Join Morgan Blum and Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan for an evening information session to learn more about this tour:

February 16, 6:00 – 7:30 pm
at the JFCS Holocaust Center, 2245 Post Street, San Francisco

or

February 23, 6:00 – 7:30 pm
in the JFCS Library, 2150 Post Street, San Francisco

RSVP: KatieC@jfcs.org or 415-449-3717

More bios and photos will be posted as they become available.

Kim Carter grew up in New Jersey and has lived on the West Coast for the last 15 years. She works in the social justice field, helping workers win fair treatment and good working conditions on the job. Kim is a member of Temple Beth Abraham, a conservative synagogue in Oakland, and sits on the Regional Council of the Progressive Jewish Alliance/Jewish Funds for Social Justice.

Shayna Maxine Gelender serves as the Organizing & Community Engagement Director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California where she supervises the organizing team, leads planning and implementation of community engagement and membership recruitment programs, and develops organizing strategies for grassroots participation in advocacy campaigns.  She has worked with ACLU for over 10 years in the areas of youth empowerment, field, and community organizing. Shayna was named Emerging Social Justice Leader in 2009 by the Progressive Jewish Alliance, where she now co-chairs the Bay Area Regional Council for the combined organization Progressive Jewish Alliance & Jewish Funds for Justice. Shayna is a founder and former Membership Director of the Good Ol’ Girls as well as former Membership Director of the East Bay Young Democrats. In 2004, Shayna earned a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy from Mills College in Oakland, California.  She lives with her partner in Alameda. (Photo by Bob Hsiang Photography)

A community Maggid, wilderness guide, youth mentor, environmental educator and attorney, Zelig Golden brings over a decade of visionary leadership to the Jewish environmental movement. To help connect people and community to their highest purpose, Zelig develops and guides programs such as the Jewish Vision Quest, B’naiture, and Wilderness Torah’s annual cycle of land-based pilgrimage festivals. A former member of the Hazon Board of Directors, he co-chaired Hazon’s 2008 Food Conference. Zelig derives much inspiration from his 2006 season farming, teaching and pickling at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center’s Adamah program; as well as his years as a Colorado Outward Bound instructor, an Alaskan back country park ranger and a life-long explorer of wild places. Until recently, he worked as an environmental attorney for the Center for Food Safety to protect our food and farms. Zelig holds a B.S. in ecology from the University of Washington and a J.D. from the Berkeley School of Law. He received smicha from Reb Zalman Schacter-Shalomi as Maggid, Gabbai, and Mentor of Torah on Lag B’Omer 5771. He teaches at his home congregation, Chochmat HaLev, in Berkeley.

Robi Feliz Saphyra is an executive assistant at the Oshman Family JCC.

Rona Teitelman is a member of Beth Israel in Berkeley and her son attends Oakland Hebrew Day School. She is also a member of the Berkeley Midrasha board.

Register here.

Keynote:

Fred Rosenbaum: Controversies That Shook the Bay Area Jewish Community

While remarkably blessed compared to other Jewish communities, Bay Area Jewry has nonetheless been faced with major crises—internal and external—for more than a century and a half. It endured the turmoil of the Gold Rush decade and later the earthquake and fire, absorbed Jews from all over the world, and was forced to respond to the Holocaust, Zionism, and the Soviet Jewry movement. Through it all, a Jewish identity emerged in Northern California like nowhere else.

Panels

Panel 1: The Pioneer Period (Moderator: Francesco Spagnolo)

Ava F. Kahn: The Jews Rushed In: A Multi-Ethnic Community by the Bay
With news of the first gold finds Jews from as far away as Australia and Europe began journeys to the Golden Gate. There they joined native-born American Sephardim, Poles, Germans, English, French and New Zealanders in creating a new vibrant multi-ethnic Jewish community on the Pacific Rim.

