Berkley Center

Background: In this exchange between Joyce Dubensky and Katherine Marshall in June 2010, Ms. Dubensky highlights the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding's long-standing efforts to fill gaps in awareness and understanding of women's important roles in peace processes. She stresses the deeply entrenched societal patterns of bias which deflect this understanding and her ideas for changing the situation. Much of her work at Tanenbaum has been dedicated to finding those women practitioners who were placing themselves at risk for their peacebuilding work and documenting and promoting their work, thus reducing the striking invisibility of women who work for peace. Peacemakers engage in an intensive interview process that leads to in-depth case studies that explore the motivations and approaches, especially those linked to their faith. In reflecting on her diverse career experiences, she highlights a consistent thread, that is, pursuing justice, which has consistently motivated her and been at the center of each activity she has undertaken. Her witness highlights how the pursuit of social justice has drawn her increasingly to focus on the deeply embedded barriers that center on gender, race, class, and religion. She explores special qualities that religiously motivated women bring to the work of peace. A long-term view is an essential element in pursuing social justice, she argues. The aim must be to change the way diplomats and policymakers approach women’s issues and religious peacebuilding overall.

You are one of the people who has advocated for greater awareness of women’s work for peace over the years. How did you come to your current work and the priorities that motivate and guide you?

As I look back, over what has amounted in some sense to four different careers, I try to see consistent trends and elements that link them. Among the things that have been true as long as I can remember has been my deep-seated concern about justice and about all people being treated equitably and as valuable. During my studies, pursuing a master’s degree in American history, I was drawn to gender studies and black studies. My first career was working as a case worker. I then went to New York University School of Law and, when I graduated, embarked on my second career, which was a corporate legal job. I am sure I did a good job, but I found that I simply could not get up in the morning. Later, when I pursued work of the heart, that was never an issue. So, I now understand that the reason was that, for the first time (and what has turned out to be the only time in my life through today), I was working for something that was not mission-driven. And my own passion was about what I called at the time justice; today I would call it something from the religious tradition that marks my heritage, “repairing the world.”

So I left the corporate world and went to work as the general counsel in the Legal Department at what was then the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York. My responsibilities over the years I was there included building up the department and merging the federation with UJA [United Jewish Appeal] of New York into what is now probably the largest local philanthropy in the country, UJA-Federation of New York. I did not see myself as an activist for diversity at the time, although there was no question that I valued it. But, at one point, I realized that an African-American woman I had hired to work with me as a lawyer in my department, and clearly the best candidate who came to my attention, was in fact the most senior black person in the organization. I had not been fully aware of that reality until a Diversity Task Force for staff was created. I was asked to lead it as the executive co-chair, and there was concern about asking my lawyer-colleague to also participate, because we were a two-person department and there was concern that it would look like the Legal Department was being favored. The problem for those creating the Task Force was that she was a logical member, because she was the most senior person of color in the organization. I’m not trying to say that I was color-blind, but I had not thought of race as a criterion in recruiting or working with her. The experience there heightened my awareness and my commitment to address the barriers. Addressing the goal of increasing and respecting diversity became an increasingly important theme.

Some time later, as the co-chair of the task force, I attended a UJA-Federation Martin Luther King, Jr. event where Sanford Cloud, Jr. was speaking. It was 1994, and he had just been named the president of the National Conference for Community and Justice [NCCJ, which was known for most of its history as the National Conference of Christians and Jews]. I was sitting with my closest friend at UJA-Federation, and I remember being inspired and whispering that if I could do anything, I would do policy work with Sandy. I networked to Sandy, and we had conversations for about one year. Then, he called and asked what I knew about communications. I told him that I could write pretty much anything, including speeches, and he asked me to do that for his upcoming speech, which I did. (In truth, knowing how to write in different voices was about all I knew about communications; I had zero experience with marketing, PR, and other dimensions of the world of communications.) But Sandy Cloud hired me as his national director, and I moved to my new career as a communications professional and not a lawyer in the world of philanthropy.

