Bryan Schwartzman:	From the recording studios of Reconstructing Judaism, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Your average Jew knows that once you're Jewish -- and I believed this when I converted -- once's your Jewish, you're never supposed to be asked if you converted. You're a Jew. That's all that matters. White people forget that when it comes to people of color.

Bryan Schwartzman:	I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and we have another episode diving into the fraught issue of race. Our guest is Rabbi Sandra Lawson, and we'll be discussing her essay, "Racism in the Jewish Community." This piece, co-written with rabbinical student Donna Cephas, examines the assumption that all Jews are white while touching on a 
 whole bunch of other issues -- conversion, interracial families, adoption, Ashkenazi privilege, political correctness. Right now, it's the most read essay in the Evolve site. Check it out and you can see why.

As a reminder, all the essays discussed on this show are available to read for free at the Evolve website -- evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. The essays are not required reading for the show, but we definitely recommend checking them out. A little housekeeping -- for those who don't know, Sam Wachs edits this show and is my partner in putting it together in every respect along with Rabbi Jacob Staub who is our executive producer. I've often encouraged him to lend his voice to the show because he just asks great questions, and on this interview, he did it. So if you hear a voice seemingly out of the blue, it's Sam asking a question.

Sam Wachs:	Thanks Bryan. It's great to join the conversation.

Bryan Schwartzman:	All right. I am really excited to have Rabbi Lawson on the show. A disclosure -- as part of my job at Reconstructing Judaism, I successfully pitch profiles of her to the Philadelphia Inquirer and JTA. You can check those stories out in our show notes. In short, I've heard Rabbi Lawson tell her story before -- both in public settings and in private. But during this interview, I was really struck -- almost heartbroken -- by the rawness of the way she described her experiences. During these episodes, I've been pressing for, I guess, "the answers" -- how we move forward on questions about race, and it hasn't always been easy to get those answers, and maybe it was unfair to expect Rabbi Lawson and others to have an ABC step program forward.

But I think what you get today is as important, if not more important, than "the answers." I'm betting that you'll find Rabbi Lawson's stories, I'm going to use the word "transformative" even though it's an overused word. I think it really applies here. Listening to this, I think you're going to approach your next encounter with a Jew of color in a synagogue or other Jewish setting -- I think you're going to approach that differently.

For me, I think these words are going to stay with me for a long time and I hope remain etched in my brain and my heart. I think it's really [in] the power of sharing stories that we can be impacted and changed.

Anything else, folks, to know before we get going? Yes. Rabbi Lawson is the associate chaplain of Jewish life and the Jewish educator at Elon University in North Carolina -- a 2018 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She's also a military veteran, a musician, a weightlifter and a personal trainer. She identifies as African American, queer and vegan. She's also a social media powerhouse and has been dubbed  "the Snapchat Rabbi". In 2016, she was included in JTA's list of 10 Jews you should follow on Snapchat.

So Rabbi Sandra Lawson, welcome to the podcast. We're so happy to have you.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Thank you, Bryan. It's good to be back.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Yes. I know. You were a guest on the former podcast, Trending Jewish. We were neighbors. I worked in the building where you went to school. So it's great to reconnect and really excited to talk with you. We're starting with the essay you wrote on racism in the Jewish community, which was written a couple of years ago and it's the most popular read essay on the Evolve site.

So to the extent you remember, I wanted to learn just a little bit about, in some ways, it seems like an obvious topic for you to write about. Then maybe on the other hand, it might not be something you'd want to write about. I guess how did it come about?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Rabbi Jacob Staub sent me an email and we had a conversation, From my memory,  I think he knew that I had some challenges being a person of color, black person, rabbinical student at RRC and asked me to co-author an essay on my experiences of race or racism. I'm not sure how we worked that out. He gave me the opportunity to pick a co-author. We went through some names and Donna Cephas seemed to be the best person for both of us, especially me because her experiences as a white woman with a black family was complementing my experiences as a black woman. So those two perspectives were really important for the essay.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Unfortunately, Donna is not with us today for really reasons of privacy and concern about her family and has chosen not to participate in the podcast which we totally respect. I guess there's a lot there about your personal experiences, which I want to get into, but could you summarize the argument the two of you were making, what you really hoped folks would take away from being confronted with your perspective on racism in the Jewish community?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	What Donna and I decided to do early on was that we figured the best approach for us was to talk about racism from our own personal narratives. So the first part of the essay lays out the challenges of race and give some historical knowledge of racism in the United States and racism in the Jewish community and how privileged white Ashkenazi Jews experience Judaism versus how people of color experience Judaism. Then both of us went into our own narratives with some examples. The interesting thing that is funny or sad is that we had so many examples. We had to be picky about which ones that we chose because we both experience racism in the Jewish world.

