THE JEAN & SAMUEL FRANKEL CENTER FOR JUDAIC STUDIES a Hyman and the Virtues of Collaboration by Deborah Dash Moore, Director, The Frankel Center, and Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History University of Michigan We often speak in academia of collaboration, and we practice it as well. At the Frankel Center, faculty members team-teach; they conduct research together, co-author articles, and co- edit volumes. The Frankel Institute promotes intellectual collaboration through its weekly workshops. Indeed, this year's Institute has produced its first co-authored book project. Ken Wald (University of Florida) and Herb Weisberg (Ohio State University) are collaborating • to examine the distinctive voting behavior of American Jews. But despite our extensive experience sharing ideas and working together to produce new knowledge, we rarely reflect upon the virtues—and challenges—of collaboration. I have enjoyed the pleasures (and occasional frustrations) of collaboration with diverse scholars, but I first learned its virtues from Paula Hyman, who serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Frankel Institute. We started out as friends in graduate school doing the things grad students do so well together: preparing for comprehensive exams, discussing our dissertations. But as feminist graduate students, we also shared political passions and a commitment to find a way to combine family with career. Both of us chose to have children while we were still students. The demands of raising young children led us to integrate our intellectual exchanges with more personal and Paula Hyman political ones. After graduation, we began to navigate a collegial relationship. Paula Hyman stayed at Columbia University's History Department and I went to the Religion Department at Vassar College but maintained affiliation with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. That provided the basis for our first collaboration. z • \KM- iN Paula Hyman called me up one day in 1979 and invited me to lunch at the Columbia Faculty Club, a special treat, so that we could plan a conference to be sponsored jointly by YIVO and Columbia on "Jews, Cities, and Modernist Culture." We aimed to bring writers and artists together with scholars and journalists, to connect young academics like Leon Botstein with established figures like Grace Paley, and to encourage them to speak across disciplinary boundaries as well as those separating practitioners from academics. We hoped for a large, diverse audience. When the conference opened in April 1980, we were not disappointed. Hundreds attended. Planning the conference we parceled out the tasks; we wrote grant applications, invited participants, managed logistics, and argued over themes and people. It was challenging for two untenured faculty members to pull off, but ultimately rewarding; and we learned a lot about Jewish and academic politics. GENDER ANA , ENVISH HISTORY women's voices, but we haven't always agreed about Jewish politics. Yet one of the virtues of collaboration means that we keep on talking, arguing our points of view while still loving and respecting each other and finding ways to accommodate our different perspectives. For both of us, a high point of collaboration occurred in 1994, after the demise of the YIT/O Annual, when Paula invited me to co- edit Jewish Women in America: An Historical [Paula Hyman passed away Engclopedia. Although on Dec. 15, 2011, at the age we both now were of 65. This month, it was an- established scholars, nounced that Gender & Jewish Paula Hyman at Yale History—edited by Deborah University as Lucy Dash Moore and Marion Kaplan Moses Professor in Paula Hyman's honor—was of Modern Jewish selected for the National Jewish History, we tackled Book Award.] this massive project with some of the same naiveté that characterized our first conference collaboration. Our subsequent collaborations extended across Choosing whom to invite to the editorial board, decades; one continues to this day. In 1982 and then picking the women to be included in Paula Hyman and I agreed to co-edit a series the encyclopedia, themes to be addressed, and on the Modern Jewish Experience for Indiana finding hundreds of scholars, young and old, to University Press. We are a good team; Paula write the entries, turned out to be an enormous focuses on Europe and I cover the United States. and highly politicized undertaking. Paula had Together with Janet Rabinowitch at the press, asked me to join her in editing the encyclopedia we have published a steady stream of books, not just because of the work involved or because including a number of prizewinners that helped she wanted an ally but because, she said, we'd to launch many of our colleagues' careers. get to see each other regularly. That clinched it. In 1988 I invited Paula to serve on the editorial board of a reconstituted YIVO Annual for Jewish Research. She accepted. Then at one of our early board meetings she got into a knock-down, drag-out fight with another board member over the virtues of a feminist memoir that had been initially approved for publication. In the end, Paula convinced a majority of the board that the voices of unheralded observers, including women, deserved to be heard, published alongside scholarship. Principle established, subsequent editorial board meetings spawned less conflict. Paula and I agreed about the memoir and When it came time finally to write the preface, all those years of collaboration paid off. The sentences just flowed. First hers, then mine, then her intervention, then my rewrite. It was exhilarating. Collaboration born of years of intellectual exchange, political discussion, and personal friendship, found its fulfillment in a worthy project. The virtues of collaboration are manifold: intellectual rigor, strengthening of one's own values, acquiring fresh perspectives, support for risk-taking and critical consciousness, and most importantly, enduring friendship. "Like" University of Michigan's Frankel Center for Judaic Studies on Facebook or contact us to be added to our mailing list: 734.763.9047 or judaicstudies@umich.edu . Visit our website at vvww.lsa.umich.edu/judaic.