How Ilana Blumberg is Breaking Classroom Barriers with Life Writing
Picture a classroom with two groups of students. Each group knows only members of their own group. The other group is an other, unknown, anonymous. The groups parallel play, each experiencing the same class while living entirely different lives, and neither group knowing anything about the lives of the other.
This is how Ilana Blumberg, author of “Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American,” described her classrooms at Bar Ilan University, and this is what she set out to fix. Speaking to Stern students on Feb. 2, in an event co-sponsored by the S. Daniel Abraham Honors Program and the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Program for International Affairs, Blumberg shared the way life writing — writing about one’s life — can be the tool to bring these two groups together.
A self-described scholar of life writing, Blumberg taught Victorian literature for many years. She’s long been a teacher and a writer, and she said that reading and writing are the most important activities in her life. Memoir writing forces her to articulate her feelings in words that others can resonate with, allowing her to better understand her own life as she is living it. Blumberg claimed that there is a relationship between selfhood and writing, that telling our stories seems to be as necessary to life as eating, drinking and sleeping are.
Prof. Ronnie Perelis, director of the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Program for International Affairs, was behind bringing Blumberg to speak at Stern. “I believe in the power of the humanities to create spaces of dialogue and engagement and I have felt that her work in this area can teach us all about the power of reading and listening and writing,” Perelis told The Commentator. “Her experience in both the US and Israel offers a unique, global perspective.”
Blumberg moved from Ann Arbor to Israel a little over ten years ago, leaving her teaching post at Michigan State University to teach Victorian literature at Bar Ilan University. Something felt weird, though; she described looking out at Tel Aviv and feeling that it was strange to focus on history rather than what was right in front of her.
But the most striking difference between teaching in Michigan and teaching in Israel was the diversity of students in front of her. She had expected that her students in Israel would be all Jews; instead, she found herself teaching students who are Jewish as well as Muslim and Christian Arabs, students whose families had stayed after 1948 and become Israeli citizens. Of the 20,000 students at Bar Ilan, 1,600 of them are Israeli Arabs; a minority, but a clear presence. Blumberg explained that many Palestinian families, like many Jewish ones, worry that in going to secular university, their children will become secular; they sometimes feel that a religious university, like Bar Ilan, will be better for them, despite it being a Jewish religious university.
Blumberg described having these students of different backgrounds in the same room, explaining that it was like they were merely engaging in parallel play. They didn’t know each other at all. Blumberg argued that the Israeli public school system is partially responsible for this, giving an example of how students learn to cross the street. In schools separated by religion, each group looks at street-crossing diagrams that portray characters who look only like them. “As if we can’t identify with anyone if they don’t dress like us or look like us,” Blumberg said about those diagrams, which she argued strengthen the divides between the groups.
Blumberg wanted to change things. Rather than merely teach British literature, she wanted to encourage her students to encounter each other, and she decided that the best way to do that was through life writing.
Life writing is, simply, writing about your life. A piece of life writing does not have to tell a full life story; a memoir, for instance, is one specific portion of life. For a long time, Blumberg explained, people wanted to read the stories of important people’s lives — someone who had lived a famous and successful life and sat down afterward to share the tale. But now, there’s been a shift, and life writing allows anyone to tell their story, to find enough meaning in their own experiences to write about them. Ordinary people can tell their stories, and it is merely because of the power of their writing that anyone cares what they have to say.
Blumberg brought this into her classroom, having students study autobiography and memoir and write their own. Blumberg described an early activity that she did with her students: she discovered that in many autobiographies, writers confess to stealing things as children. So Blumberg asked her students to write about something they had stolen as a child, and then asked who wanted to share what they had written. She was surprised by the number of students who wanted to share. They went around the room, and anyone who wanted to share their work did. This resulted in one of the most wonderful class sessions Blumberg can remember.
Life writing highlights differences between people, thus teaching them about each other, while also uncovering similarities between them, thus helping them find shared experiences through which to connect. Blumberg’s Jewish and Arab students learned about the different ways each group lived, but also connected through similar experiences, such as their relationships with their parents.
Blumberg doesn’t shy away from difficult topics; she intentionally teaches memoirs of Jewish and Palestinian suffering. In Blumberg’s classroom, not a single Palestinian student had heard of Anne Frank … but her Jewish students had never read about the Nakba, what the Palestinians call the destructive events of 1948. Blumberg stated that we don’t know anything about each other, we don’t know each other’s deepest wounds. And that is exactly what she’s striving to fix.
Bruria Schwartz (SCW ‘26) was impacted by a moment in which Blumberg asked audience members what memoirs we’ve read. “A lot of us have read memoirs by Holocaust survivors or political memoirs, books that are really important and impactful memoirs,” Schwartz told The Commentator. “But Holocaust memoirs are in our own daled amot, our own circles. Dr. Blumberg challenged us to find memoirs of people whose lives we might otherwise not have access to. Find Palestinian memoirs, find non-American memoirs, find memoirs that were translated, find great works that come from outside of our cultural context, and read them and understand them.”
Schwartz ended the night by speaking with Blumberg and with Prof. Matt Miller, associate professor of English and chair of the English department at Stern, discussing with them similarities between the Stern English department and the English department at Bar Ilan. Schwartz shared that the two professors “discussed similarities in English and writing, and sharing one’s written work being a path for vulnerability.”
I’ve seen this firsthand in the English department at Stern, where we might initially think that we know all about each other. The English department has classes that prove that in reality, we have much to learn about each other. A few semesters ago, I was privileged to take a course called “Writing Women’s Lives” with Prof. Ann Peters, associate professor of English at Stern, in which we read memoir pieces (including a chapter from one of Blumberg’s books) and then wrote our own. Writing about our own lives taught us how to think more deeply about our experiences; reading our classmates’ pieces helped us come to a deeper understanding of whom we were sitting next to in class. We discovered the stories and life experiences that make each person unique; we also bonded as a class as we spoke about our experiences with Judaism and our thoughts on memoir-writing in general, and we bonded with each other on a more personal level as we found shared experiences in each other’s writings.
Blumberg ended her presentation with a message about the power of life stories, a message to which I can attest through my experiences in that memoir writing class. Life stories teach people to listen, to hear people out, to learn about others; they also teach that each person has a story. You have a story, and you can write about it and you can share it too.
Photo Caption: Ilana Blumberg speaks to Stern students
Photo Credit: Professor Perelis