Frances Dinkelspiel: “Our Crowd” West: The Shaping of San Francisco and Its Jewish Community

Mary Ann Irwin: Private Charity and Public Activism: Jewish Women in San Francisco, 1855-1911
Jewish women’s  community service work in the 1850s in San Francisco, took place in both “private” and “public” domains, through the charitable associations they formed (such as the Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society) and assisted in building (Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum, Mt. Zion Hospital). In the 1890s and early 20th century, thw next generation engaged  in public activism, creating new organizations to solve social problems, from keeping dependent and delinquent youth out of adult jails, to inspecting dairies for bovine tuberculosis, to securing votes for women.

Panel 2: Between World Wars (Moderator: Stephen Mark Dobbs)

Kenneth L. Kann: The Jewish Radical Experience: Petaluma and Beyond
In the 1920′s and 1930′s, Petaluma not only was the “Egg Basket of the World,” but also a nest for Jewish Communists, Socialists, Zionists, Anarchists and other radicals who arrived from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and the sweatshops New York’s Lower East Side. Though a distance to the north, the radical Petaluma Jewish chicken ranchers played significant role in the Greater Bay Area Jewish community between the wars.

Fred Rosenbaum: The Cataclysms of the 1940s: How Bay Area Jews Responded to the Holocaust and Zionism
Despite a century of acceptance and accomplishment, local Jews were poorly mobilized in the face of the Shoah and bitterly divided on the issue of Zionism. What accounts for the tragic failure of Jewish leadership in the Bay Area during the pivotal decade of the 1940s?

Ellen Eisenberg: To Cry Down Injustice? Bay Area Jewish Responses to the Japanese- American Internment
The presentation will provide an overview of the range of Jewish responses to the removal of Japanese Americans from the Bay Area, highlighting both the communal silence and the protest of individual Jewish activists.

Panel 3: From the 60’s to the Present (Moderator: Marc Klein)

Rabbi David Cooper: Jewish Student & Youth Activism after 1967: Soviet Jewry, Anti-War, Dissent on Israel
The activist Jewish youth of the 1960’s and 70’s were often multi-taskers working within the context of several causes simultaneously – causes that today we do not readily associate with each other. Those young activists have become today the old-timers in many different Jewish institutions and even in opposing camps.

Deborah Kaufman: Innovative Cultural Institutions
For many years, the Bay Area was a hot house incubating new American Jewish culture. How and why did so many creative people and institutions thrive here?

Rabbi Yoel Kahn: Twice Blessed & Challenged: Coming Out/In to the Jewish Community
In 1976, three Jewish men founded Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco. No synagogue would give them a room to meet in and the Northern California Jewish Bulletin refused to publish ads announcing their Shabbat services. In the decades that followed, GLBT Jews have strived to build positive identity and community, moving from invisibility and denial to inclusion and outreach, while wrestling to find the balance between integration, assimilation, separation.

Rabbi Dorothy Richman: Religious Innovation: House of Love & Prayer, Aquarian Minyan, and Jewish Meditation
Beginning with the cultural tectonic shifts of the 60′s, the Bay Area Jewish community entered a period of religious innovation and many new forms of worship and communal religious life emerged. They continue to play key roles in the community’s spiritual life today.

Workshops

(By Presenter’s Last Name)

Aryae Coopersmith: From the Summer of Love to the House of Love and Prayer
In the late 1960s, when spiritual teachers from all over the world, and young people from all over the United States, were converging in the Bay Area to find each other, one of those teachers, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, had a vision of house where “everyone who was longing for the Great Day of love and peace” could come and find each other. This house became a well-known part of the legend of 1960s San Francisco, and a milestone in the renewal of Judaism in America.

Ellen Eisenberg: Workshop: From Protest to Collaboration: California Jews and Japanese- American Internment
The workshop will guide participants in exploring the reasons for Jewish communal silence in the face of Japanese American removal from the West Coast, and examine what motivated some individuals to break the silence and protest the policy. In addition, the Bay Area Jewish response will be compared to that in L.A., where an organized Jewish group played a key role in generating the anti-Japanese American propaganda that fueled support for the internment policy.

