I: Bryan Schwartzman
R: Rabbi Joshua Lesser

I: Hi, this is Bryan jumping in with a quick postscript update recorded after the episode you're about to hear initially aired.  In the intro today, I say that I hope I don't get "tarred and feathered" while wading into the complicated waters of race. A listener pointed out this was really far from the best term to use when introducing a sensitive subject. It's a violent image that is synonymous with public torture, humiliation and death.  And, little did I know there's a history of tarring and feathering being used as a tool of racial intimidation. We're not deleting the phrase from the episode, but I wanted to include this note to say that we'll try to learn from this and think more carefully about the language we use, particularly language containing violent imagery. Our language is full of phrases with violent connotations, and speaking in a manner that is sensitive, while not being overcautious, is a challenge for all of us. All right, thanks for listening and on with the episode.  


[Recording starts 00:00:00]
I:	From the recording studios of Reconstructing Judaism, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.
R:	I really came into the rabbinate understanding that the Jewish community had to be a part of the solutions and that part of what we needed to do was some soul-searching and reckoning in order for us to get to a place where we could be good allies with people of color both in our community and in the larger country.
I:	I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and we have a compelling show for you today. Our guest today is Rabbi Joshua Lesser of Congregation Bet Haverim in Atlanta and we'll be discussing his essay Preparing Our Communities for Conversations on Race.
	As a reminder, all of the essays discussed on this show are available to read for free on the Evolve website:  evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. No paywall there whatsoever.
	So do you need to read the essays? Do you not? The essays are absolutely not required reading to listen to this show but we recommend checking them out because we think they're great and because you may get more out of it if you've read the piece before or after. And if you're enjoying our podcast, this is huge. Please take a moment to give us a five-star rating or leave a review. This really, really helps. We're not just saying that.
	What else? All right. We need to -- would love to hear from you. Questions, comments, criticisms, praise -- maybe a little praise. Send it directly to my inbox at BSchwartzman@ReconstructingJudaism.org. Writing us, it's one way to make sure that we develop a show that's more relevant to your life and your Jewish journey.
	Today's episode, I think, really demonstrates what the Evolve project is all about. On the website, in our web conversations and on this podcast, we are promoting the ongoing evolution of the Jewish community by launching collective communal conversations on the urgent issues of the day and we're really trying to model civil conversations about difficult -- maybe even taboo topics.
	And let me tell you. Race is a hard conversation. I was more than a little nervous about going on the air about this. Just because the topic is so fraught, it's like the third rail for all of American history and on the one level, I consider myself sensitive. I don't want to cause anyone pain or discomfort by asking an ill-informed question. And on the other hand, social media culture that we have today, I don't really want to risk being tarred and feathered on social media for saying the wrong thing and that fear is exactly what shuts down conversations before they even start.
	I think it says something about this community Reconstructing Judaism, this program and project and our particular guest today that we were able to have a real conversation. Yes, it's an artificial element. I'm speaking into a microphone and I was talking to someone 1500 miles away but it was a real conversation and yes, it was between two white Jews on the topic of race.
	But there is still a significant conversation to be had in majority white synagogues about confronting our assumptions and yes, our prejudices and our sense that Jewish communities are inherently white and how to relate and respond and confront that national society, legacy of racism, and how to be allies to African-American communities today and other communities.
	And Rabbi Lesser is someone who has not only been thinking about these issues for decades but he has been living them as an activist and a leader, and I felt pretty safe talking with him and asking questions that made me feel a little uncomfortable as an interviewer. And I think we got somewhere. So thanks for going on this journey a bit with me.
	I clearly labeled this as a conversation between two white Ashkenazi Jews. And just to point out we certainly don't only want to be talking to white Ashkenazi Jews and Evolve and the Reconstructionist movement really tries to center the voices of Jews of color, and we certainly will feature those voices in future episodes.