Bryan Schwartzman:	I guess I wanted to learn about some of your experiences both that were mentioned in the essay and without of it before we can really gather what to draw from those experiences. I'm assuming before the negative experiences, there must have been some positive ones to draw you into Jewish life. I was wondering if you could talk at all about your early experiences at Congregation Bet Haverim which from what I understand is really the first place you went to -- in Atlanta where you went to synagogue and really first experienced Jewish life. My sense is, I guess, I wanted to hear about that. Was racism something that hit you right from the beginning or did it encounter later on as you grew more involved in Jewish communities and in other places?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	No. It was there from the beginning. I think what's interesting is that people can have good experiences and bad experiences at communities and both can be true. People can experience welcoming from a person and racism at the same time from a person. So there are levels of racism and microaggressions and macroaggressions that Jews of color and people of color in United States experience all the time.

I recently did a workshop, and we talked about how racism has evolved. So as a woman of color, I feel [that] for white people -- and you could tell me if this is wrong -- if I call you out on racist behavior, that's the worst thing and people's minds automatically go to the worst descriptions of racism ever that have ever existed -- lynchings, KKK, Neo-Nazi -- whatever and that's definitely examples of racism.

But because our laws have changed and it's no longer socially acceptable and we live in a culture that from the very beginning that has privileged one group of people over another, racism has also evolved. So how I experience racism is very different than my mother and my father experienced racism, and how they experienced racism is very different than how my grandparents experienced racism.

My parents migrated, made a mass migration from the South to the North to the Midwest to find jobs and they met and they had me and my brother and they got divorced and all that. (laughs) 

Bryan Schwartzman:	That's another story.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	I know. And I have benefits of a college degree, a master's degree and rabbinical. Well, actually two master's degrees if you count my rabbinic ordination. So I'm in a very different place than my parents and my grandparents. So I just want to say that.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Can you give an example of an instance where you felt welcomed and some level of racism at the same moment? It's certainly hard for me to picture.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	I'll give you a perfect example, and, again, there's a lot to pick from. Actually, I'll just say this. Congregation Bet Haverim -- the synagogue that I love. That is my foundation for Judaism.

Bryan Schwartzman:	You are a board member there, right?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Yes. I was a board member. I was the first vice-president. When I was leaving, I left Congregation Bet Haverim initially because I thought I wanted an academic degree in Judaism, a masters and PhD in religious studies, and I quickly realized that wasn't the route that I wanted to go, but I talked to a member who I had known for a long time. I was saying that I was going to pursue this and then ultimately, I probably would wind up going to rabbinical school, and he was really excited for me and really happy, but his initial response to me was, "Oh, my God. You are more Jewish than the Jews."

So he could have meant in that moment that converts are more excited about Judaism, but the way it came across -- and I don't actually think that's what he meant -- the way it came across to me was, "I don't see you as a Jew even after all these years that you have been my board member, my congregant, I still cannot see you as a Jew. I know you're Jewish. So therefore, I can validate and be excited that you're going to rabbinical school or you're going to pursue this higher education, but at the same time, I don't see you."

Bryan Schwartzman:	At least the way you're telling it, I envision it being sprouted out unconsciously.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Oh yes, because he did a major backpedaling afterwards. He knew how that sounded. And the more he kept trying to explain it, the worse he was digging himself in because there was no way to explain it.

Bryan Schwartzman:	That feels like something that I could really easily see myself blurting that out. How does that make you feel? Is it crushing? Is it something you just shrug off? Is it somewhere in between?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	This particular person I had had multiple conversations with around Judaism and race, for some reason, I'm using examples from the same person, a few years earlier or maybe earlier that year, Josh --

Bryan Schwartzman:	So that's Rabbi Joshua Lesser of Congregation Bet Haverim who was actually a guest on the third episode of the show, "Preparing our Communities for Conversations on Race." That was his essay.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Rabbi Josh did a sermon on Yom Kippur on grace. So this particular congregant came up to me and started talking to me about Jews of color. In that conversation, I said to him, "Please don't assume that all Jews of color in our community converted to Judaism," because that's not true of all Jews and it's definitely not true of all Jews of color in our community. And he's like, "Oh, really? So who are they?" I said, "That's irrelevant. They're all Jewish."

