Adam Cooper combines his love for arts and culture with his strong Jewish identity and entrepreneurial spirit every day on the job.
He is the program director of Capital J, a program recently launched by the Edlavitch DCJCC. Capital J brings high-profile Jewish speakers from politics, media, culture, business and the arts to Washington, D.C., to help explore what it means to be Jewish in America today.
Cooper, who studied political philosophy at the University of Virginia, worked in politics before landing at the JCC in February.
He lives in D.C., where he frequents gatherings at DC Minyan, Sixth & I, Washington Hebrew Congregation and Adas Israel.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York. It doesn’t have a huge Jewish population, but the Jewish sleepaway camp I went to, Camp Young Judaea Sprout Lake, was located a 12-minute drive from my childhood home. I ended up going to the older camp, Camp Tel Yehudah, as well, and got really involved in my Jewish youth movement. That propelled me into taking a gap year in Israel, then staying involved with Hillel during college and seeking out a Jewish community when I moved to D.C. The through line of my Jewish background has been my Jewish youth movement.
My parents come from two different wings of American Jewish life. My dad grew up in the Bronx, going to a Modern Orthodox Jewish school, and my mom grew up in Long Island, steeped in the Conservative movement. I feel like my upbringing is sort of the mish-mash of the two. And now I find myself working as a Jewish professional.
Have you always wanted to be a Jewish professional?
I wouldn’t say that it was my guiding light, but I think over the last six-plus months, there’s this incredible feeling that I can bring my whole self to my work, and I don’t need to tamp down anything. That’s been really meaningful to me. Although this work wasn’t what I wanted to do my entire life, building this new program with [an identity] that’s so central to my core self [gives me] a sense of connection throughout, fusing my personal and professional lives.
Have you always been interested in arts and culture?
For sure. I’ve been a cellist since I was in the fourth grade and still play chamber music around the city. I consider myself to be interested in cultural happenings around the city, so I think that inclination towards building arts and culture has always been there. For me, [that interest] started musically, but it’s grown into other spheres, as well.
How did you get involved with Capital J?
The [EDCJCC] wanted to put something together to respond to this moment for quite some time, and they needed someone who was scrappy enough to take it off the ground. I have an interesting entrepreneurial background, from starting a Super PAC during my last year of college to doing work in elections, including going to Ohio to launch a candidate recruitment program by myself in the middle of winter and leading development operations. It’s been a lot of building things from the ground up, and I think the leadership of the JCC wanted me to take that experience and that energy and put it towards something that they thought was really important to bring to the nation’s capital.
Why does Capital J’s mission resonate with you?
A lot of people have these sorts of tensions in their Jewish identity and their American Jewish identity. We’re not sure what is OK to say [or] even think to ourselves. [Discussions of Jewish identity] exist in the alleys of group chats and one-off comments rather than in open and honest reflections about where we stand at this pretty flammable moment in this country. Both my interest in politics and study of political philosophy [taught me about] creating spaces for small “D” democracy to exist and to have conversations grounded in shared inquiry, not in necessarily building consensus, but working towards trying to figure it out together, and focusing on the process rather than the end product. That feels really important right now.
I don’t think this is necessarily feel-good conversations about what it means to be Jewish at this moment in America. I think it’s actually hard, important conversations that I personally think are really important, and I think that the [JCC] wants to be a center for moving forward.
What are your goals?
For Capital J, I really want to be unafraid to try new structural arrangements and organizing manners [and] not shy away from new modes of gathering. I recently spoke with this organization called The Longest Table. They host really large community gatherings at a huge, long table all across a city block. There’s something bold and almost a little bit messy about it; it’s not this picture-perfect event, and they don’t really moderate the discussion. They bring people together and set the stage perfectly for important conversations to happen. I think it’s my job to think about the baseline environment that I can create for important, reflective, deep conversations to occur. I want to be the creator of that environment to give people a springboard to have really important conversations with one another and be inspired and motivated by the speakers we bring in.
I want to take time to really reflect on all the different events that we hold. I think there’s a tendency in a lot of nonprofit workplaces to host an event, then host another event, then host another event, and we keep going. I want to be deeply reflective and take the time to do the “postmortem” after events to talk about what happened and really learn from our experiences and listen to community feedback, because this program is meant for the people in D.C. I want to be a reflection of what I’m hearing from our community members.
