Practicing Imperfection: A Zen Rabbi and the Limits of Historical Inquiry

The Power of the Archives

Archives, historian and archivist Randall Jimerson writes, are places of “knowledge, memory, [and] nourishment” as well as “sites of power.”[1] Take a moment to consider why Jimerson, who has spent a career either using or working in archives, might say as much. It might be helpful to remember the details of Alan Lew’s life as we unravel Jimerson’s line of thinking: Alan Lew was born in New York, educated in Pennsylvania and Iowa, and spent much of his spiritual and professional life in the San Francisco Bay Area. His personal papers, however, are held in Boulder, Colorado.

In 2015, six years after Alan Lew’s, the Post-Holocaust American Judaism (PHAJ) Collection at the University of Colorado and Lew’s widowed wife, author Sherril Jaffe Lew, agreed that his personal papers would fit with the PHAJ’s collections. Lew’s papers would add to PHAJ’s growing collection of material related to the Jewish Renewal movement. Now sitting alongside the papers of Jewish Renewal founder Zalman M. Schacter-Shalomi  and Freedom Seder author and Civil Rights activist Rabbi Arthru Waskow, Lew’s records allows researchers to think about the many ways Jewish spiritual practice and activism changed in postwar America.

Lew's papers now being in Boulder proves that Jimmerson is right: archives are places of power. By choosing what to accept and what to deny, archives directly impact the kinds of stories future scholars will be able to tell. Lew’s papers are now in Boulder because archivists in 2015 agreed that his life and work matched PHAJ’s collecting goals. We can be glad that university officials felt Lew’s papers were worth preserving while keeping in mind that this exhibit would not exist, nor would we be discussing Alan Lew if Archivists and University officials had not believed Lew was significant.
 
[1] Jimerson, Randall C. Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009).

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