Then, in his mind though, he wanted to talk to them because he thought that meant those people had the same upbringing. For this particular individual, that meant they grew up in New York, not only New York, but they grew up in Brooklyn and they had a similar background to him because that's how he saw Jews. I was like, "Why are you assuming that if someone is Jewish from the time that they were born, that they grew up in Brooklyn?" And he was like that's how he saw the Jewish community even though we were nowhere near Brooklyn at the time, we were in Atlanta, Georgia.

Bryan Schwartzman:	So you just shrugged it off as --

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	No. I didn't like it. Josh and I had a conversation about it afterwards. I was annoyed and frustrated, but I make decisions all the time about when to call people out on their racism and because this was a very festive event and people knew that I was leaving, that was not the time to do that. He was struggling to correct himself so I just let him continue to struggle.

Sometimes these things happen so fast that I'm making decisions quickly on how to deal with them. I'll give you another example where I currently work. I work as a rabbi at the campus and I'm the only rabbi serving in that role on the campus. There's another ordained rabbi but he's a professor. He's the chair of religious life and he's a wonderful man.

Bryan Schwartzman:	This is Western North Carolina, right?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	It's upper north middle. (laughs)

Bryan Schwartzman:	Okay. There are mountains there, right?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Oh, yes. Not where I live but not far away. I really suggest you check them out because they are beautiful and I love going to them. But there was a parent and she came to visit and a colleague of mine said, "Oh, I want you to meet our rabbi. This is Rabbi Sandra Lawson," and the parent of a prospective student just stared at me and just several times asked me if I was ordained. She's like, "You're ordained?" She stumbled over it. I said, "Yes." She was like, "You're an ordained rabbi?" I said, "Yes." After the third or fourth time, I just jokingly said, "I have a business card at my office if you'd like to see it."

Bryan Schwartzman:	Do you just want to shake the person like, "Do you know what I had to do to get that title?"

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	But the thing is like as if any university would hire a non-ordained rabbi. I don't even understand what that would look like. Even when I got this job, I had to show transcripts from all of my education to be in the file. It's not like they're taking people's word for it.

Sometimes I make different decisions. My first few weeks here, we had a family brunch or something. I was cornered by several parents who repeatedly felt entitled to have intimate details about my life like "So when did you convert?" and just questions that my white male colleagues just don't get without knowing anything about me and they were assuming a lot and asking a lot of questions.

I understand on some level that these parents are leaving their children here and they have some concerns about the Jewish life here, but I really don't believe that this would have happened to any of my male colleagues when they met a parent. Sometimes, instead of asking about religious life, before they can even ask about Jewish religious life, they have to ask questions about me.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Wow. So it seems like this is a crux issue for so many white Jews. There is a certain image of what a Jew looks like and it seems very difficult to get past that and that creates more than uncomfortable situations for Jews of color in Jewish spaces where everybody's supposed to be Jewish -- no differentiation.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	I also want to add too that being a female in the rabbinate also, we're doing this to ourselves and Joshua Lesser, on your show, talked about the images in his office. I have been into multiple synagogues that are progressive, Reform, whatever you want to call it, and they still have images on their walls with bearded white men with tefillin -- which is how traditional Jews pray -- that these men look relatively orthodox and no one in that community looks like that. So the fact that we're beholden with images of what a rabbi looks like or what a community leader is supposed to look like, who these people in prayer is supposed to look like, that has a lot to do with the images that people still see in their synagogues.

Bryan Schwartzman:	The $10 million question --  what does it take to change that? Does it take rabbis like you being public to change image? What does it take to change those perceptions so that that things aren't taken for granted or the image of the Eastern European bearded man is not our image of a Jew?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	One of the things that I think will help --  and this is one of the things I feel like I've been taking on -- is that none of this will change unless I can make my colleague see that it's important. I have had multiple conversations with white male colleagues or white female colleagues getting them to try to understand the importance of this issue so that they can serve as leaders in their community and when they see microaggressions can disrupt them or educate their communities.

