Susanna Garfein was raised in the Reform movement to be “a joyful Jew.”
The executive director of Na’aleh is the daughter of a rabbi in a small Jewish community in Tallahassee, Florida. Garfein explained there weren’t any Jewish day schools or Jewish community centers when she was growing up. “The synagogue was the heart and soul of Jewish life.”
At the time, the vastness of the Jewish communal professions was unbeknownst to her.
When she attended the University of Georgia for her undergraduate degree, she entered undeclared, thinking she’d focus on political science. “I just knew I wanted to do something meaningful. That’s all I knew,” she recalled.
She was motivated by her father’s work as a rabbi in the 1960s, when her parents first moved to Tallahassee. At the time, segregation in Tallahassee was still prevalent. She said her father’s work to build bridges between communities heavily influenced her upbringing.
“I thought maybe more advocacy work was where I was heading, and then I started taking Hebrew,” she explained. “Then I was exposed to the academic study [of] the Bible, and it just took me in a completely different direction.”
She ended up graduating with a bachelor’s in religious studies, but life as a Jewish professional, as she knew it to be, was still a narrow path.
“My paths before me were rabbinical school or academia,” she noted.
Garfein chose academia, noting that she always wanted to teach. So after graduating, she decided to spend a year attending the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s graduate program.
“There’s so many different cross-cultural connections in the literature, and from the biblical stories, from the ancient Near Eastern stories, all of it was fascinating to me,” she said.
When she returned, she waited tables in Tallahassee, took classes in German, worked on her doctoral applications and met her now-husband on a blind date.
Her first choice for pursuing her doctorate was Johns Hopkins University. Before she knew it, she was moving to Baltimore.
As she was finishing up her doctoral program at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore Hebrew University (now Baltimore Hebrew Institute at Towson University) was looking for someone to cover a couple of classes for professors who were going on sabbatical. Upon completion of her doctoral program, she was offered a full-time position, which she said, “was very unusual.”
At Baltimore Hebrew University, she taught Hebrew and Hebrew Bible before becoming dean of students. Then, when the college merged with Towson University, she became the director of the graduate program in Jewish studies.
But after a decade in academia and with a young child, Garfein was looking for a change.
“When you’re in academia, it seems like you have your summers off, [but] you’re constantly under pressure to publish and I just wanted a change,” she said. “I was looking for something that was very mission-driven.”
Then Baltimore Hebrew University merged with Towson University and Garfein said she was exposed to fields within the Jewish community she didn’t know existed, even when she was in graduate school.
“I started thinking about ‘what are other possible pathways outside of academia’ [and] I wanted to devote myself more fully to Jewish communal work,” she added.
Garfein had taught adult education at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, where she and her family are members, from time to time served on the board.
So, when an opportunity to work for The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore became available in 2017, Garfein decided to leave academia and became the director of leadership engagement. Then, last June, Garfein took on her new role as executive director of Na’aleh: the hub for leadership learning, an agency of The Associated.
“A lot of things that I do still involves teaching and connection,” she explained. “Connecting community-building to Jewish text, to Jewish wisdom. Like, ‘how are we understanding leadership through a Jewish lens?’”
Still an active member of Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, today Garfein lives in Mt. Washington.
“Last year, when the position opened, I applied and it’s just a great fit,” she added. “It’s a great fit in terms of this idea of … my past life as an academic, and where my heart is in terms of being a community builder within the Jewish world.”
