By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
It’s been almost four months since the launch of the Year of Civil Discourse, a broad-based, community-wide initiative aiming to “empower Louisville community members to transform difficult conversations into learning opportunities.”
More than 100 people attended the initial orientation sessions in mid-November, with a subset of 26 undergoing additional training as facilitators
Recently we spoke with three of these newly-trained facilitators: Samantha Schaffer a doctoral candidate at Spalding University’s School of Professional Psychology; Joseph Sinski, an Analytical Chemistry professor at Bellarmine University; and Kathy Karr, Principal Flute with the Louisville Orchestra.
Samantha Schaffer
Samantha Schaffer
“Being part of the Jewish community was a big driver for me, just wanting to be engaged. I don’t think I’m that dissimilar to others in our community who’ve experienced a lot of emotional distress since the events of October 7. I work in mental health, so it’s my bread and butter. But when it comes to knowing what to do for myself, that’s another story.”
With YOCD, “I feel like I’m doing something to bridge those gaps of disconnection not just between Jews and non-Jews, but between Jews in this community who fall on different end of the spectrum of opinion.”
Social media itself can be debilitating.
“I personally tend to lean on the left side of the aisle. And one thing that was super shocking for me when everything happened was to see all this discourse in my algorithm. And we know that algorithms cater to what we want to see or think we want to see, and all of a sudden I was seeing all this very black and white, polarized language around the Middle East of this is good, and this is bad. And I’m sitting here thinking, these are people I typically would agree with on most social issues, and I’m sort of dumbfounded by how no one seems willing or able to see the nuance that I see.
“But I’m also willing to recognize that my opinion is not the be all, end all. I don’t know everything about the geopolitics of the Middle East, but these are issues that I grew up with from a very young age, learning about in Hebrew School and Sunday School, and I think it widened my eyes and made me reflect on moments in my own life, where I perhaps was thinking in terms of ‘this is just right and this is just wrong,’ and there’s no in between. That’s actually part of the problem. I’m not just sitting there screaming into the void or into a vacuum of people who agree with me, or screaming into a void of people who don’t agree with me and won’t ever change their opinion just because I’m screaming at them.”
Joe Sinski
Joe Sinski
“I read about (YOCD) both from synagogue and from newsletters, and it sounded like something I would love to do. In teaching you stand in front of a crowd for 30 years, so you know you can handle a room – I’m disseminating top-down information about chemistry – there are absolute truths I’m trying to get across and students are very respectful of me.” With YOCD, however, “a much different skill set is needed.”
“Once we got this Red State and Blue State thing, people are using their neural pathways to attack and demonize the other half of the country…for hatred more than they did ever before – ‘I’m on the Right’ or ‘I’m on the Left’ – it’s gotten overboard, and it’s been bothering me a lot.”
What’s been your impression of facilitator training?
“They train you in a new way of thinking. It’s been extremely eye-opening, because one of my problems is that I put thoughts together and come to conclusions – I’m an analytical chemist, so I’m going to tell you how much lead is in your backyard; how much of any pollutant there is.”
Facilitators adopt an alternative approach: “When I hear someone stating their opinion, you’re supposed to hear what they have to say and mirror it back to them. But a lot of the time, I’d add my own opinions of what I think they’re trying to get to. And the (training) facilitators are very good about saying, ‘You know, you’re intuitive and 80 percent of the time you’ll be right, but 20 percent of the time you’ll upset that person – and then that person isn’t going to want to talk to you anymore.’”
Instead, facilitators strive “to be able to get what both sides are saying and encapsulate it, and then name the differences that they have and help them to agree on those differences. You’re not supposed to solve the problem – you’re supposed to just get them to talk to each other.”
Kathy Karr
Kathy Karr
“What’s driving me is that in this world and our Jewish community, we have so many different perspectives on issues. I want to have an open mind and bring our community together. So when this opportunity came up I got super excited, because I thought this would be a way not only to facilitate open conversation and mutual respect, but that I would learn diverse perspectives that would help me better understand the differences we have.”
“We’re more polarized than ever, not just in the Jewish community, but in our United States and perhaps the world. But what I’m focusing on is just where I live, and that’s troubling to me. We tend to watch the news that agrees with us or have our silos of friends and colleagues who agree with us. So when we hear somebody else talk instead of really listening, we tend to dismiss and tell ourselves they’re wrong and we don’t really want to listen to what they have to say. It’s black and white these days – there aren’t a lot of gray areas.”
In keeping with the YOCD imperative, “I don’t want to persuade anybody to think differently, because even in my own loving family I have people who have different opinions. I respect where they’re coming from and I don’t want to change their minds, and they’re not going to change mine. It’s not about debating them – it’s about opening my mind and listening. That to me is a challenge, because I always thought I was a good listener, and what I’ve come to realize is that I listen very much on the surface.”
Indeed, the facilitator training emphasizes how “we all have to practice. Just like playing the flute, I know I can be told by my teacher how to do a technique, but I have to actually go home and hone it and practice over and over before it becomes ingrained in muscle memory.”
YOCD comprises three parts. Part One, “Training in Constructive Dialogue,” took place during mid-November in partnership with Resetting the Table, a “nationally recognized organization that equips communities to have courageous conversations on difficult topics.” Part Two has spent January and February training a subset of 26 Part One participants to serve as facilitators.
Part Three will get under way and continue throughout 2026, presenting an “Interactive Speaker Series & Community Discussions” “to the broader community through facilitated conversations using written materials, films, webinars, and presentations.”
“We didn’t know when we launched this how interested people would be, and the interest is extremely high,” explains Bill Altman, chair of the Jewish Community Relations Council, who is a principal YOCD convener along with JFCS CEO David L. Finke and numerous other Jewish community groups. The program had sufficient funding for 70 initial participants, but “when over 100 people applied, we realized there was a yearning for this that needed to be met. So, we found additional funds through a combination of resources.
“We had a lot of people apply to be facilitators,” Altman said, “and we went through a very rigorous process of making sure that we had diverse representation of the community…by age, by gender, by political orientation, and by commitment.
YOCD has also brought in Amy Ryan, the recently appointed Strategic Initiatives and Community Engagement Director at the Jewish Federation of Louisville, as project manager.
Ryan has over 25 years of experience in learning and development in various industries. While working at Humana she was responsible for developing facilitators to deliver culture training and to support the organization in shaping the culture. This often involved equipping people to have forthright, courageous conversations about challenging topics.
“I think there’s a hunger in the community, during this tumultuous time, to figure out ways to explore Jewish identity and to engage with the community in that exploration,” Altman said. “From that standpoint, I think the initiative has met and exceeded expectations.”
“We each hold our own definitions of what it means to be Jewish,” Finke observed. “Already, that speaks to a shared understanding, the threat to Louisville and every Jewish community is that if we do not listen and accept each other, even those with whom we disagree, we risk further fracturing our community and disengaging people from it. From the first rounds of training, we have already seen YOCD help bridge understanding among people who do not completely agree. It facilitates the potential to mend bridges.”
At the same time, “we recognize that hard work lays ahead of us as we bring YOCD to the broader community,” Altman acknowledged. “We are working hard to identify the topics, settings, speakers and other means to have community conversations about the challenging issues related to Jewish identity that Louisville and other Jewish communities are facing. And we have a convened an advisory group of community members, plus a separate advisory collective comprising local clergy, to guide us in this work.”
For more background about the Year of Civil Discourse, and for a list of synagogues and other community organizations supporting and participating in YOCD, you can go online at yocdlouisville.org