Some rabbis feel like they're inadequate to talk about the subject or they feel like they don't have to because there are no Jews of color in their community or they assume everything is all right. So what I say to them is that we have Jewish values. Use your Jewish values in our texts -- all of our texts -- to teach what it means to be inclusive and radically welcoming and what's inappropriate and what's appropriate to ask people when they walk through the door.

Bryan Schwartzman:	I definitely want to get into that. We talked about that a little bit on Rabbi Lesser's show and in general, I think that that first initial meeting is still an area that almost all Jewish communities could use improvement with everybody.

You write about the burden of being asked to explain yourself, to answer questions about conversion from a complete stranger. I thought it was really heartbreaking when you wrote, "I rarely get to tell my own Jewish story in a way that feels safe. I am often made to feel like I am expected to rattle off a simple yes or no answer as if anyone's Jewish story is that simple." Can you help us? Why does it feel so wrong to you when a white-identified person in a Jewish setting asks you where you come from, if this is the first time you've joined us, what your story is?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	I also want to pull out, "Okay. Is this the first time you've joined us?" That's a different question because I think that's a more common question when you're trying to welcome new members. I still deal with this today. But to answer your question, it's othering. So I'm coming into a house to pray. You don't know what's going on with me. Maybe somebody in my family died or I just want to be in a community. I just want to be a Jew in a pew. Also, most white people don't understand how many times I get asked that.

One of the things when this happened to me recently at a conference where somebody sat down at dinner and started rattling off questions to me before I even knew his name, I asked him, "How often do you get asked those questions?" Well, never. I said, "So why are you asking me?" I said, "I know you're Jewish. This is a Jewish conference. That's really all that matters to me. I don't need to know how that came to be. I'm more interested in getting to know you, but why do you feel asking me those questions helps you to understand me? It tells you absolutely nothing about me except whether I converted or not."

Bryan Schwartzman:	Okay. A short timeout here. A little commercial break. Do you want others to experience to hear this kind of conversation? Please just take a minute to give us a five-star rating or leave a review on your favorite podcast app. Positive ratings and reviews really, really help other people find out about this show. All right. Now back to our interview with Rabbi Sandra Lawson.

So have you come up with some do's? What are the don'ts, I guess?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	I think what communities need to understand is that regardless of where they live,  Jews of color have been around forever. because of the fact that any group that has moved here, they assimilated and they start to look like the rest of America. For Jews anyway, even though a large portion of Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe, they've been in this country long enough that the Jewish community is starting to look like the rest of America which means it's probably the same racial and ethnic demographics you're going to see in the larger America and you're also going to see in a Jewish population and depending on which study you look at, 15 to 20% of the American Jewish community is identified as Jews of color.

Considering that the Jews are 2% of the American population, the fact that 15 to 20% of the Jewish population are Jews of color, that's a significant number. That's not a number that you can just ignore. So we need to stop assuming that when people of color come into our community, they're not Jewish or that they converted. Jewish communities as a whole, given the trauma that is part of our history in this country, aren't necessarily welcoming places in general. So we need to work on what it means to be hospitable, what it means to be welcoming. Some communities do that better than others and some communities do a terrible job.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Is there an example you could share where you walked into a place and they just got it or you just had an encounter where you felt welcome and not self-conscious right away or is that too high a bar right now?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	No. I've been to two communities that from the very beginning are pretty welcoming. One was Beit Tikvah and I think that's in Maryland in Baltimore and Congregation Bet Haverim in Atlanta. So the initial group of people who welcomed me were fine. But after I had been there for a while, as people started to see me more often, then they felt entitled to know more about my information. So even in those spaces, before people asked me my name, were still making assumptions about me.

For example, at Congregation Bet Haverim, there was a woman who was actually not a member of our community but she came to our community a lot. We were in the middle of something I don't even know. As soon as she got there, she's like, "You're not Jewish, are you?" I said, "Actually, I am. I'm a board member of this synagogue." And she's like, "Oh." But she did that in a group of people and it was othering.

So luckily, I was in a group of people that I knew. I've been in a synagogue where recently -- I think it was in Philadelphia, it's a Reform synagogue -- and I was really hesitant to go at first because it's a large synagogue and I just didn't know that it was going to be quite warm. But even though it was a large synagogue when I walked in the door --  it wasn't easily navigated. There was no like when you walk in, here's the sanctuary, but there was a person there that said, "Hey, welcome. Have some food. Have some water. The sanctuary is this way."

