How Did You Get Here? Early Career Decisions and Graduate School

This is a talk I gave to Cohen Center summer interns on July 27, 2010, as part of a series of talks by full-time staff.

My path here began, I suppose, at birth. I was born in 1975 in Sydney, Australia, to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. My father’s father was born in Australia of Lithuanian parents while his mother was born in Baden bei Wein, Austria, and escaped in 1938 following the Anschluß. Both were doctors. My mother’s family was Hungarian. My maternal grandparents walked westward in 1945 away from the Soviet advance and ended up in a displaced persons camp in Wiener Neustadt, Germany, where my Grandpa Fafa served as a doctor. He moved to the then-Australian colony of Papua New Guinea, along with a number of other Hungarian doctors, bringing my grandmother and mother (born in the DP camp) along later. My parents actually met in Papua New Guinea, where Grandpa Fafa had heard that there was a visiting Viennese lady doctor and her two eligible medical student sons. (My paternal grandfather had died before then.) Grandpa Fafa promptly went to see my maternal grandma, Edith, and, European gentleman that he was, clicked his heels, bowed, introduced himself, and explained that he had two daughters and heard that she, my grandmother, had two sons. Thus I came to be.

This level of detail might be seen as self-indulgent, I suppose, except I study Jews, and I study outcomes, and beginnings do count. I also know that my path here was somewhat more winding than normal, so I sketch out my beginnings.

I was not raised as a Jew or a Christian. My religious education, such as it was, consisted of attending an Easter mass at Sydney’s Catholic cathedral, a daily service at an Anglican church, and morning services at an Orthodox synagogue. (Most synagogues in Australia are Orthodox.) I felt I belonged in the synagogue in a way that I did not in the cathedral or the church. I don’t know why. Ever afterwards, I felt Jewish. I don’t think it was because I felt closer to that side of my family. I spent far more time with my Hungarian grandparents than my Jewish grandmother. The ethnic food I cook is Hungarian. The language I curse in is Hungarian. Nor was Grandma Edith a pillar of Jewish practice. She had a hostile relationship with Judaism, her observant family having barred her from attending Jewish tutoring with her brothers. Despite living but a door away from her observant parents, Jewish holidays were not celebrated.

Until college (or university, as we would say in Australia), there wasn’t much I could do about my feelings of Jewishness. I didn’t live in a Jewish neighborhood. I didn’t know that Jewish youth groups existed. There was no web for me to search things out on. I did read the Jerusalem Report, which my grandmother passed onto me, and books on Israel and occasionally Jewish life in general. At college, however, I had options. During orientation week, I joined the Australian Union of Jewish Students (we don’t have Hillels). When signing up for classes, at the last minute I chickened out from taking Chinese and decided to sign up for Jewish Civilisation, Thought, and Culture. I only planned to take it for a year, dropping it and keeping up with my “serious” subjects of political science and modern history, as well as my classes as a law student. (Like Canada and the rest of the Commonwealth, law is an undergraduate degree in Australia.) As it turned out, Jewish Civ was the only class I enjoyed, and I dropped history without a further thought at the end of the year. At the end of the year, I spent the summer holidays in Israel on program ran by the Union of Jewish Students and with my relatives.

By the time I came back, I knew I wanted to resolve my status. I certainly I wasn’t Jewish by Orthodox or Conservative standards, nor was I Jewish under the Reform movement’s standard of “appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and the Jewish people.” No exception or loophole covered me. Thus, I began the process of conversion. It was clear to me that I couldn’t “accept the yoke of the mitzvot,” in an Orthodox sense, so I converted under Reform auspices (there being no Conservative movement in Australia) after a year of studying material I had already learned at university. And so, I became a Jew.