A central theme during my time there was the importance and power of communication as a vehicle for building justice. When I began at NCCJ, the very first task was to produce an annual report, I think in five, maybe six, weeks for the upcoming annual meeting. When I asked where the organization was in the process, they responded by asking me if I had a designer. I actually called my babysitter (also a college student studying art) to ask what on earth a designer had to do with an annual report—showing just how new this communications role was to me! The designer I finally found described me as Mr. Magoo, having no idea that doing an annual report in five or six weeks is unheard of but just marching forward as all the waiting hazards kept lurking, having constant near misses, and making it happen. I worked at NCCJ for a few years in the central office responding to hate, including homophobia when Matthew Sheppard was slaughtered, and providing an institutional reaction that both acknowledged the heartfelt motivation of the Southern Baptist Convention’s statement that it was committed to converting Jews, while emphasizing how such a decision failed to value differences, was hurtful to those who are proud of their Jewish heritage, and resulted in great pain that an inclusive approach to interreligious acknowledgement would not. I then moved to a regional office and left at a time when there was a major downsizing.

As I was making that transition, some things were very clear. I knew I wanted to continue pursing justice issues in intergroup relations, in ways that were more than talk and could truly address issues of hatred, identities, and the marginalization that keeps people down and from being all they can be. Communications was a way of working that could give voice to that. With Sandy Cloud, writing his speeches and other materials, I had honed my understanding of how communication and action work and how they are truly linked.

My next (and current) chapter emerged from that period and that understanding. Almost by chance, a former funder from my UJA-Federation days suggested that I should talk to Georgette Bennett, who had founded the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding in 1992. I did; she offered me a job and hired me. That was in 2002, and the path we have followed since has been a simply amazing journey. It is a special story of two women working together, and someday we need to write the book about how we are doing it. During my first interview with her, Georgette asked whether I was worried about working with a founder. I remember answering truthfully: “Yes, but I guess it depends on the chemistry.” So, from the really the very beginning, we have always been able to have forthright conversations.

I was there only a year when we went out to lunch and Georgette told me that she was going to go part-time in four years and that we should plan for that happening. She is such a presence and powerful woman that, frankly, I didn’t believe her. But we proceeded as though our collaboration was based on an evolving transition, more than establishing a status quo and maintaining it. She proved me wrong, and four years later, she went part-time.

She is still our president and founder, and I have been named by the board executive vice president and CEO. Both the board and Georgette really acknowledge that role; it is not just a title. We have always talked about what she and I do, and work together as true and respectful partners. We learn from each other, and Georgette is one of my best friends, one of my life mentors, and still among my bosses. It is truly an amazing life experience. What makes it possible is our common drive to justice and, always, always, trying to do what is best for Tanenbaum and our shared vision that it can really be a force for change.

How would you encapsulate the spirit and ideas that are the driving force of Tanenbaum today?

It is about taking the word “respect” or, if you will, the idea of “respect,” and translating it into the concrete behaviors and policies that affect people’s lives. Respect is important, but we need to understand that feeling kindly and acting nice is not enough. Respect for all our identities and differences has to be put into practice and become the context of our lives and how our institutions operate.

Our Tanenbaum spirit is also one of constantly exploring and probing, as we look at each of Tanenbaum’s core programs. We are never satisfied but are always assessing what the real outcomes of our work are, and what we can learn from each project that we undertake. At Tanenbaum, for example, we work to change actual skill sets, including, for example, the skill to inquire about religious (and non-religious) differences as the foundation for fostering stronger teamwork in companies and among partners. This practical approach to change applies broadly in our work whether it is with educators of students, corporations, and how healthcare is provided. It leads us to approaches that are very concrete.

And it is of course especially important in looking at policies that affect how conflicts are addressed.

There, in particular, the notion that you highlighted earlier about the underappreciated and under-documented roles of practitioners is also our dominant frame, especially in our religion and conflict resolution work.

