25. The Photography Exhibit, with Rabbi Joy Levitt

If you’re listening to this in the fall of 2021, and you’re not aware, the JCC’s Chief Executive Officer, Rabbi Joy Levitt, is retiring at the end of the year. This podcast is for you. If it’s sometime past the fall, maybe the spring of 2022, or the winter of 2026, this podcast is for you, too. There’s something about stories, and this particular storyteller, that’s crucial to understanding what makes—and made—the country’s premier JCC tick. What allowed it to go as fast as it did, to build success upon success upon success. Rabbi Joy Levitt isn’t—wasn’t—just a boss to some of us. She is, was, a spiritual adviser. A relentless “idea person.” A source of endless motivation. And whether you’re listening to this before she leaves, or after, there are lessons you can take from it. You can listen to her voice and know there was a strong hand steering the ship at the JCC. There was joy, in Joy. Welcome to season 5 of 76West, recorded, appropriately, in an office at the corner of West 76th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. In past years you’ve heard conversations with some of the great thinkers of our time. This season you’re going to hear the voice of one: Rabbi Joy Levitt. Sometimes she’ll be by herself, sometimes accompanied by the amazing people who helped make the programs she shepherded a reality. That’s by design. Joy works—worked— best in collaboration with others, people who pushed her, prodded, who inspired her as much as she inspired them. That’s going to be—is—her legacy to the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan: a spirit of positivity, of moving onward and upward. Taking a simple idea, a Jewish Community Center, and elevating it beyond what anyone would use as their definition. In this episode, Rabbi Joy Levitt discusses an eye-opening moment in the JCC’s Laurie M. Tisch Gallery, in which an exhibit of the work of photographer Caryl Englander brings about an epiphany for one young family and for Joy.