, that we live up to our morals, and our history, and our lessons from history.

BS: We're coming from the... We're recording in the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, so I guess we'd be remiss not to point out for our listeners that you're a member of a Reconstructionist Congregation in Atlanta and are a great-grandson of a founder of the first Reconstructionist Synagogue in New York, Society for the Advancement of Judaism. You just told us before we went on the air that your great grandparents were actually married by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. Does that lineage or legacy have any extra bearing or influence on you and your work? 

DL: Of course, yeah, absolutely. The values of my great grandfather, Samuel, around not just Reconstructionism, but being part of the creation of that idea and that movement, certainly those values seeped into my brother and me and my family. So yeah, of course, it's been a part of me since before I even realized it was a part of me. And now, in Atlanta, I belong to a great Reconstructionist synagogue, Congregation Bet Haverim, and our Rabbi is just an amazing... He's an amazing leader. It's a synagogue that was originally for the LGBT community in Atlanta and then, since then, has been expanded to just being welcoming to everybody. But that initial cause of it being started, the idea of inclusion of people who didn't feel included, is still such a part of the culture of the synagogue. It's really an honor to be part of that congregation and have Rabbi Josh Lesser leading us and he's just so supportive of what I do and such an important voice in Atlanta and in this region. So, yeah, it's really nice for me to feel connected to my past through the present, through being part of the Reconstructionist synagogue and Ccongregation in Atlanta.

RB: So, we're actually just about running out of time, which is very unfortunate because I feel like I could ask you all sorts of questions about the things that you've seen and the work that you've done, and one thing I think that many of us have heard about... We're all familiar I think with the issues with immigration and being welcoming and I think, also I hear quite a bit that being welcoming is almost kind of a bit of a buzz word. People say that they want to be welcoming, they are welcoming, but how do you show that? What are things that we can do in order to be welcoming? I guess. What are ways that we can make our communities welcoming? 

DL: Well, there's a whole... We use a spectrum for when we try to analyze a community, diagnose a community to see where they are on the welcoming spectrum. Are they in a fearful place for the community or more of a tolerant place or an actively welcoming place? There's also a spectrum, as far as engagement on welcoming. On one of the spectrums, you could work with your municipal government, whether it's Philadelphia, the big city... Actually, Philadelphia's a great participant in our network where some of those smaller towns and cities surrounding the area. But yeah, everything from getting a city, a municipal government to join the network and to create welcoming policies and programs as a result. That's on one end of the engagement spectrum too. Having a conversation in your neighborhood, reaching out to immigrants and refugees and either, in your neighborhood or in the broader community, inviting somebody to your house for dinner, for Shabbat dinner, for example or having a larger conversation at your synagogue about this, especially inviting immigrants or refugees to come to the synagogue. We have tools on our website that can help you to do some of these different things on a grassroots, I would say, level.

DL: Another thing is we have in September, we do something called Welcoming Week, and in Welcoming Week, communities and individuals host events across the country that bring immigrants and long-time residents together in contact and the celebration of the idea of welcoming. And so, anybody can host a dialogue at the synagogue during Welcoming Week and be part of this larger movement of communities doing that. But there's a limitless number of things but really, when you get down to the basics of it, it's about that connection. How do you start connecting yourself and those around you to people who may feel like strangers and doing that can change your life. My mom who still lives in Wynnewood, outside of Philadelphia, she volunteers with a local refugee serving organization that's become very close to a Bhutanese family, in the area, and that's changed her life and her outlook and her also understanding of the work that I do. And so, through that work, she's started to help that family feel more welcomed to Philadelphia, but she's also felt more a part of the community as well. That's also something that you can do, just volunteer for a local organization. But yeah, the options are limitless. It's just important to get started.

BS: Needless... Needless to say, this has been challenging months and I'm sure a challenging time for your organization. How do you... How do you stay optimistic when, not to get too political, but when the goals of our administration seem counter to what you're trying to accomplish? 

DL: Sure. These are sad times and it's very sad to see our values threatened, to see immigrant communities feeling threatened and really being threatened. These are not easy times and you can't whitewash that or sugarcoat that. From our perspective, our silver lining is the fact that there are a lot more welcomers who have come out of the woodwork; so more people who want to get involved in helping to welcome immigrants and refugees in every community that we work in for sure, and want to be supportive in whatever way they can. The level of engagement has gone up hugely but also the number of cities that realize that they need to do something have joined our network and are actively welcoming in ways that they weren't before has grown tremendously, since the election. From perspective, what we can do is, one community at a time... A community at a time grow this movement of welcoming places. And so, it's a bottom up change, but our vision is to be in every community in the country. And actually, we have a certification program. We want to certify every community in the country as welcoming and when that happens, it's going to be a lot harder for this country to do what it did in November. We're just one community at a time, building a bottom up movement to get our country back on track because this is not who we are. What's happening now at the federal level, it's just not who we are. And we need to turn this ship around and we all need to do our part.

RB: David, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day saving the world. And I hope that... [chuckle] And thank you, also for all of your advice on how we can get involved to make our country and our world a more welcoming place. So, I hope our listeners check out Welcoming America, and also on your website you can also see about a 15-minute video of David's talk in TED Talk in Germany, where he throws his parents under the bus for saying don't talk to strangers. [laughter] So, it's a fabulous talk. It was great and it gave... It gave us a lot of things to think about and we were very excited to be able to talk to you and being able to dig more into what you do and your motivation and what keeps you going.

DL: Thank you. I appreciate it. It's such a rich topic, we could have talked for hours but I've enjoyed the time that we had very much and appreciate you, shining a light on this work and at this moment in time.

BS: Hope we can do it again some time. It was a pleasure.

DL: Yeah, I do too. Thank you so much. Definitely a pleasure.

RB: Absolutely, thank you so much and if you want to check out more information, go to welcomingamerica.org.

BS: And if you like what you hear, please go ahead, leave us a five star review on iTunes. We could use it.

RB: If you would rather leave a four star, please just send us an email, I don't... [chuckle]

BS: So, if people don't like what we're doing, I guess we don't... You don't have to tell the world but you can tell us. If people don't... They just email us, what's the carrier pigeon? What's the accepted method of communication these days? 

RB: Well, you can definitely message us on Facebook. So, you can check out our Facebook page. It's facebook.com/trendingjewish, and you can also... I think there's also a contact us on our website which is trendingjewish.fireside.fm, and please feel free to shoot us an email, give us suggestions. If you have a great story or something that's going on in the Jewish community you would like us to talk about, please send us a message. We love suggestions, we love talking about what's trending.

BS: So everybody, have a great week and we'll catch up with you next time on Trending Jewish. Till then, be responsible.

RB: And make good decisions.

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