There is a huge vision that conceptually says what we are about, and that is to find ways for us to live harmoniously. It is about inspiring people to want to practice respect so that the people they touch feel valued, and to create the context so that they can live and work that way.

And where do women come into this picture? We start in a sense with the concern that the work women do for peace is so often invisible.

Invisible is exactly the right word.

Let me give you a relatively quick history of our Peacemakers in Action program and tell you a bit about it, because that program has led us to a sharper current focus on women’s roles for peace.

We have set out five clear criteria that we use to define a Tanenbaum Peacemaker and that are our explicit selection criteria for selecting the peacemakers we honor. They have emerged from our efforts to identify what a religious peacemaker looks like. We are looking for people who were religiously motivated, to varying degrees, and also people who in most instances have local, grassroots contact in their work. The peacemakers must be working in situations of armed conflict. Also, they are relatively unknown, meaning that we were not looking for an Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu or Mahatma Gandhi. Finally, we were looking for people who truly put their lives or their freedom at risk. Once we identify these peacemaker-practitioners (through a major selection process that involves nominations, research of nominees, and our advisory council selecting the finalists), our objective is to document and promote their work so that they are no longer invisible and those in power recognize how they can help to establish peace and stabilize conflict zones.

We start by creating case studies of each peacemaker. This is a learning process, and it involves a quite intensive interview process with each of them and research and writing on our part. They read and edit the texts of our interviews. We do a lot of our own editing so that in our presentation of the case studies there is a consistent voice. We also believe it is critical to identify how they do their work. We therefore analyze the techniques that are involved, which pop up most often. In this process, we are assessing specifically the techniques that are employed by religiously motivated peacemakers, techniques that are linked to and inspired by their religious beliefs.

Some of the techniques we find are the same ones that conflict resolution practitioners would use; in that instance, the motivations may differ, but the approach is the same. But some techniques come deeply out of a religious tradition or practice, and there are particular qualities and approaches that come out of religious background, beliefs, practices, and positions of leadership within religious communities. Our first set of case studies and analysis is called Peacemakers in Action: Profiles of Religion in Conflict Resolution, named after the peacemakers themselves.

Our long-term objective is to change the way diplomats operate, so that they are more alert and sensitive to these factors and engage more with religious peacemakers. To that end, a lot has changed in the past 10 years. The understanding of religious peacemaking is beginning to emerge as a theme in the diplomatic community, reflected in the thinking of people like Madeleine Albright and in some of the policy frameworks that are now emerging. But there is still a need for change. One problem comes because personnel in the U.S. State Department tend to change every two years, so that the lessons learned in particular conflict zones have to be relearned all the time.

We also are working to change how seminaries and divinity schools train people, so that religious peacemaking becomes far more of a vocation than it already is—and is option that young people can think about studying and pursuing.

Two things have happened that led us more purposefully into looking at the work of women. We got a very small grant from a very committed friend who was deeply concerned about the situation in the Middle East. This donor wanted to see more focus on the role of women in the Middle East, and thus to see a clearer vision of what we could do with the peacemakers. This gave us the financial wherewithal to take the time to assess what women were doing. We started to do an assessment along these lines around 2005. A second factor was our nagging concern that few, if any, women were emerging from our nomination process, and that meant we had few women peacemakers.

Our analysis proved what we suspected: that women were working for peace all over the world, including but not exclusively in the Middle East. They were emerging from the ground up, as practitioners. In that sense, we concluded that there was nothing we could do to add to what they were doing on the ground in the Middle East. But we were concerned by our realization that they were so under-recognized, not only in the society as peacemakers, but that they were also being systematically marginalized by male peacemakers. Our evaluation of the field also highlighted that women tend to self-select in a negative way, and that they promote men first and then the men ignore them. (We actually found that women who we would consider peacemakers actually nominated men who they considered to be worthy rather than naming themselves! We have had more than one man self-nominate.)

