Dr. Ari Kelman from Stanford University joins Executive Director Andy Bachman for a special home-hosted Shabbat dinner conversation. Dr. Kelman is a leading demographer and sociologist of American Jewish life, with a focus on ways new communities of young Jews are responding to the challenges of identity in the twenty-first century.

• Enjoy drinks and appetizers, and great conversation with fellow community members.

• Location to be announced after registration – a community member’s home in Tribeca.

DATE AND TIME

Community Member’s Home

Dr. Ari Kelman is interested in research at the intersection of Education and Jewish Studies, with an emphasis on the myriad ways in which people cultivate deep commitments His research focuses on questions of culture in all its manifestations including the material, aural, visual, and ideological. He is the coordinator of the Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies.

He is the author of Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America (NYU 2018) Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio (California, 2009). He is also the editor of Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Comic Reader (NYU, 2010), and a co-author of Sacred Strategies: Transforming Synagogues from Functional to Visionary (Alban Institute, 2011). He is also the author of a number of articles about contemporary Jewish identity and culture, among other things.

Andy Bachman is a New York City-based community leader and educator, and a nationally-recognized executive, teacher, writer, rabbi and social entrepreneur. He is a deeply dedicated Jewish leader with significant experience in expanding and strengthening all aspects of pluralistic Jewish public, private and not-for-profit organizations. His experiences include executive leadership and development, as well as teaching and social justice action and advocacy on local, national and international issues.

Andy comes to JCP as Executive Director from JCC Brooklyn, a project of the Kings Bay Y, where he helped to launch three storefront community centers in Windsor Terrace, North Williamsburg and Clinton Hill. Prior to that role, he was the Director of Jewish Content at the 92nd Street Y. He served for 9 years as the Senior Rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE) in Brooklyn. He was ordained a rabbi in 1996 by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. In 1998 he became Executive Director of the Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life: Hillel at New York University. In 2003, Bachman and his wife, Rachel Altstein, along with several friends, founded Brooklyn Jews, an innovative outreach program for the many unaffiliated Jews who have made Brooklyn their home in the past decade. Bachman was on the Newsweek and Forward 50 rabbis’ list.