So I went and got some whatever snacks they had and then another person directing me to where the sanctuary was. I can't tell you how many synagogues I have been to where I walk in the door -- I would get buzzed in, and I don't know where I'm going.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Oh, it's like you're exploring a cavern or a fortress and you don't know...right. One thing I wanted to get at is the basis of your essay and the point you and your co-author make, Donna, about the importance of personal narratives and how personal narratives can be transforming. I have that on the one hand and on the other, I understand how it can be off-putting to be asked aspects of your own story on first meeting. So what is the right formula or space for Jews of color to share personal narrative and change some of those perceptions?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Well, my first thing that I don't understand, and I asked friends this all the time, is why is it so important to know? I have a friend in Baltimore who stepped on it and asked me inappropriate questions and then spent some time with me going to synagogue. She was like, "Oh, my God. I'm so sorry. I really get it now," because she saw how people interacted with me. So I don't know what goes on with white Jews because I'm never going to be white but I do understand white culture better than white people understand black people or brown people, but I don't understand what goes on in people's mind where they feel like they are entitled to know,  and the only answer I have is privilege.

So when you are the privileged dominant group, you feel you can behave or act or ask certain questions or assume a level, just like assuming everybody celebrates Christmas because that's what our dominant culture says. You celebrate Christmas and if you don't, there's something wrong with you or you're an other.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Does the Jewish geography thing play into it? There's a joke that two Jews meet and they're like, "Oh, we went to this camp," and if somebody doesn't fit into that puzzle, they don't know what to do with them. I'm trying to see if there's a less nefarious motivation behind it potentially.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Yes. I had this conversation with some staff members and friends, and one day I will talk with students about it, Jewish geography can be fun. I get it. I played the game but usually with one other person, like, "Oh, I have a colleague, whose son is about to marry the sister of somebody I went to school with." It's weird. That was a fun Jewish game of geography.

The othering piece or the challenging piece is when you're in a large group of people and you all start to do it around what camp you went to, what school you went to, what Jewish this and Jewish that. Jews who don't have that experience can't contribute to that conversation because it is assumed that you have those experiences.

So we have a lot of students that went to Jewish camp and that's their thing that made them love Judaism. We also have a lot of students who didn't go to camp. We also have students who were Jewish but didn't do anything -- Jewish their whole life and now they're in college and they want to explore that. I get it on one hand. Yes, Jewish geography is fun. It makes you feel connected but it can also make other people feel disconnected or not connected at all.

Bryan Schwartzman:	I just want to go back and ask again about the personal narrative. Are you saying it's important to share in the spaces and your settings of your choosing like a podcast, like an article?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Yes. Absolutely. But I also think that when people have relationships, your story evolves. I know lots of Jews of color. I have no idea how they came to be Jewish or cared. It's just never been a question that I've asked and they have never asked me. It's something that all of us  usually experienced by white people, white Jews or Jews who have white privilege.

People in relationships, at some point, it is okay to ask because you know each other. You've been through some things together, and you could say, "Hey, this may be inappropriate," or, "Hey, I've always wondered. Forgive me, but did you convert?" But if we've been friends for a while, I feel it's fair to ask, but to ask me right when you meet me before I've sat down or if you even already know that I'm Jewish, asking me questions about my conversion status, what I often say -- here's something funny. Your average Jew knows that once you're Jewish -- and I believed this when I converted -- you're never supposed to be asked if you converted. You're a Jew. That's all that matters. White people forget that when it comes to people of color.

Sam Wachs:	Is that what you mean when you say white Jewish privilege? Because when you're talking about Ashkenazi Jews, if you confront them with "privilege", that might be something that they fight back. They might say, "Well, my family fled to this country in the Holocaust.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	I'm going to say several things. First of all, we can no longer assume that Ashkenazi means white. There are black and brown people who have Ashkenazi identity from family or whatever, and within the Jewish framework -- (gesturing) I'm making a little square -- there are some in our community who have privilege. So that privilege plays out in our music, in our prayer books and the food that we talk about even and their privilege in assuming that all Jews look like them -- look white.

In a larger American context, some Jews have a lot of privilege and some don't, but the fact that we are a religious minority, that takes away a lot of the privilege that white Ashkenazi Jews may have in our society.