We decided to address our findings by creating a separate peace award, a Women’s Peace Initiative Award, focused on the Middle East and North Africa to honor our funder’s intent that we create a program focused on peace in the Middle East. We have theories about the reasons we were getting so few women nominees through the peacemaker nomination process. One is linked to our requirement that religion be involved for this specific award (all our other programs focus on how to respond to the full breadth of religious and non-religious belief systems, including atheism, but not in our work with the peacemakers). That sometimes tended to shut out women activists who otherwise would be qualified (but that, of course, is also true of male humanitarians where religion is not a motivator). We also found, however, that we were getting very few nominees from traditions other than the three Abrahamic, monotheistic faiths—from Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and other traditions. So we needed to address the unconscious biases built into the systems and communities.

That is how we created an award specifically for a woman peacemaker. We believed it would allow us to address the dearth of women awardees. At the same time it would help us to broaden the understanding of people working on conflicts elsewhere by triggering greater awareness of women’s roles. So for the first time, we went out for nominations of women and researched groups, not only in the Middle East but in Asia and elsewhere to diverse nominees of women and from diverse religious traditions. We canvassed groups connected to activists around the world to get women nominees and to broaden the geographic distribution of our nominees more generally.

And for the first time, even with the criterion that includes a focus on religious motivation, we got strong women nominees. The first awards were to a fabulous pair of women, Osnat Aram-Daphna from Karmiel and Najeeba Sirhan from Majd Al Kurum in the Galilee, and then another award went to Hind Kabawat from Syria. Our case study of Osnat and Najeeba’s work is now close to a final draft. Our case studies are a demanding process. The interviews go on for days. But the stories that emerge are truly illuminating.

Last fall, we had another set of nominations. We are honing the process institutionally every time, always asking how it could have been better. We also learn from our advisory council. In addition to adjustments we made to bring in more female and diverse religious nominees, we also did an assessment and concluded that the nomination materials we were presenting to our advisory council of experts were just too much, as they include so much data to provide background on the five criteria. Following our analysis, we decided to present to the committee with comprehensive information on the top 10 candidates who most closely fit our selection criteria, and less information on all the others. Any council member who wanted to focus on those not in the top ten could get all the information and raise the person as a candidate for consideration as a peacemaker during the council’s deliberations.

But as we went through this winnowing process this year, we realized that this year the women candidates who came from the Middle East and North Africa were very few and not nearly as strong as some of other candidates. The advisory council therefore determined not to give the award for women with that geographic limitation. Rather, we gave two Peacemaker in Action Awards (we do the nomination process every two years.) But then what came out of the final selection process was indeed a woman awardee, Jamila Afghani from Afghanistan.

How satisfied are you with your nomination process? Do you think you are getting nominees who truly reflect the pool of people working on peace? How do you deal with the potentially distorting possibility of self-nomination and self-promotion?

This year we had 25 nominees, all but one new. We present 10 to our advisory council, which does the selection, but they are free to go into the other nominations that we have not put forward. Ours is not a process that the staff drives, but we do focus on drawing from our staff their best thinking and reasoning. The reason for greater selectivity in the list of nominees we present is that there is so much material, reflecting our research and analysis.

This year we were able to get nominees who were new and different for us, after we had screened out those who were already relatively well-known, who got a lot of awards internationally (we would not exclude people who get awards locally). It is a challenging process and casts a wide net.

But we are still concerned about who we are missing and why we are not getting more women. One aspect does relate to self identification and image. I remember a story of an Israeli woman I was speaking to once, an activist who was very religious. In talking to her about a young man she had nominated who was doing work in Gaza and who faced daily dangers, we also talked about her own work. It was a time before the wall, when bombings were common. She was determined to go to the north for her reconciliation work but was being strongly advised to stay home because it was too dangerous. She was emphasizing the risks that the young man took but, even as she argued that she had to go to the north herself despite the dangers, she did not see herself putting herself at risk. I saw her taking risks as a conscious choice because of what she believed in, but clearly she did not see herself in the same way as she saw the man. Women thus tend to self-select out of the process.