I kept taking classes in Jewish Civilisation and started enjoying political science more. I became secretary and then vice-president of the Union of Jewish Students at Sydney University. At the end of my second year, I went back to Israel for the summer for the Union of Jewish Students’ Leadership Development Program. It developed me in ways I never expected, as I met and fell in love with an American at the Jerusalem youth hostel in which my group was staying. Back in Australia, I never did enjoy law and dropped my law degree at the end of my third year, keeping studying for my B.A. If I wasn’t going to be a lawyer, what would I do? With the innocence (read “foolishness”) of youth, I decided I would go to grad school in Jewish studies. Because I was in a long-distance relationship with an American, clearly it would be in the U.S. As it happened, because I dropped Criminal Law, I was a few credits shy of a three year B.A., which in any case was not accepted by U.S. universities. I thus spent something of a gap year in my fourth year of college: working at a department store, catching up on my honours year entry courses in political science, and taking Hebrew classes outside my degree. I also planned a topic for my honours thesis. This was quite difficult. It had to be on a Jewish and political science topic; it couldn’t be on something purely Israeli, because my Hebrew was not up to reading scholarly literature, to put it mildly; it had to involve original research; it couldn’t have been studied before; and it had to involve travel to the U.S. Eventually, I worked out that I could study American Jewish lobbying of Israel over the then-current (1998) debate over the status of non-Orthodox converts for the Law of Return. Because I had a quasi-gap year, I was able to do my bibliographic research in advance and work out who I wanted to interview. I then spent three months in the U.S. over my summer holidays doing all my reading of the existing literature and interviewing heads of major American Jewish organizations. Nothing to do with my girlfriend, of course. When I came back to Australia and classes began, I was able to write my thesis with ease.

This marked the end of my involvement in political science. I was interested in studying Jews with social scientific methods, but couldn’t stand being locked into political questions. While all Jewish studies interested me, I found that the more recent the topic was, the more fascinating it was. The pivotal point for me was reading Jewish Choices: American Jewish Denominationalism. This is actually an unremarkable book, a heavily statistical analysis of Jewish religious identification and behavior using the National Jewish Population Survey of 1990, but it showed me what could be done with social scientific methods and Jewish topics.

Degree in hand, I took my GRE’s, doing abysmally in math, poorly in logic, and brilliantly in English. Again, with the foolishness of youth, I only applied to two grad programs: sociology at Columbia and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and sociology at Brandeis. I found out about the latter because I called the Brandeis sociology department and spoke to the grad student administrator. She heard what I was interested in and said, Well, actually, we have this joint Ph.D. I was sold. I was accepted to Brandeis but not Columbia. I’m not sure my qualifications would have been enough for a straight sociology or Jewish studies degree. Foolishly, once again, I took the Brandeis offer even though I was not funded (my application was sent at the very last minute). I got funding in my second year, but I was extraordinarily lucky to do so. I don’t know if I would have applied to grad school in the U.S. had my fiancée not been American. I might well have ended up in exactly the same place, but the odds certainly would have been lower.

I arrived here on August 2, 1999, less than a year after finishing college, started grad school a month later, and married my fiancée in June of 2000. It took me a while to adjust to life as a grad student. Some classes were great, others not so much. The classes that were central to my academic development were those that were out of department. I took a class in survey research at the Heller School. I also had to take a module on stats in Heller as part of my NEJS requirements. Being a module, it wasn’t listed in the course catalog. Most people would have asked for help and eventually enrolled. Not me. I’m shy and hate talking to people. I took the nearest class listed in the course catalog, Applied Regression Analysis. I almost died when I open the text and saw the statistical formulae in all their Greek glory. I’d had a little exposure to stats in a sociology class, though, and took to the material very rapidly. In my final semester, I took the 21st and 22nd of my required 21 classes by taking Applied Econometrics and Applied Multivariate Analysis. I also TAed. I ended up getting quite depressed. In retrospect, I should have worked at the Cohen Center rather than just trying to study and be a TA. (I did work for the Cohen Center during vacations as a participant observer on Birthright trips and at summer camps.) I like having structure in my life, and work keeps me busy and gives me a sense of worth. While it didn’t fit my plans, it’s probably better to spend a year or two in the real world before signing yourself up for another three year or more years of institutionalization in an educational institution—you will already have spent at least 17 years in school by this point.