	And for now, it's on the Evolve website. Try diving into some of the essays including Radical Inclusion by Aurora Levins Morales and Racism in the Jewish Community which was cowritten by Rabbi Sandra Lawson and rabbinical student, Donna Cephas.
	Okay. Without further ado, let's get to our guest. Rabbi Joshua Lesser is the rabbi of Congregation Bet Haverim in Atlanta -- a Reconstructionist community founded by and for gays and lesbians which now today serves a much wider diverse Jewish community. He is a founder of the Rainbow Center -- a resource information and educational organization addressing the needs of the LGBTQ community.
	In this Evolve essay, Preparing our Communities for Conversations on Race, Rabbi Joshua Lesser writes frankly about leadership, representation, and making assumptions about Jews of color and spaces dominated by white Jews.
	Rabbi Lesser, I'm so thrilled to have you on the program.
R:	I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you.
I:	We're talking about the issue of race in Jewish community. It's such an engaging, fraught, overdue issue. I'm sure a lot of people are looking for guidance on how to approach this, how to have conversations. So we really appreciate you being here and sharing your thinking with us.
R:	Sure. Just to reflect on that, I think that part of what makes it necessary and challenging conversation is that on one hand we need to be having this conversation as an internal conversation. We are a multiracial, multiethnic Jewish community and we often do not take that into account and we're at a time where that is past due; and then on the other hand we are a community that interfaces with a lot of other communities, and so it's an external conversation and that particularly Jews, like myself -- I often say that I identify as a Jew with white privilege -- and so for folks who have my skin color and look like me, that there is a way that we participate in the racist systems in our country and our world. and that is another conversation. and they intersect, and that's what I think makes this such an important but difficult conversation at times.
I:	So I guess before I get to question one, I'll share a decade ago in my career as a journalist covering the Jewish community right around the time of President Obama's inauguration. I was asked to do a big think piece on the state of black-Jewish relations and was asked to speak to Federation officials, rabbis, folks in the alphabet soup of Jewish communities and leaders, in this case, in the Philadelphia black community, and nobody -- not my editor -- nobody said, "Hey, make sure you take Jews of Color into account." It's not even a thought. And I think we've come a ways since then, but as you point it out right at the get-go, this is something we just constantly have to be reminded of, that we are not a uni-ethnic cultural community, that there is great diversity in North American Judaism.
R:	Yes. And it's that reason that I often talk about in my community, that when we stand against racism and racist systems like mass incarceration, we're not just doing "good deeds" or mitzvot for another community but that we're actually taking care of our own community.
I:	I think I want to ask, as a civil rights leader widely known in the Atlanta community as the rabbi of a historically gay and lesbian synagogue, where does this begin for you? Where does this story begin? Was there a moment where you had an "aha" moment that my community really needs to reckon and wrestle with issues of race, or is it something that's always percolated in the background and has more come to the surface in recent years?
R:	So it's interesting, I wasn't planning to become a rabbi. I was planning to, out of school, I'd taken my LSATs and I wanted to do public policy and law and hopefully I thought at that point work in the inner city, and I think that I had a framework of what we might call the white savior complex or a white hope that came from what was a very benevolent place, but what I came to understand pretty quickly by the experience I'm about to tell you that it was not an appropriate place to come from. I was misguided.
	And so I didn't want to go straight to law school. So I did a program called Teach For America and I was part of the first Teach For America corps in New Orleans. And I was placed in a school system where there was one other white teacher in the school, in a school that all of the students were African-American and there was one Latino student.
	And so for the first time ever, I had moved into the space where I was completely in relationship with the black community in a way that I hadn't been before. I always had black friends. We were either in the same school or we're in the same college, and this really began to open my eyes to some of the deep inequities about our country --  understanding that there are people in this country that don't have access to running water and that there are people that live in substandard housing and that the school that I was teaching in was doing such a poor job in many ways from a systemic perspective, from a funding perspective that unless you are somehow a stellar student that could rise above, that we were creating what I didn't know was called but I definitely saw that this was going to be a place that would be the pipeline from school to prison. And it just felt crushing and overwhelming.