Sam Wachs:	I just feel like in maybe the larger societal race conversation, it's sometimes hard for white people to understand what their privilege --

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Oh, of course. Yes. But what they don't understand is that when you're talking about racism you're not talking about individual responsibility or individual people. That is when you're talking about individuals, you're talking more about prejudice. But racism is a system that was designed and built from the very beginning of the founding of this culture. It is designed to privilege one group of people over the other. It was designed to privilege white men with property or initially a group of people from Great Britain and then white people with property and then just white people.

Somewhere down the line, women got the right to vote and then black people got the right to vote and gain citizenship. You couldn't even buy a property in this country for a while unless you were considered white. There were brown people who went to the Supreme Court argue that they were white so that they can buy property. Now gay people have more rights than they had before but there are still people in our society that are marginalized because they're not White Anglo-Saxon men.

Bryan Schwartzman:	You and Donna wrote something that was pretty clear and strong. You said "there is a continued commitment within the Jewish community to the belief that people of color have equal rights and equal opportunity. Sadly, this commitment to equality is often limited to people of color who are not Jewish, and to the rights of Jewish people of color in the larger society". You're essentially hitting on a hypocrisy here that's conscious or unconscious. I think I'll go back again to how do you combat that or is it up to you to combat that?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	I don't think it's up to me, but I do think that acknowledging it -- For example, I've been in plenty of communities where there might be people of color in the room, and it's a Jewish event and the assumption is that I'm not Jewish. So on one hand, I'm radically welcomed as an outsider coming into the community. But once someone finds out I'm Jewish, then all of a sudden, "Oh wait," then people ask inappropriate questions.

I do think the Jewish community is committed, like I wrote in the essay, to working on social justice issues, working on racial equality, prison reform, but all that happens outside. They're not doing the work they need to do inward to see how they are supporting a racist system or white supremacist and we're seeing how they are supporting white privilege within their community because it's so easy to look over there and see how white people are doing so wrong but I don't want to look inward and see what I'm doing, which means that when Jews of color come into Jewish spaces, they are often not treated as Jewish.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Well, let's shrink it down from the whole world because you can't take on the whole world by yourself -- although it seems like you can sometimes. (Laughter) How about at Elon University? What kinds of things are you doing there or I guess is do you see it as part of your scope to expand student's view of authentic Judaism or who is an authentic Jew or it happens more on an unconscious level that you're just doing your work?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	So yes, I'm just doing my work. So my role here is to support our Jewish students and help them. I feel like helping them come to a Judaism of their understanding and so, for me, that means I meet them where they are, wherever they are in the Jewish life and I help move them along. I don't have any expectations that they should be further along wherever they are in their journey. I'm just like trying to help them where they are, and our students are all over the place when it comes to their own level of Jewish knowledge.

My students that I work with here, they just want a rabbi. They know I'm black and they know that I'm queer and on some level that's extra cool. But they just want someone to support them and be there for them and answer whatever Jewish questions or have coffee or lunch. For the most part, my students have not asked me the same inappropriate questions that their parents have. But it doesn't mean that they don't share biases, that doesn't mean that they don't have racist ideas. But I just think where they are right now, they're just happy to have a rabbi and I hope they like me, that I'm present for them.

I also work on a campus that is not a politically charged campus, students are really generally happy. We don't have protests and we don't have people trying to tear down statues. We don't have a lot of Palestinian, Israeli, BDS stuff on this campus either and that's just not where the students are. That doesn't mean they are naïve, it just means that that's just not where they want to put their energy.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Before offline, you mentioned to me that however many months, certainly more than a year, maybe more than two years since you started working on this essay that your perspective has changed whether just by growing older or being in the field as a rabbi. Can you talk a little bit about what's happened since you wrote the essay?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	That's actually not what I said, but I can understand how you would say that.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Okay, great.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	No, I'm just saying that I'm in a different place. The things that I wrote in the essay are so true and they're still true today. If I were asked to write the essay, I'm not sure I would have written it the same way because I'm in a different place. I wrote that -- I was a rabbinical student who was struggling to find employment as an intern in jobs and I was getting faced with the racism in the Jewish community and wasn't sure how to ask for help or wasn't sure how to make that change.

Today, there's power behind the title. When I say things, people generally, for the most part, will listen. It could be argumentative a little bit, but I have a knowledge and the expertise to at least usually back up what I'm saying. So that just makes me in a different place being a rabbinical student with no power versus being a rabbi that has some power.