With coursework over, I should have been studying hard for my sociology accreditation committee and NEJS comprehensive exam. As it was, I was very depressed (lack of structure, once again), and my wife was pregnant and we would need more income. I screwed up my courage and emailed Len to see if he had work for me at the Cohen Center. He did. I was meant to work 20 hours a week and spend the rest of my time studying. My initial assignment was a small independent project to do some literature reviews. This is typical. A grad student doesn’t necessarily make a good employee. Some are know-it-alls for whom drudge work is beneath them. Others are just flaky. We give assignments that don’t matter much to see what kind of person a grad student is. My record, looking back, gave clear signs of flakiness. I hadn’t worked as a grad student and I didn’t have a record of analogous research projects. As it turned out, I wasn’t a flake. Just as lack of structure depressed me, having structure in the form of a job energized me and I was rapidly working 40 hour weeks. I spent the next year essentially working full-time and neglecting my exams. While not advancing my studies, it was therapeutic. I was then able to get back to my exams and treat them as if they were a job, while keeping working at the Cohen Center. Having reframed them as work, I was able to get through them with minimal trauma. I had progressed through steadily more meaningful jobs at the Cohen Center and found my niche at the quantitative end of the spectrum. It’s far more difficult to find people interested in Jewish topics with quantitative predilections than qualitative ones, so I fit in very well.

Working as a researcher is very different from studying to be one. Grad school provides a way of thinking about the world and provides a basic level of knowledge. But that’s it. I remember sitting in my survey research class talking about data collection and the professor said “and then you clean the data.” Little did I know that cleaning the data is more than 95 percent of the effort expended, with analysis being 5 percent at most. Nobody teaches you in grad school to clean data or any of the other elements of what I will call the art or practice of social research. These are learned by doing and take place in the context of an apprenticeship. When I look at resumes, I look for people with practical experience far more than people with higher degrees. Somebody who has practiced research, even in a humble way, takes far less effort to train and represents a much lower level of risk as a hire.

Having gotten my exams out the way, I needed a topic for my dissertation. I had a role model in Shaul Kelner, who wrote his Ph.D. at CUNY on his work as the Cohen Center’s fieldwork coordinator for Birthright studies in Israel. I was determined to do the same and have my job and my dissertation be one and the same. At that time, Len was talking to Combined Jewish Philanthropies about their forthcoming community survey. I told Len that I wanted to take the project on and be involved in every single aspect I possibly could and write about methods used in Jewish population studies. This built on the work I had been doing at the Cohen Center. For the nine months the North American Jewish Data Bank was at Brandeis, I served as the day to day staff person and became familiar with the extensive history of Jewish population studies. I was also responsible for distributing the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-01, a deeply flawed piece of research. Understanding its limitations gave me a keen sense of research methods. The Boston study was a wonderful experience and I learned a vast amount about the theory and practice of survey research. Large sections of my dissertation were drawn with little editing from methodological material I prepared during the course of the project and other work I had conducted on the National Jewish Population Survey. In turn, large sections of my dissertation ended up in the methodological report with little editing. It was a win-win situation, with the added bonus that I had a $500,000 budget for my dissertation research.

Having received my Ph.D., why am I still working here? There aren’t many faculty positions in contemporary Jewry. In the past decade, I recall the following: A tenure-track position in sociology at the University of Judaism, Los Angeles. The person in the position left and it appears the position no longer exists. A tenure-track position in the sociology department at Yeshiva University which seems never to have been filled. A tenure track position in Jewish studies and any social science department at the University of Michigan, the funding for which never came to fruition. A tenure-track position in sociology and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University, which was filled by my former colleague Shaul Kelner. A position for an “established scholar” (i.e., not me) at Monash University in Australia. They ended up hiring a Yiddishist. To teach contemporary Jewry. A tenure-track position at Brown University, which was written for a specific candidate who, not surprisingly, was hired. A position at open rank at the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program at Brandeis. No-one was hired for it and the position wasn’t filled. A position at the professorial level in the Hornstein Program which was written for Len, who was hired. A tenure-track position at USC in sociology and Jewish studies, filled by a Ph.D. student in sociology from Columbia whom I’m not familiar with. I might be forgetting one or two, but that’s about it. I was one of three people to interview for the Vanderbilt position, but that’s the furthest I have advanced. There has also been a post-doctoral position at the University of Michigan. I can’t recall a single person from either the contemporary Jewry track of the NEJS Ph.D. program or from the joint Ph.D. I studied for who is a professor. If you want to be a professor of Jewish studies, you appear to be better off with a Ph.D. in modern Jewish history. If you want to be a professor in a social scientific discipline who studies Jewish topics, you’re probably better off doing a straight Ph.D. in the discipline of your choice, being careful not to let your Jewish interests put you outside the mainstream.

What about other careers? People with my training seem to go three ways. They work for a philanthropic foundation focused on Jewish life, they work for a Jewish organization, most commonly in research or evaluation, or they work here.

