Partner Spotlight:
theatre dybbuk
A Jewish Theater Looks Back to Look Forward
At its core, theatre dybbuk’s podcast, The Dybbukast, poses the following question: How can our society — and by extension, our democracy — meet the urgency of this moment, while holding time and space for its complexities?
Aaron Henne, Artistic Director of theatre dybbuk, describes its work with the Jewish Partnership for Democracy as a fitting match in both scope and mission.
“We plant seeds that bear fruit over time to help people to understand the world and to complexify, rather than clarify. We already had a vehicle, which is The Dybbukast, that seemed poised to reach a broad and diverse audience, [as well as to] accomplish this part of our mission. It wasn't a very difficult leap to then say, ‘How do we align that with questions of America, democracy, identity, and power structures in America?’ It just seemed like a natural fit.”
Henne was in the planning stages of The Dybbukast’s next feature with Hebrew College’s Rabbi Dan Judson when it all quickly fell into place. They decided to frame the episode around Emma Lazarus’s journey through American Jewish identity, alongside quintessential American poet Henry Longfellow’s The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.
Henne sees these conversations as a starting point for addressing the overload of competing interests, perspectives, and sensitivities facing our society as we try to figure out what’s “right.”
Strategic Priorities: Civic Learning
Network Commitment: theatre dybbuk will create and distribute an episode of our podcast, The Dybbukast, that will use performed readings and an interview with at least one scholar or expert in the field to illuminate an aspect of democracy in the United States of America and provide historical and/or cultural context. It will be available on a variety of platforms for downloading and listening in regions across North America and beyond.
Partner since: 2023
Henne believes that looking to our past will help meet this need as the 2024 election season picks up and our nation feels more polarized than ever.
“I think that using this as a resource to help communities hold those multiple perspectives — while it may not solve anything — may help community members process this moment. They may actually be able to feel a little bit more hopeful because they can see that, [although these dynamics are] not exactly where we’ve been before, we've held similar issues at other times and will probably — for better and worse — hold them again.”
Check out theatre dybbuk’s “At Newport” episode of The Dybbukast here.
“How do organizations, institutions, and individuals put their focus in those multiple places simultaneously?” asks Henne. “How do we meet the urgency of the moment and the long-term social, psychological, and structural needs that aren’t being fully met?”
Get involved: For information about how your organization can work with A More Perfect Union,
contact our team at info@jewishdemocracy.org.
Dig into our argument for democracy.
To help you understand our argument, approach, and evidence, we’ve published this brief white paper on the Jewish Imperative to Protect and Strengthen American Democracy.
What is transpartisanship?
We believe that protecting and strengthening American democracy is not a partisan issue.
That's why we pursue our work in a spirit of transpartisanship, which rejects the "us vs. them" mindset that characterizes so many political conversations.
We believe that whatever issues we care about individually – from religious freedom to climate change to fair elections – we all have a stake in American self-governance. Engaging effectively in self-governance requires respect and compromise, and we can only exercise these muscles when we focus on what brings us together rather than what sets us apart.
Ultimately, transpartisanship is both an approach and a commitment – to ourselves, to each other, and to future generations.