	And at the same time, I also saw how both the school and the faith communities, which were almost exclusively in my school, churches, were the supports and I began to realize that if I wanted to put my energy into building some of the bridges and into rectifying what was wrong, I needed to locate myself in my community, being the Jewish community, but I really came into the rabbinate understanding that the Jewish community had to be a part of the solutions and that part of what we needed to do was some soul searching and reckoning in order for us to get to a place where we could be good allies with People of Color both in our community and in the larger country.
I:	As I was discovering my Jewish identity, I was immersed in the black community of Southeast Queens as a journalist, pretty ill-prepared to cover that community and I think at the time I, in a very misguided way, saw it as needing to make a choice between working on those social issues and getting more in touch with the Jewish community, and I think you rightly point out one does not need to include or exclude the other by any stretch. So I guess chalk it all up to misguided 20-something ideas, but that's really interesting that this thinking about race is something that was there even before you were a rabbi but at the very beginning.
R:	And I would also say that as somebody who was coming out at this time in my life -- and I was already out when I entered in rabbinical school -- I think I understood from a different perspective this idea of what does it mean to be marginalized and what does it mean to sometimes feel that the country is setting up systems that intentionally discriminate or make my life oppressed and that, for whatever reason, I sometimes feel, and sometimes the challenge between Jews and other communities, is we feel if we work on these other issues, we're somehow neglecting our own.
	I have had the sense that when I move forward an agenda around racism, I'm also working on antisemitism. I'm also working on homophobia by showing up in my full sense of who I am. And then I have these touchpoints of my own experience of what does it mean to not feel a full citizen of this country at times. That has helped me be open to think about what a good ally might be, because I'm somebody who needs an ally as well.
I:	So in your article, you write that "Bet Haverim has been looking at these issues for almost two decades. Because of that, we have made some progress." So can you talk about a little bit about that process and what the progress has looked like, recognizing what's worked at Bet Haverim might not be one size fits all?
R:	Absolutely. And I think that as a good Reconstructionist I think that I want to underscore that this is a process. So I would say, first and foremost, that the leadership of Bet Haverim, and I would say a number of our members, recognize that this is an ongoing exploration. I think that we recognize the kinds of experiences that Jews of Color have when they walk into a Jewish system, and that we've enabled enough voices -- or maybe not enough -- it's probably never enough -- but that we've begun to enable some voices to articulate their stories, their perspectives as Jews of Color to be able to create a sense of support, empathy, and then also platforms of leadership that allow them to help shape this community the way that they need it to be responsive to them.
I:	Would you mind giving us an example?
R:	Up until recently, one of our kids, who basically through most of his childhood was a Jewish man of Color, he's almost a junior in college, he basically went through our school and then became a madrikh and then a Hebrew school teacher, and to be able to have Jews of Color in leadership is incredibly important. There is really this deep sense that representation is important.
	And so that's, I would say, some of the internal work. We always try to look at, are there Jews of Color who are on our board.
	If you were to see my office, you would walk into my office and I have on my walls real people that I'm in relationship with, both in this community and outside, that represent the different ways that Jews look and act and exist in this world. So that we're not always portraying this Ashkenazi image or even worse when I walk into most synagogues, it's the bearded man with the Ten Commandments. And that's some of the internal piece.
	The external piece is that it's been incredibly important that we, as a synagogue, have been represented on issues like pre-arrest diversion as a way to look at answers to mass incarceration, that we're at tables where People of Color are advancing what are their needs, understanding that there are ways where how we look at systemic racism is incredibly important and how we can be a part of dismantling some of those systems and using our privilege.
	So for a long time, we were the only synagogue showing up to our city hall around these issues, around the decriminalization of marijuana, around ensuring that there's pre-arrest diversion, and now we've actually helped create a coalition of more Jews, which feels great, in terms of looking at closing our city jail and looking at ways to make that a center of restitution and repair in the community.