Bryan Schwartzman:	I know you've got an active online following, you've shared your essay in a number of different places. Have you gotten interesting feedback on it? Has it led to a conversation that you'd hoped?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	I think because the way Donna and I wrote it when we wrote it from our own personal narrative, I have not seen much pushback. I don't haven't seen much arguing, like nobody's saying that's not true, because it's our story. I have seen that with some of the other essays that I've shared on Evolve that didn't go with that approach and I think that's just part of how white fragility works. Instead of listening to the content, you're going to argue certain points that you think are factually not accurate. But whenever I've shared it, the people who feel the need to respond, they have said that they've learned a lot from the essay and they appreciated sharing the narrative and makes them think. I don't know if they've gone back to their community and anything has changed, but the more people learn about the diversity in the Jewish world and how people of color are treated in the Jewish world, I want to believe that will create change.

I also want to say too that there are a significant number of black and brown rabbis out there who don't want to do this. They want to be rabbis and they don't want every conversation to be about race. I don't actually want every conversation to be about race either. But they're not willing to take this on. They just want to do their jobs and I respect that.

Sam Wachs:	I have one more question -- the disembodied voice...

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	The voice from beyond.

Sam Wachs:	You just mentioned that about being in a different place when you wrote it and experiencing racism maybe on the job hunt and not knowing where to turn or what to do about it. What would you say if you could talk to yourself from three years ago or if you could talk to someone who is maybe experiencing a similar thing now, what would you say to them?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Well, I'm not sure because one of the challenges was that I was the first black student admitted into RRC and one of the first black students admitted to any rabbinical school. I have a colleague who is now an RRA member, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association member. I've never talked to her about her experiences at another school, but I know she was the first person there.

The black and brown students that are now rabbinical students, because other people were there before then, I could say things to them. Being the only black student for a while, I just wanted to keep my mouth shut and I just wanted to learn. I didn't even understand sometimes the things that I was often experiencing were microaggressions because I was just trying to finish school, but then once another black student came, it became easier because I wasn't alone anymore. So her and I could talk about some of the things that we experienced. Like one example, another black student who graduated from RRC. When I got to RRC, I had long hair and she had short hair. We look very different and then I cut my hair off and a staff member who's no longer there said, "Oh my god, how am I ever going to tell you two apart now?" Like, seriously? I think she meant it as a joke but like, really?

Bryan Schwartzman:	Yes, I never heard that story. That's at the...

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	And I'm not sure what I would say because it really is hard being the first to do anything in this country. But I'm not the only black rabbi out there and I'm also not the only black queer rabbi out there. So I have a support network of people that I can talk to, which would not have been the case 10 years ago.

Bryan Schwartzman:	I guess as a white person, if I really start to think about this stuff and think about how structurally racism has been woven into American history and then you get into this idea that I buy that that structure has gotten into my consciousness in a way I'm not even aware of and I'm sure I've said things as cringe-worthy as what you just repeated in that vein. It can just seem very overwhelming to struggle against. Is there hope that we're thinking and talking about this? I guess I'm looking for where is the light because the way I just put it, to me seems very bleak.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	So part of my duties are serving as the Jewish educator on my campus, and that's a Hillel International responsibility. So I was recently at the Hillel International Global Assembly. It's their large conference, thousands of people. This is the second time that I've been there.

The first year I was there, there were some people of color there. Most of them are really young and they were probably Springboard fellows. This time around, the number of black and brown people there was a lot bigger. I met the black assistant director from St. Louis who shared recently the microaggressions he had experienced. I met a young black woman -- actually, I knew her already, but she was at the conference. She's a rabbi at Yale, and so that gives me hope that when you see more racial diversity, that shows that things are changing for me anyway.

Bryan Schwartzman:	I think we're running out of time. I want to ask if you were brought in as a consultant to a Jewish community that really wanted to address these issues, obviously every community is different, but where would you advise a suburban white majority Jewish synagogue to start?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	So I have been brought in as a consultant, and that's what I will call it but when I...

Bryan Schwartzman:	Maybe this will get you more business.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	(Laughs) I'm calling it a consultant. But what I often do, and I do travel and I do spend time in Jewish communities talking about these issues, and often, not always, I will talk to a white person, and they tell me how great they are on X issue. And I say to them, it would really be helpful if you had a group of members who represent a marginalized minority and if I could talk to them before I come, because that will give me a better insight into how your community is doing.

