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Henry
Green serves as catalyst for social change
Sure, many academicians profess
a desire to contribute ultimately to the betterment of society,
but only few may actualize their ambitions on a grand scale.
Henry Green, director of the Judaic Studies Program, is one of
those few.
Raised in a traditional Jewish background, Green felt compelled
to pursue study in Israel. While studying for an M.A. at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he became attached to a number
of issues that were resonating in the states but playing themselves
out in Israel in different ways.
"At the end of the 1960s we had civil rights and Vietnam,
and in Israel there was the aftermath of the 1967 war,"
says Green. "Many Jews who had come in from the Arab countries,
the Sephardim, were treated like minorities were in the United
States, like second-class citizens."
 Though Israel
was a socialist fabric with seemingly all kinds of opportunities
for people, Green experienced a different side. He realized that
it had various walls and institutional discrimination. Green
set out to redress the inequity between ethnic groups and classes
in Israel by advocating the opening up of higher education for
minority groups.
After his involvement there in social change, he returned
to his native Canada to work in the government as the research
director of a program called Opportunities for Youth (OFY). Created
to provide jobs for students during the summer, OFY offers a
vehicle for people to self-actualize. "The idea was to have
students develop their own service learning ideas rather than
fill a hole as a street digger," says Green, "and the
government would fund you if it was productive for the community."
That role led him to a variety of positions in government,
including researching and writing the first draft of the freedom
of information bill for Canada. He then went back to his interests
in Jewish civilization to earn a Ph.D., becoming a pioneer through
his study of the origin of the first century A.D. sectarian movement
Gnosticism, from a sociological perspective. Through his dissertation,
The Economic and Social Origins of Gnosticism (1985), Green reveals
an illustration of how economic change leads to sectarian religious
movements, and that Gnosticism, which was viewed previously as
a Christian heresy, now becomes instead a Jewish heresy. The
book has become a classic in the field, referenced in books on
the subject all over the world.
When he came to the University in 1984, Green was invited
to be part of a project for a Jewish community center, called
Jewish Life in America. Judaic Studies changed the focus from
America to Florida and called it Mosaic: Jewish Life in Florida.
His classes traveled the state and continually did research,
which led to an exhibit at Miami's Historical Museum of Southern
Florida in 1990. It then traveled the country and led to the
establishment of the Ziff Jewish Museum of Florida, of which
Green is the founding executive director.
His greatest source of pride, however, dates back to 1977,
when Green was asked to write a Ford Foundation grant for HIPPY
(Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters). Avima Lombard,
the founder, had worked on Headstart when it began in California,
and she adapted the program for Israel by creating a preschool
program in which a paraprofessional would go to a house one hour
a week and work with a mother or father.
"It reached out to the Sephardim, those Jews who came
from countries of Islamic origin, primarily Morocco, Tunisia,
Yemen-countries that had very little human capitol," says
Green. "It was a way of trying to bring the children and
the parents up to speed."
Green helped internationalize the program and brought it to
Miami-Dade Public Schools. The program then caught the eye of
Hillary Clinton and is now one of the major early childhood programs
in the United States and part of a national HIPPY USA organization.
Green serves as chair of the Miami HIPPY advisory board, on the
Florida State Advisory Board, and is a board of trustee member
of HIPPY USA.
This past fall, HIPPY began a collaborative effort with the
School of Nursing to bring health care to HIPPY children in Miami.
Students studying to be nurses are assigned to HIPPY children
and families as their practi-cum, bringing health care to these
individuals.
Now he's trying to introduce the program to third world countries
and especially Latin America. He's also in the midst of writing
a grant to study the kids in Miami who are now in middle school
who had HIPPY at age four and five to reveal less absenteeism,
less violence, and less drugs.
"We want to show that HIPPY is not only demonstrating
academic achievement, but empowering children and families and
creating welfare-to-work opportunities," says Green. "The
most important thing we can teach our students is how the skills
we give them are ways in which they can make society a better
place to live in."
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The laboratory
was set up in the early 1960s originally as a radiocarbon dating
lab. A few years later, the scope of study was enlarged to include
tritium, which is a harmless radioactive form of hydrogen. Both
of these radioactive isotopes were introduced into the environment
through the hydrogen bomb testing in the mid-1960s. "There
was so much tritium released into the environment, that it made
a huge impact on the global inventory of it, and it was very
measurable." says Grall. "It was a very good tracer-a
chemical that can be used to trace the movement of ocean water
to determine the patterns of current movement and water formation."