I don’t know what it’s like to work for a foundation, but I can’t imagine it’s much fun to be a program officer, the person who supervises projects for the philanthropy. We work with them all the time, and they’re administrators with extremely limited scope for innovation or creativity. Research and evaluation for a foundation might be a little better, but your life will be spent conducting small-scale evaluations of programs and contracting for larger projects. The professional heads of foundations have backgrounds in Jewish organizations, usually federations, so it’s not clear if a career path exists from evaluation to senior roles.

Work for Jewish organizations seems to have little career path, either, if you work on the research side. People who have had these positions seem to leave in under a decade or have their jobs downsized. Research tends not to be taken very seriously in the Jewish organizational world. Some senior professionals do have Ph.D.’s, but they are on the managerial track and don’t engage in much research. You can also start with a master’s in Jewish communal service, an MBA, rabbinical ordination, or perhaps a Jewish studies MA. It’s not entirely clear why being a rabbi qualifies you to work in a complex service organization, but many rabbis end up there, so apparently it does. The coin of the realm for the highest positions in Jewish organizations is the ability to raise money.

This leaves the Cohen Center and other research organizations. Entry level for people with masters degrees is the research analyst or research associate level, depending on skills and experience. This involves working for a principal investigator, albeit with a considerable degree of autonomy once you’ve proved yourself (and assuming you work for a good P.I.). You are typically given a job and work out how to complete it. You are usually working on several projects at once and need to juggle these. Some analysis work will be involved, but writing is minimal. The intangibles we look for are maturity, being hard-working, capable of working well without constant supervision, being a quick study, the ability to work well as part of a team, and generally not being a prima donna. The specifics of education and even intelligence in general are less important. Ph.D.’s with limited experience will come in at the research associate level. Most Ph.D.’s will start as senior research associates. Initially, work will be under or in conjunction with a more senior researcher and will involve similar work to a research associate, but with greater responsibilities, autonomy, and supervision of junior staff. Analysis and writing is a major part of the job. Advance sufficiently high on the totem pole to be at the principal investigator level and a major part of your job is preparing research proposals in response to RFPs (requests for proposals), a good number of which will fail. At this level, working with clients, writing reports, and supervising staff are major responsibilities. Substantive involvement in research and analysis is typically limited to setting up paradigms for more junior researchers to follow, resolving difficult issues, and conducting particularly complicated work. Much more time is spent looking over the work others have done and advising them on how to refine it.
Working at the Cohen Center enables one to conduct a different type of research to academics. Most working professors don’t actually do particularly exciting research. They don’t have the staff to conduct complicated research projects. Consequently, if they are quantitative types, they spend their lives analyzing datasets that other people have created. If they are qualitatively oriented, they will do small-scale interview and participant observation research. Teaching responsibilities take up some time (more earlier in your career when you’re still creating courses), particularly if you don’t work at a research university. You’re also expected to publish in peer-reviewed journals and need to produce a book to be eligible for tenure and move from assistant professor to associate professor.

What should you learn from all this? In some ways, the most helpful advice is: don’t be me. Consider working for a while before going to grad school. Apply to plenty of grad schools. Visit them and talk to faculty and students. Get your applications in early. Apply for fellowships like Wexner and other funding opportunities. Work while you study. Prepare for your qualifying classes while you’re still doing coursework. Understand the career options available to you. I shudder to think at all the places where things could have fallen apart but fortuitously did not. But if I were to offer this advice to myself as an undergraduate, I might have made fewer errors, but it wouldn’t have changed my plans. It was the only thing I wanted to do…I couldn’t avoid it any more than I could have decided not to become a Jew. The flip side of the coin is that I’m a living example of Herzl’s line that “if you will it, it is no dream,” anachronistically rendered in Hebrew as “im tirtzu ein zo agadah.” I had no Jewish background to speak of, grew up in Australia, had a decent but not outstanding undergraduate education, and no appreciable mathematical abilities, but I wanted to conduct social research on American Jewry. Yet today I am an “expert” on American Jewry, a competent survey researcher, and a very good statistical analyst. I’ve also discovered my interests on the border of survey design, statistics, and mathematics, which I didn’t know I would become interested in. I can’t complain about the life I lead, but if you are planning to apply to grad school in a field of purely academic interest (astronomy, English, linguistics, Jewish studies), do so because you can’t help yourself, not because you want a career in academia.