I:	Can you explain the term pre-arrest diversion for folks who might not be familiar?
R:	Absolutely. So a number of folks in the community, and really it was a group of Transwomen of Color who approached me, saying that they needed faith leaders to support their goal of looking at cities like Seattle, like Santa Fe, and a handful of others that have instituted programs that for some low-level offenses around loitering and solicitation, that rather than putting people into the criminal system, that they divert or that they are given options other than arrest.
	So pre-arrest diversion allows for folks to get some of the treatment that they need. There are ways where people can go into drug and alcohol rehabilitation. There are ways where people can receive job training and there's a whole host of other kinds of support that people need rather than throwing them into an incarceration system.
I:	You started out talking a little bit about having the "white savior mentality" as a younger man. Is it a difficult balance to be an ally without coming from that place or exhibiting some of those savior tendencies?
R:	What is an asset to being a rabbi? Maybe then, I would say, how I feel I was trained as a Reconstructionist rabbi and a member of the Institute of Jewish Spirituality cohorts is that this really is a spiritual practice, and it continually takes a stance of humility and I would say that a lot of my white savior complex came from wanting to be at the center of the story and wanting to be in a place where I was not only doing good but that the good that I was doing was perceived as good by others.
	And there's lots of reasons why that happens to many of us but really coming from a place of humility, I'm much more interested in connection than I am in the sense of story.
I:	That's interesting. How does that play out in your rabbinate?
R:	I'm interested in, where does justice live in this moment? How can I support those who need that sense of support to be able to bring their voice forward? And often what that looks like is having the hard conversations with other white folks, so that people of color don't necessarily need to have the painful conversations that often lead to numbers of microaggressions. And I hear "good white people" complaining about this all of the time.
	And I try to remind myself when I feel agitated or irritated when I'm with someone who has not fully understood how they could be a good ally, whether that's in the synagogue or not. Let's say this often happens in the synagogue. People have such good intentions and when they understand that asking the Jewish person of color when did you convert is really a harmful question, not a welcoming one, "but I just wanted to get to know the person. I didn't mean anything by it" --  Instead of allowing the Jewish person of color to have to answer every single time, to really give them that choice, but when appropriate to be the person that intervenes and has the hard conversation, and enables the person to take a break from the kind of racism that happens on a regular inundating basis.
I:	That's a great segue because you devote a lot of space in the article towards interacting with a Jew of Color when they walk in your door as a Jewish community and I think in general we don't spend enough time talking about what we do when anybody walks in the door because it's a lot of times where a missed opportunity for connections being made. But your essay offers some don'ts -- do not comment on whether someone looks Jewish or not, do not expect a guest to immediately become your resource for understanding their identity -- any positive guidelines on what someone should do when you see someone in your religious community that doesn't look like you, or that obviously comes from a different background?
R:	Not only does my reference points come from being in a relationship with Jews of Color, I also spend a great deal of time reading the blogs of Jews of Color, and I think that if you're in a community where you don't have Jews of Color that it's really important to get that window, because you really end up seeing all of the ways that people are affected.
	My partner is Brazilian and is Latino, and somebody in my own community asked if he was a janitor --  and, on the other hand, he and I are of this place, there's nothing wrong with being the janitor. And so there's a lot of work to be done but there is a reason why there was that kind of assumption, and I think that we often feel like we have this license to ask whatever we want.
	And so the "do" that I want to invite people to begin to think about are what are the kinds of conversations that foster a connection that gives the sense of welcome? And it often can be a simple phrase like, "Tell me about yourself." There are some really simple open-ended questions that don't bring the fullness of our assumptions. that allow people to tell their story at the pace and at the desire, at the clip that they want without us coming from a place of curiosity or assumption and if we come from a place of connection and hospitality then I think that it begins to reframe the kinds of questions that are truly hospitable or truly about connection and not about being invasive or assumptive.
