Avi Hoffman is a globally renowned award-winning actor, director and producer, and Co-Founder & CEO of Yiddishkayt Initiative, Inc. (YILoveJewish.org)
This is a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting Antisemitism through the Arts : Yiddish Saves The World.
Avi was recently awarded Congressional recognition. He was invited to the Vatican to meet Pope Francis and was inducted into the Bronx Jewish Hall of Fame for his lifetime work advancing Jewish culture, Yiddish language and Holocaust awareness.
Far from being abstract research on the dynamics of resilience, Deborah Levine has provided us with a life story, and highly relevant biography, an ethnography if you will, of the struggle for resilience lived out, day by day. It is filled with the challenges to resilience from health, work, environments, and relationships. Today we speak of the cost of intersectionality on oneself. The term is extremely relevant here, as Deborah herself is bundled into her white female identity, her Jewish ethnicity, the cultural marks of her places of upbringing, her immigrant status, her health vulnerability, and her religious belongings. Each of these shows up repeatedly both as a liability and an asset in her resilience narrative.