We decided on this particular subject because we ourselves are both practicing Jews, and we could use our own experiences to help us organize and research this topic. We decided to use our own experiences as a form of participant research, as we have both actively used a lot of the services we talked about in our final presentation, like Chabad or Hillel.
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As we are both actively practicing Jews, we of course also had some bias that we had to recognize and work around as we examined ourselves in the process. We made sure to mention as little of our own personal experiences as possible to our participants in order to avoid swaying them to answer in any particular way, or have them try to match their answers with ours unconsciously. Our interviews themselves we recorded, however in the recording we didn’t show us briefing and debriefing of our participants, where we went over things like release forms and any privacy concerns.
The major readings we used as frame works for this research assignment were Diane Taylor’s “Who When What Why”, “Symbols in Ndembu” (reading by Victor Turner) and our lessons on Photovoice. We had our subjects participate in this as well. We were particularly inspired by Diane Taylor’s reading. That’s how we settled on studying how ones identity changes by being Jewish in one place, then another, and being different in both. In regards to Victor Turner’s reading, it encouraged us to look at Jewish symbols and traditions, the active practice of culture, and how both ourselves and our participants experienced and incorporated these performatives into our lives. Things like ways of dressing, jewelry, how we treat ourselves, others and our community.