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The latest updates from the Center for Small Town Jewish Life
Robinson Will Engage and Support Jewish Leaders in Rural and Under-Resourced Communities Across the Country
The Center for Small Town Jewish Life at Colby College, an organization that cultivates locally rooted, vibrant, connected, socially equitable learning communities steeped in the Jewish tradition, has named Bill Robinson as Director of National Leadership Initiatives.
“As our organization continues to grow both in size and impact, we’re very excited to have Bill Robinson joining our team,” said Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, Executive Director of the Center for Small Town Jewish Life. “His expertise and vision will greatly help us reach more communities throughout the country and continue to support a diverse Jewish landscape. These communities are models for how people of different backgrounds and life perspectives can come together, build relationships, and learn from one another.”
In this new role, Robinson will serve a growing network of Jewish leaders from small, rural, and remote areas of the country through rigorous cohort learning programs, thoughtful in-person gatherings, and more. His work will help transform the trajectory of the Jewish communities where approximately 1 out of every 8 American Jews live.
“The Center for Small Town Jewish Life serves an extremely important mission by focusing on areas outside of major urban centers,” said Robinson. “Jewish life comes in all forms and sizes, and I look forward to helping more people connect to each other and to Jewish experiences that add meaning to their lives.”
More Info About Bill Robinson
Robinson is a recognized scholar-practitioner with over 30 years of experience building impactful nonprofit organizations and writing about the future of Jewish life and learning in America. He has studied and worked with scholars and practitioners across all denominations from Reform to Modern Orthodox. He has an interdisciplinary doctorate in the social sciences with a dissertation focused on rabbinic leadership.
Most recently, as the executive director of Na’aleh: The Hub for Leadership Learning in Baltimore, Robinson built the largest community-based Jewish leadership organization in North America and designed its distinctive training model, which focuses on seven core practices of Jewish leadership. A scholar of and longtime advocate for the transformation of Jewish education, Robinson has written numerous articles on new approaches to learning grounded in the creative work of cutting-edge practitioners. As the Dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education and the Chief Strategy Officer of the Jewish Education Project, he also helped to make that transformation a reality.
About the Center for Small Town Jewish Life
The Center for Small Town Jewish Life at Colby College cultivates locally rooted, vibrant, connected, socially equitable learning communities steeped in the Jewish tradition and intertwined with the broader Jewish world. It envisions a diverse Jewish landscape that affirms the value of every individual and the power of mutually beneficial collaboration. The Center for Small Town Jewish Life brings this vision to life in Maine and empowers professional and lay leaders to realize it throughout the United States, especially in communities outside of major population centers.
Check out the June 19, 2023 Identity/Crisis podcast from the Shalom Hartman Institute, featuring Rabbi Rachel Isaacs speaking about one of her main areas of expertise: Small Town American Judaism. Compelling Waterville, Maine stories abound in this fascinating conversation with Yehuda Kurtzer.
Rabbi Rachel Isaacs was honored to deliver the sermon at Central Synagogue in Manhattan on March 24, 2023. She spoke about class and income inequality, sharing her experience in small-town Maine and touching on geographical and socioeconomic inequities in the American Jewish community. From Central Synagogue:
“Why aren’t we talking about class? The topic is tender because class is inextricably linked with our dignity. In Hebrew, the word for dignity is ‘kavod’ and it shares the same root with ‘kaved,’ ‘heavy.’ Dignity is about how much leverage we have – in creating a world that gives us what we need and brings us into spaces with the promise of fullness, respect, and agency. And the inequitable distribution of this ‘kavod’ is impacting the ability of the American Jewish establishment to sustain functional, holy communities equitably nationwide.” – Rabbi Rachel Isaacs
Watch: https://youtu.be/PmgDlQbxw3k
It is 6:45 a.m. on a Sunday morning in April, and I am sitting in a coffee shop in Brookline, MA, with two young women. We’re staking out this very spot, across the street from the closest kosher supermarket to the town we live in, 185 miles away. The supermarket doors are due to open at 7A.M., and we’re sipping much-appreciated coffee as we watch a line slowly accrue at the door. I feel the 13 days until Passover perching demon-like on my shoulder.
We are here for Pesach shopping, naturally, and my 19-year-old ally is doing this sort of mad run for the first time. She’s a fellow for the Center for Small Town Jewish Life, where I and my other young colleague work, and president of the local Hillel. The three of us had aggressively workshopped the Hillel Passover shopping list on our ride through interminable Boston traffic. I myself have four lists in my pocket, covering what feels like the needs of every Jew for several zip codes in any direction. The teenager eyes the growing queue with frank disbelief. “I kind of can’t believe I’m doing this,” she murmurs into her coffee. I grin. “Welcome to Maine Jewish womanhood!”
I want to be clear: it is not like I did not wait in crazy-long lines at kosher supermarkets back when I lived in Brooklyn, not like I didn’t schlep groceries for friends or spend crazy time and effort on holiday preparations. But until I moved to small-town Maine, a state that clocks in with a mere 1.3 million people,there was never any undercurrent of desperation to these acts; they were never freighted with the certain knowledge that, if we didn’t drag ourselves down to do a town’s worth of shopping, there might not be food for Passover…