Where do you think the invisible women are hidden?

They are everywhere!

But in identifying women there are still many questions we need to answer, theoretical as well as practical. Perhaps most important, we need to probe the question of defining what falls into the category of religious women peacemakers. Who is this kind of person? What do they look like? And what is peace and peacemaking by women? It clearly is far more than just the absence of battles, of the rapes. It is about a life of lived justice, often focused on children, a just life where there is education and health. Clearly, thinking or theorizing along these lines can include many kinds of peace action, not just stopping the fighting. So we have to ask what happens if you take this broader definition? It does take us to an understanding of peace that is much bigger than the absence of war. What that means is that people, women, are doing something everywhere, in very small villages and towns, at border crossings, in so many places, and it helps us to look at all the things people can do. In fact, most of the women who have been nominated for our awards have not been the actors in the middle of the violent conflict or directly involved in negotiations. They are, rather, actors working to establish a lived peace.

Yes, Ela Bhatt who just was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize commented that her award was creating a buzz in the peace community because it focuses on justice for women and informal work.

Yes, there is a peace community, which is good, but they can indeed spend too much time debating what words mean. There are many that are debated, conflict transformation among them. I’m with you, that the larger definition is important. But we should also recognize that the work is absolutely linked, but the different kinds of work are not interchangeable. Too often we focus simply on stopping the fighting. To have peace, the fight must continue until there are all the pieces needed for a lived peace.

Will you venture to make some suggestions on the tricky question of what women bring to work for peace that is distinctive?

The generalizations are tricky, and I do not want to lump all women together or suggest that all women are different from all men. But there are some trends that I see that do apply to the women we see. They apply to most but not all women, and the qualities are not unique to women (we see them also in men). But there are certain qualities within and among women that you will often find, though they are not per se gender driven.

There is something about an understanding of and appreciation for community that comes from being female. It seems that often women see the community as a whole, and see people who are left out. Women often have a capacity to see people who are marginalized, who are excluded. Some of this may be because women experience being marginalized, but it may also involve the physical ability to have children, even if you have not had them; I have seen it even among women who do not have children and have chosen not to have children, because all have at least thought about having children.

I also think that women very often have a capacity to connect. I am personally amazed, from my personal life experience, at the power of connection I can feel with another woman. It is an intangible, but one that many feel and comment on. I can call on that connection, even years afterwards. I am friends with men, but it is not always the same, and I sense that their definitions or understandings of friendships are not always the same. There are huge risks in generalizing, and this is an uncomfortable question because it calls on me to do what I work not to do: stereotype!

What about the policy implications of these insights?

An obvious one is to avoid groups and situations where the composition of leadership and groups is all male.

But the real problem is the depth of prejudice that is so deeply ingrained that I can even fall into it myself. It affects many if not all women as well as men, and we need to combat it. I have had the horribly embarrassing situation, myself a lawyer with 15 years of practice behind me, of assuming that the lawyer would be the man in a group. The biases and stereotypes and assumptions we have are so embedded that it is even difficult to imagine what comprehensive change at that level would look like. In my training of high school students, I used to collect the front pages of the New York Times, and the sports and business pages, focusing on what the students would see among the photographs. While the picture has changed a little, the visual images show, still, predominantly white men in business suits on the front page, a similar picture on the business pages, while on the sports pages, with the exception of figure skaters and gymnasts, African-American men.

And what if you took the religion page!

Indeed, it would be men, or women with hijabs. It is startling to see how we are all caught by these embedded stereotypes. Who is it we expect to see speaking on the High Holy Days or conducting a prominent funeral? That is changing also, perhaps because fewer men want to go into the religious life. But there is also a danger that a shift in the proportions of women entering the religious life will change the respect that historically exists for the religious tradition and profession, for example as reflected in salaries. Remember that teachers were paid more until women came to predominate among teachers. It is still a major challenge. What is amazing is that women keep doing what they do notwithstanding.