I:	That's so interesting you went there. I've already referenced a couple of times in this show my background as a journalist, which is driven by curiosity. You actually say be engaging rather than curious. I'm wondering why curiosity can be fraught in these interactions and what the difference might look like.
R:	I sometimes think as a journalist you have a different kind of job than a congregant does. And so of course we're curious. Of course, we have these kinds of questions but when we privilege our own curiosity, we're putting our story first and we're not putting the other person first.
	Sometimes the focus and the attention can feel hospitable but really when it is from an objectifying place, I think that's the danger of curiosity. It's that some of what we're trying to do is to try to put someone neatly in a box so that we can feel the comfort of knowing "who they are," whereas when you're engaging people it can satisfy curiosity, but curiosity isn't at the center. What's at the center is we are a sacred community and we're hoping that you can feel, for this service or maybe for the rest of your life, that this can be a home for you.
	And so I believe that as a congregation, we should be of service rather than having someone fill in our need. And so often, I think, congregations and organizations think about things from our organizational need. "We need members" rather than encounter people in who they are and let them tell us. And I think that what I've discovered is that once I have a relatedness with someone, I then ask for permission. If I'm really curious about something, I then ask, "Hey, I've been really curious, I wanted to know. Did you grow up here?" Whatever it is of that question, whyever I have it, I do think it's important when we can, when we can think of it, to ask for that permission so that someone has the freedom to say no.
I:	And I recognize that peppering somebody with questions in real life doesn't always work as well as it does in an interview situation. That's for sure.
	I guess I wanted to ask about Jews of Color in your community and in Jewish communities more general. Are there ways that the congregation can be a source of support both spiritually and actually, because Jews of Color are dealing with societal issues and problems directly that you and I may be facing indirectly. I mean, there are different stakes in the game for Jews of Color.
R:	So I think it's important for congregations to be explicit that they are having ongoing conversation about the ways that white privilege, white supremacy affect the ways that we organize and how we present ourselves. I think that -- I've learned recently that we can be really good relationally and that there are times where Jews of Color can feel very welcome as an individual, but that often there are ways where things get tripped up.
	I once did a workshop not so long ago that basically said that white folks tend to want to build relationships and feel like things are good; and that in this moment in the world, that many black folks are really interested in changing the system. And I've taken that very much to heart, not that I don't value my relationships and I do think that in the congregation it's a little bit different. I think it needs to be on both ends and not an either-or.
	I think that sometimes it is through relationship that we can get to the systems as white folks but that if we'd feel like that once we've made a black friend or that we've welcomed a Jewish family of Color or Jewish individual of Color, then we're done. That, to me, really sends a very unwelcoming message of not saying that we're in this work together and that I want a world that is free of racism and that there's greater equity. And I feel like the Torah talks so much about equity, that how in this country can we not be talking about racial equity as a part of that?  It almost feels like intentional neglect not to.
	There are times where I have been criticized publicly that I focused too much on racism and not enough on antisemitism. And so the Jews of Color who hear that in my community often feel taken aback that somebody who was trying to work on behalf of something that should be a shared value, that it's as if their priority and their life is not the same as some of the other Jews in the community, rather than understanding that antisemitism and racism share some deep roots in white supremacy.
I:	Where could a congregation start forming a study group, putting this to the top of a social action committee? If a community is 15 or 20 years behind where you are in this process, where Bet Haverim is, where would you advise to begin?

R:	So if there are Jews of Color in the community, not that they necessarily have to be the lead and the driver, but I think it would be really important for the leadership of the community to talk about, what are the things that would make this more welcoming, and what are the ways that we could be more representative of ensuring that you feel who you are and what you need in this world is represented by this community. And I say that just to make sure that people aren't just marching forward with their own agenda so that it's not misguided. I think it's important.
