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I am a Jew. I am a European descended American. I always hesitate to say I’m White,
because depending on the culture and the age, Jews weren’t considered White in the
United States, as I’m sure you are very familiar with that. So obviously,
I pass as White
but who knows?
For James, his Jewishness was more important than his Whiteness, and when further asked
whether he considers himself White, he responded, “I consider myself a Jew, which is a
historically discriminated-against minority. Okay, and even to this day, in our political climate, I
am, to a certain extent, vulnerable to criticism and attack.” Jewishness has played
a big role in
James’s identity even though he did not grow up in a very religious environment. During his
early college years, James experienced an event that would be transformational in his life. He
shared:
Sometime in my junior and senior year of college, I had a spiritual awakening, kind of a
born-again experience. And I wanted to learn more about my heritage,
I had not grown
up in a particularly religious spiritual environment, and I wanted to learn more about it.
So, I decided to enter a seminary towards a path of ordination to learn more about my
background, not that I ever truly wanted to go into that field. I was just intellectually
curious. And by the way, a theme here is that I’ve turned out to be a lifelong learner.
Two things stood out from this statement; first, this born-again experience
changed the course of
James’s life by allowing him to find his true calling. With a bachelor’s degree in English
literature, he had originally envisioned himself changing paths and becoming an artist. His life-
changing experience was as the result of attending a summer camp for young adults in Southern
California in the early 1980s. According to James, he said:
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It was specifically for young Jewish adults that did not have any particular strong Jewish
background. So, it was a Jewish camp. And the whole purpose of it was to
kind of
purposely to imbue us with this spiritual awakening in this interest. So, what worked for
me, it didn’t work for everybody, but it worked for me. Not everybody became rabbis, of
course, but that was my path.
The second thing that stood out was James pointed out being a lifelong learner has become a
theme in his life. It is impossible for me to say if James’ inclination for lifelong learning was the
result of his experience in Jewish camp or something already innate in him,
but in listening to
James describe his life experience, I could see how his Jewish identity and his love for learning
were not exclusive of each other but rather complemented each other to propel James forward.
James was an instructional designer and technologist and has taught undergraduate and graduate
courses in instructional technology at the university where he got one of his master’s degrees. He
has taken graduate-level courses in HyFlex modality, and as an instructional technologist and
designer, he had insights about HyFlex from both points of view. I provide further discussion of
James’s experience in HyFlex in the findings section.