One important point is that some women are driven by religious prejudices to say that they are not religious, even if religion is deeply important to them. One of our woman peacemakers recently told me that she was not religious, but then I observed that she always prays before she eats, which to me is a clear sign of faith. But in her country to be religious has a different connotation, and because she does not adhere to those norms, like wearing the hijab, she does not describe herself as religious. She and I have, in effect, had different answers because we were answering different questions as we explored the significance of religion in her work for peace and as a motivator in her life.

In exploring how to support women and their work for peace, many highlight the role of networks. What is your own experience?

Networks mean very different things in different contexts, and what is possible is changing fast with new technologies. There is a dimension here linked to age, with some differences among younger and older women, and across generations. Tanenbaum has spent the last year and a half working to build our peacebuilders as a conscious network. We are thinking a lot about both the theory and the practice. There is a lot to think about.

What networks do you find useful yourself?

That’s hard to answer because I don’t myself tend to think and act in those terms, and I am not a lover of technology. I joined LinkedIn because my staff suggested it would be helpful to do so, that it would be useful for Tanenbaum, and they have been helpful in identifying groups involved in our issues, so that I can put my voice to be out there. I find that I am receiving news from various places every day. Sometimes I look at it before I delete it, but what it means in practice is that often I have about two seconds to focus on an item, and whether I have even that depends on what else is happening. I was part of the American Bar Association network, but it had a cost and I was not using it so I dropped it. And even with the networks I have, I find it overwhelming when I get unsolicited outreach from people I do not know. I can’t respond to all the emails people could send.

I think the theory is that networks suggest offer something that is useful and could be useful in any situation. That, however, may not really be the right issue. So we have to ask what it means to be connected. And what does it mean for our capacity to focus on what we receive from others and on the people around us? How can we navigate this new world of networks and connections and keep the important qualities of relationships among people? With 250 to 300 emails a day, how much time is there for talking to anyone? How are we finding the time and the capacity to keep centered? We don’t even write notes and letters in the same way, even as we can more easily bring to mind someone we know and care about. How, in this new world, can we keep who we are as people? We are losing as well as gaining with the new technologies and their powerful capacity. It is part of being task-driven.

How do you think about religion in the context of the remarkable work you do, work that you define as secular yet tightly tied to a sense of religious motivation?

One of greatest gifts of being at Tanenbaum is that in many respects I have become far more religious in that I am far more aware of my spirituality. Although Tanenbaum is not a religious organization in any way, we deal with religion and religious beliefs. (We always say that we don’t promote nor do we denigrate religion. Our work is about finding practical approaches for reducing the tensions that our differences in beliefs can stimulate). Nonetheless, my daily work had an impact on me personally. Before, I would have described myself as a Reform but not a religious Jew, in that being Jewish was part of my culture and identity. Now, I continue to be a Reform Jewish person, but my spiritual life has changed dramatically, and it inspires me to do things that I have never done before in my life. Just as one example, recently I took a real vacation. I went to Peru without my computer, and my Blackberry barely worked. I was then in Bolivia and away for 10 days, where nothing worked. And it was wonderful and a vivid reminder that time is so important. It also gave me the chance to see new things and find new dimensions and develop ideas. For example, I was horrified by the garbage that I saw everywhere. The land was so beautiful, and the plastic bottles were strewn everywhere. In reflecting on the problems of the environment and movements, separately, with a friend, we came up with the idea that everyone should pick up seven pieces of garbage every day, a piece at a time, until that expands into a real movement for change and clean up. If everyone did it, the world would be different. So my vacation was spent bending down and picking up trash that I saw in a new way.

Especially in the world I have chosen to live in, time has special value, and yet we give it up to the degree that we do not even take care of ourselves, not even enough to do the work that draws us. It is my experience that in fact women do give up more of themselves to take care of others, to nurture others, to care for someone other than me. That does not apply to everyone, obviously, but it happens enough to be a real generalization. That is the story of our myths, and of our mother and grandmothers. Maybe we will truly have come of age when we can say no.