So I went to  D.C. last year and that's what I did. With a Zoom call, I met with people of color and some people who had children of color or are married to people of color just to get insight to see, because I don't want to go into community talking about things that people already know. So they told me what they wanted me to say. They wanted the community to understand the microaggressions they experienced, the racism they experienced, and they love the community at the same time. So there's that piece.

Depending on how much time I have, I have a text study. What I often do is I start from the beginning. At this stage, I'm not coming in trying to teach people how not to be racist. I want Jewish communities to get back to their roots and their values. So I use a text study and that text study brings in biblical text. One text in particular talks about how, from the time we fled Egypt, we were mixed multitude of people, meaning we've always been a mixed multitude of people. I bring in texts from the Torah.

Bryan Schwartzman:	That's from Exodus? That...

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Yes. It says that we were an "erev rav", which in this instance means that we were mixed multitude of people. There's lots of ways that you can embody that text, to translate the text, but one way I use that text is to remind people from the time that we left slavery, we were never just one group of people. We've always been a mixed multitude of people and we made it to Sinai and then we became a group of people. So I do that, and I bring in texts from the Mishnah, text from the Talmud and then eventually, we bring in some modern texts, one written by Leiah Moser, one written by Joshua Lesser, that talk about pluralism.

So that's the next stage. And that sets them up, hopefully, to have a better dialogue using Jewish values to talk about how to be welcoming of people who might be different than ourselves.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Wow. Well, I deeply appreciate your willingness to answer any and all questions and be a repeat guest on the podcast in the former iteration and the Evolve podcast and your work on the Evolve project and promoting it out there online. So thank you. It's good to see you. I think we addressed some important issues today and I think gave folks something to think about.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	One of the reasons when I'm using my social media platform to create a Facebook group is initially set it up so I could teach. And then I realized I wanted to bring in this other piece talking about race. I also did not want to write a bunch of essays on race, and I didn't want to just randomly pull essays from the Internet, and remembered that our movement, our denomination has these amazing essays on race. And so that's one of the reasons why I started to show them because they're great.

Bryan Schwartzman:	All right. Since I got you, you're here, we're talking about your social media platform. I have to ask, what's Barefoot, Bluegrass about? What is that?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	That's so funny. That is my own little side project and sometimes I weave in Jewish words. I've learned guitar and singing definitely as an adult and I was really frustrated that I could not remember -- I had to continue to rely on chord sheets to learn music. So at some point, I realized that all country music and all bluegrass music had pretty much the same chord structures.

So I decided to learn a song and then play it by heart with my wife videotaping it or video with the iPhone. Because I did in the summertime and it was dark and I didn't have shoes on, the first two, I didn't really call it Barefoot Bluegrass, but I figured it was good to have a title for it. So now, even in the wintertime, it's Barefoot Bluegrass and Blues, although I thought about for a minute changing it to Boots, Bluegrass and Blues to keep the Bs but I'm still doing it barefoot. So that's what that is, and I love the music.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Hopefully you're not doing it below 32 degrees and...

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	No, it's a lot warmer.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Got it.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	I had done it one day when it was super cold, and I finished that song really quite quick.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Awesome, and how could folks find that?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Yes, if you have an Instagram account or a Facebook account, so my handle on Instagram is @RabbiSandra, my handle on Facebook is Rabbi Sandra and my handle on Twitter is @RabbiSandra.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Good branding.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Yes.

Bryan Schwartzman:	All right. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Yes. Thank you Bryan.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Let's stay in touch and hopefully this podcast lasts a long time and we'll have you back again.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Thank you. Thank you, Sam.

Sam Wachs:	Thank you.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	The voice from beyond.

Sam Wachs:	Is there anything else you'd like us to plug?

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	Oh, my website is rabbisandralawson, I hope that's right. My website is rabbisandralawson.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Great. Have a great day and it's too early for Shabbat Shalom. So enjoy the rest of your week.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson:	All right. Thank you.

Bryan Schwartzman:	Thanks so much for listening to our interview with Rabbi Sandra Lawson. If you enjoyed our conversation, please be sure to read the essay, "Racism in the Jewish Community."

Let us know your thoughts about today's episode. We want to hear it from you. Evolve is about meaningful conversations and that includes you and the more we hear from you, the more it's a conversation. So send us your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you got. You can reach me at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. I'm waiting for my inbox to be blown up so come on.

Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs.

Our theme song Ilu Finu is by Rabbi Miriam Margles.

The show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism.

I'm your host Bryan Schwartzman and we'll see you next time.