	But I also want to say that there's a tension. I feel it all the time -- which is that on one hand I sometimes hear black folks saying, "Don't always burden us with figuring out what the problems are. Figure it out." And on the other hand, I sometimes hear, "Don't do the work without consulting us because you'll be misguided," and the truth is that no community is a monolith. There are lots of different ways. What I've been doing the last couple of years is really understanding that my fragility has been tied to doing things perfectly which is something that is across the board. In my life, I like to do things perfectly and there's a lot of fragility around when I don't do it, not just around race but across the board.
	So having that insight about the way that I navigate the world has been really helpful in just saying, "You know what, I'm not going to do this perfectly," and that I will sometimes hear frustrations and disappointment from the Jews of Color even when I feel like I've been working hard on behalf of something, and then I'm going to do the best I can not to take it personally.
	In some ways, that doesn't quite answer your question, which I will try to do in a moment. What I feel is really important about this aspect of our fragility --  fragility is often one of the things that prevents us from getting started. And so sometimes the study group that you suggested -- the synagogue, Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn, has really had an incredible model of having a study group explore issues of race in relationship to the Jewish community and white supremacy for a number of years before actually taking any kind of action. And that certainly is one way to approach it. Our community has chosen a different path.
	So I don't want to say that there's a one size fits all. So I think a study group is good. We have a Black Lives Matter group in our synagogue, for instance, and sometimes this Black Lives Matter group is a group that helps organize people to get out to an action or a march or to get people to go to city hall or be part of a protest, and often they study and have discussions about what are things that we might do to make our community more thoughtful and more welcoming on these issues. So I think, for me, some kind of committee might be that.
	My guess is that in most of our congregations we already have people who are doing some racial justice work and that because of the way that Reconstructionist congregations often are, there are a lot of people who are doing social justice work who may be on the periphery and it would be an opportunity to bring in what is the work that they're doing to see if there's an intersection that the congregation is doing.
	I think that moving beyond just relationships, while there is nothing wrong with finding a black church to potentially partner with, this idea that we're just going to sit together and have a nice meal and pat ourselves on the backs is probably the wrong way to go, but to understand a partnership like this can both be about relationships, but then can begin to look at what are the issues that having Jewish allies could involve the community for a greater sense of support.
	And what I've learned over all of these years is that because I've shown up at a number of really important things, that when we, for instance, did a service to commemorate the victims of the Tree of Life shooting, we had so many people come to our building that we had circles and circles around our building, and it was a multiracial, multifaith group that showed up to support us and that, to me, when you plant those seeds, that's what's going to happen -- that people want to show up and be with you. I think that it's dangerous to just think that allyship is in one direction. I also like to talk about in our community the ways that we need People of Color as allies ourselves for a number of experiences that we have, and I also want to recognize that it's not as if there's a community that is immune to antisemitism.
	So in doing this work, sometimes I feel the Jewish community doesn't recognize that just as we have to wrestle with our own racism and white supremacy in our community, that often People of Color have to navigate their sense of Christian normativity and antisemitism that has been part of the culture that we've been in. And so sometimes as Jews we're much more sensitive to the antisemitism without realizing we're actually having to do the same kind of work ourselves.
I:	You mentioned something that Jewish communities in doing this work sometimes maybe forget that there may be antisemitism in other communities including communities of Color. And the past year or so we've seen, specifically in New York, an alarming increase in assaults on identifiably Jewish men in Orthodox garb, mostly from what I've read in news reports being attributed to African-American men. Obviously, there's a huge gulf between liberal and Orthodox Jewish communities but is this something that should be part of these conversations or alliance building? Something [that] should be on our radar.
R:	Perhaps because I don't live in the communities where this has happened, I think that there are things that happened on the extreme. Well, I think that we can be part of a solution with each other. I don't know if I would want to hold the People of Color that I'm in community with responsible for the kinds of violent acts of hatred that have occurred to the Orthodox Jewish men -- to me that is a really extreme form of antisemitism that I'm talking about and, in fact, I think sometimes it is a little bit an example of what I think we do as Jews sometimes. It's that we point to the most scary parts.
