Neither the violent hurricane nor the U.S. government's inept and inadequate response to the crisis discriminated according to race, wealth, or religion. In August 2006, just one year after the event, the Jewish Women's Archive (JWA), a women's history archive located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, located in Jackson, Mississippi, initiated [Katrina]'s Jewish Voices (KJV), an oral history project dedicated to telling the stories of Jewish lives affected by the disaster.

Is there a uniquely "Jewish experience" of Katrina? "A city is made up of different communities, and the hurricane did not discriminate among them," Gail Twersky-Reimer, director of the JWA, tells The Jerusalem Report. "So we should know how each community fared, for better or worse. Understanding how the Jewish community responded to itself and to the needs of others tells us an important story about the Jewish community in New Orleans and in America, and about the meaning of community in America in general."

"There was also a very practical Jewish component to the way that many New Orleans Jews navigated the storm's aftermath," [Karla Goldman] writes. "What was so striking after Katrina was that whatever one's level of identification or affiliation and whatever the location or nature of the receiving community, Jews found that if they sought assistance as Jews (and often even if they didn't), there was a Jewish community there eager, ready, and prepared to assist them.