Edie Sussman is Teaching the Next Generation

I first met Edie Sussman at Urban Adamah’s Purim celebration a few years ago. I was immediately struck by their kind energy and thoughtful storytelling. Since then, the GatherBay team has been enjoying seeing her around the Jewish community, at many of the local spots like Base and Minyan Dafna, and we knew it was time to hear her story.

Over Zoom, I got inspired by learning about Edie’s calling to teach (one of the hardest professions, in my opinion!), joyful contra dancing, and curiosity. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Edie! So what brought you to the Bay and what’s kept you here?

I first moved to the Bay in 2015 from southern California, for my undergrad at UC Berkeley. Then I had a stint in Massachusetts (I moved right before the pandemic started). But I missed California and I came back to the Bay Area in 2021 for a master’s in teaching at Berkeley, and I’ve been here ever since. I don’t really plan on leaving!

Currently, I’m a high school humanities teacher. For the past two years, I’ve been working at a school up in Richmond and this coming fall, I’m going to be starting work at a school in Oakland Unified, which I’m really excited about. There, I’ll be teaching English and US history, but up to now, I’ve been teaching English and a really cool class called Applied Research Methods that helps teach ninth graders about online research skills.

I know teaching can often really be a calling for people. How did you get into it?

I’ve kind of known for most of my life that I had some interest in education. When I was in middle school, my eighth grade had this class where, for the first period of the day, you would walk over to the elementary school next door and just help the teachers there. 

It was such a cool opportunity. A couple of weeks ago, I found a letter from one of the teachers I’d worked with in that class—basically saying, if you want to do this for a living, you’d probably be good at it. 

Wow, I love that. It was foretold!

Yes! Then in high school, I had an English teacher I loved, and just really wanted to be a high school teacher. Then I got to college and had professors I loved, so I wanted to be a professor. I had to take a year off after undergrad to sit down and think about, what do I really want to do? 

Ultimately, teaching high school called to me, because I felt like it was the place where I could make a lot of difference while also still being able to engage with my students on an advanced level. I did my student teaching in middle school, and I loved it. The kids there are wonderful and enthusiastic, but there are some deep topics that they’re not quite ready to get into yet.

With high school students, they’re at that key stage in their lives where they don’t know much about what the future holds—so you can be that support person, helping them push off into whatever they want to do next. And, you can still talk to them

on a level that’s more deep, complex, and analytical than you can with younger students.

I bet. That class on applied research methods sounds really useful! What did the students end up getting into? 

It was a really cool class that I really enjoyed teaching. All of the ninth graders at my school went through it. For the last quarter of the school year, they pick any topic in the world that is interesting to them, as long as they can come up with a research ques

tion that’s something they don’t already know and can ideally make an argument about. 

They researched things like how addictive really is social media, and does makeup support self expression or contribute to insecurities, and what are the most likely explanations for UFO sightings? By the end of the school year, we put on a research fair where they present their work to a panel of judges, teachers, other students, and anyone from the community who wants to come see what they’ve been working on—it’s very rewarding. 

That sounds like you would get to learn a lot too! Pivoting a bit, can you share more about your Jewish journey in and outside of the Bay Area?

Absolutely. My dad was Jewish, but I grew up very secular. My parents felt strongly about letting me and my sister figure out for ourselves what we believed and what our community was, spiritually and religiously. So I didn’t really dive into practicing Judaism until I got to college. I met someone my first week at college, who invited me to Hillel, saying come to Shabbos dinner with me—and I really just fell in love with this sense of community and tradition, and I felt this strong pull to this part of my heritage that I had been out of touch with. 

I dove deeper into Jewish community through Hillel—during my last two years of college, I lived at the Berkeley Bayit, which is a Jewish student co-op that actually just celebrated its 40th anniversary. That helped me explore a lot more who I was as a Jewish young adult.

But after graduating college, I found it was a little bit more difficult to find a community that stuck, and the pandemic made that especially difficult. Being in Massachusetts, I didn’t really know the people or the organizations as well.

That sounds really challenging! How did you find your way after that?

When I came back to the East Bay, I knew that I wanted to find a Jewish community that really felt like home, but I was kind of adrift, and a lot of my friends had scattered after college. I consider it really good fortune that in 2022, when I needed somewhere to go for the High Holidays, someone directed me to Minyan Dafna [an independent, traditional-egalitarian minyan in Berkeley].

At Yom Kippur, Rabbi Frankie [Sandmel] gave a drash [sermon] and invited everyone to come over afterwards, for a break-fast at Base. I was like, what the heck is Base? But there was going to be food, so I went and immediately felt like this is a warm, welcoming, thoughtful community of people who I want to spend more time around. [Base Bay is a house in Rockridge, home to a rabbi and their partner, who create Jewish community for young adults.] 

I kept going to more and more things at Base, and I’ve been in their year-long Ritually Deepening Cohort, which is a group of us who are, in some way, digging deeper into Judaism in our lives. We’re gearing up for our final ritual culmination of our year of learning together—I had this goal to learn to chant Torah, so we’ll see if that happens!

[Editor’s note: Edie is starting a weekly drop-in Torah study group that will take place at Base Bay—curious to get involved or just want to let them know you’re interested? Email edies341@gmail.com]

How do you spend your time outside of teaching?

My big passion over the past year or so has been contra dancing, which is a style of American folk dance probably most similar to square dancing in that there’s a caller who’s calling moves, and you’re dancing together with a partner in a larger group. As somebody who has always thought of myself as not a dancer, it’s very cool how beginner-friendly contra dance is and how much it allows me to move my body in joyful ways without feeling self-conscious.

That sounds so fun! Where do you like to go dancing?

There’s a queer dance called Circle Left that happens the first Saturday of every month, by Lake Merritt. It’s a beautiful, queer-affirming space and it’s really big, so you always meet tons of people there. But Berkeley contra is also very lovely, which is every other Thursday [at Christ Church Berkeley]. 

Onto our in-house Proust Questionnaire. Tell me a poem, book, movie, play, piece of art, or media that you love!

The piece that jumps into my mind first, is the poem “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver. She’s just a fantastic poet. People may be familiar with this poem for its closing line, “tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life”—but if you read the whole poem, it’s about slowing down, admiring what’s around you, and having a sense of wonder in the small moments.

I feel like so often when the question is, what are you doing with your life? The answer is supposed to be something big, important, ambitious. This poem really says, no, the thing that you should be doing with your one wild, precious life is being idle, being blessed, and noticing the small things around you that bring you joy. I forget that a lot, so it’s a useful reminder.

What’s a best-kept secret of the Bay?

I just went last Thursday to Dear San Francisco, which is a circus show at Club Fugazi in San Francisco. Club Fugazi is this historic theater in North Beach that has been doing cool stuff for many decades. The show is a love letter to San Francisco in circus form, with acrobatics and music and a little bit of poetry—it’s just the one of the coolest things I’ve ever been to see. I’m so shocked that more people don’t know about this! I totally recommend.

And lastly, what was a recent time that you felt some kind of spiritual connection? 

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of camping on a friend’s property up near Mount Shasta, in the most beautiful pine forests. They were having people on their land to dedicate it and to dream about their future plans for what they want to do with it. It was beautiful to be in the space of dreaming with other people. 

The phrase that kept coming to mind was ken yehi ratzon, may it be so—just dreaming about the future and thinking together about what could be possible.