	None of the folks that I'm in relationship or coalition with have ever asked me to represent or defend the Jews who are in this current political administration making some choices that are very much oppressive choices to People of Color, to immigrants, to LGBT folks.
	And, again, I want to assist Jews to have enough confidence in our place in the world and in our own sense of what does it mean to call to do justice, to take the first steps, often, towards the kind of understanding and sometimes -- I've done this as a gay man in almost every space I've ever been in. Because I work with people who I know are homophobic because there is a greater goal sometimes and that at over 20 years of being a rabbi, I have seen people grow in their acceptance because I have shown up in all of these other kinds of arenas.
I:	You started out your essay with this great anecdote of when your community first moved into its building and a congregant comes with a gift of a painting to put on the wall and you're like, "Let me guess. Is it a rabbi with a white beard?" So I'm wondering are you saying it's not okay at all now to have images of Eastern European shtetl life with men with white beards on the walls or this has to be more of a conscious balance? In all seriousness, I was wondering what you are arguing with that point.
R:	I just think if you go into most Jewish spaces, the balance is completely out of whack and it's not just what's on our walls, it's also what's in our books and on our websites.
	I had a congregant who has since moved away but I'm very close with her. She is a children's book illustrator and has worked on a number of Jewish books, and in sharing with her the dearth of books of Jews of Color, she took what I said to heart and so there's a book called Almost Dominion that she illustrated, and while it isn't a story about Jews of Color, the protagonist in her family are Jews of Color, and she did it just simply because we were having this kind of conversation. And so it means that there is the chance that someone's going to pick up a book that isn't a book about something specific but just see that Jews of Color are represented in everyday Jewish life, and that's more of what I'm talking about.
	I just feel like there's just this default. I don't have it up to my wall anymore because the glass of the frame broke, but one of my favorite pictures that I used to have in my wall was of a man davening at the Wall wearing mirrored sunglasses and the only thing that you could see was the Wall reflected in his sunglasses and I liked that he had sunglasses and tefilin and it was just, I thought, a very cool picture. I've gotten it in Israel. And so even in my own office there is a picture of tha,t but I also have a picture of an Asian child who had her bat mitzvah. I have several pictures of weddings I've done of multiethnic, multiracial families. I have [inaudible] protests.
	And so what I chose to do rather than have a series of men, like you went into my office, I'm in a relationship with every single person on the wall, and it represents real people in Jewish community with a wide diversity. It wasn't that difficult for me to create that kind of effect and people have gone out of their way to say how much they have felt welcome because they see themselves represented in my office. And that's all that I'm asking that we consider.
I:	Rabbi Lesser, these are very difficult, hard questions and issues. We really appreciate your time here and more importantly your leadership on them. I really appreciate and I wish the issues were going away and we didn't have to discuss them again but I look forward to checking in with you in the future about them.
R:	Thank you. I appreciate the conversation.
I:	Thanks so much for listening to the interview with Rabbi Joshua Lesser. If you enjoyed our conversation, please be sure to read his essay Preparing Our Communities for Conversations on Race. You might also want to check out Radial Inclusion by Aurora Levins Morales and Thoughts on Race and Antisemitism by Rabbi Mordechai Liebling.
	What did you think about today's episode? We want to hear from you. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations and that includes you. So send us your questions, comments, feedback -- whatever you got. You can reach me directly at BSchwartzman@ReconstructingJudaism.org. My name is spelled the same as the Argentinian tennis star, Diego Schwartzman, the actor, Jason Schwartzman, but not the same as the billionaire, Stephen Schwarzman who drops the T before the Z.
	Be sure to check back next month for an all-new episode with Rabbi Toba Spitzer to discuss her essay Slavery and Its Atonement.
	Evolve groundbreaking Jewish conversations is executively produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs.
	Our theme song, Ilu Finu, was composed by Rabbi Miriam Margles.
	This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism.
	I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and I'll see you next time.