Ava F. Kahn: Two Women who Changed the West: Mary Goldsmith Prag and Her Daughter Florence Prag Kahn
As a five year old, in 1852, Mary Goldsmith Prag arrived in Gold Rush San Francisco. There Mary became a teacher, labor activist, and board of education member. Her daughter, Florence Prag Kahn represented San Francisco in the United States House of Representatives, the first Jewish Congresswomen. Together mother and daughter defined what it meant to be a Jewish women in the far west.

Marc Klein: From the Mid ’80s Until Today: The Community Controversies and How the Jewish Bulletin/j. Covered Them
What is it like running a community-owned paper and covering embarrassments in the Jewish world that many people would like swept under the rug? Should a Jewish newspaper be a schmooze gazette or an investigate journal? Or is there something in between? This discussion will examine controversies over the years and how our Jewish newspaper handled them … or not.

Steve Rivo: America’s First Jewish Photographer Goes West
Preview screening of selections from Carvalho’s Journey, a new PBS documentary film, presented by producer/director Steve Rivo.  Carvalho’s Journey is a feature-length documentary film about Solomon Nunes Carvalho (1815-1897), a pioneering Sephardic Jewish daguerreotypist and artist born in Charleston, South Carolina.  The film tells the saga of Carvalho’s extraordinary trip across America in 1853 as the first photographer to accompany an exploring expedition to the West.

Gina Waldman: The Struggle for Soviet Jewry
As one of the key grass roots leader of the movement to free Soviet Jewry in the Bay Area, Regina Waldman saw the struggle “up close and personal.”  She will share her reflections on the evolution of the movement, its key successful strategies and the view, in retrospect, of how it has impacted the local Jewish community, both as a lesson in activism and in bringing significant numbers of Jews form the former Soviet Union to our community.

Peretz Wolf-Prusan: Camp Swig: Summers of Love, Art and Creating Jewish Identity
UAHC Camp Saratoga / Camp Swig became well known for its emphasis on the arts and social activism.  The artistic highlight of each summer was the Hagigah arts session featuring professional artists-in-residence.  The presenter, Peretz Wolf-Prusan, was active at Swig in the 70’s when the artistic bar was set high and the camp culture was infused with the joy of experiential and confluent learning.  A special part of this multi-media presentation will be the extraordinary story of the Holocaust Memorial Chapel and its visionary, Helen Burke, camp artist in residence.

 Register here.

Register here.

Presenters’ Biographies

Rabbi David J. Cooper serves Kehilla Community Synagogue. In high school in the late 60s, he was in USY’s Leader Training Fellowship, Hashomer Hatza’ir, SDS’s High School Student Mobilization Committee, and Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. He has been active in the Jewish Renewal movement for three decades.

Aryae Coopersmith, author of Holy Beggars: a Journey from Haight Street to Jerusalem, a memoir from inside the 1960s San Francisco spiritual revolution, co-founded Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s House of Love and Prayer in 1968. In his professional life he is Founder & CEO of the HR Forums, whose members are Silicon Valley’s human resource executives. In recognition of his lifetime of Jewish teaching and service, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi has ordained him as a Jewish spiritual teacher. 

Frances Dinkelspiel (Panel: The Pioneer Age) is a journalist and the author of the bestselling Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant named Isaias Hellman Created California. A co-founder of Berkeleyside.com, a two-year old news website about Berkeley, her freelance work has appeared in the New York. She is a graduate of Stanford University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Mercury News, People Magazine, and San Francisco magazine Journalism and has taught at UC Berkeley.

Stephen Mark Dobbs (Moderator, Between the Wars Period Panel) is a native San Franciscan who was educated at Stanford and who has been a long-time student of San Francisco history and especially its Jewish story. After an academic career teaching as a professor of humanities at San Francisco State University, Stephen began a second career in foundations and philanthropy, including Rockefeller and Getty where he was senior program officer.  He is a former President and CEO of the Koret Foundation and of the Marin Community Foundation, and has served in executive capacities with Osher, Taube, and Grand. Stephen currently works with several Bay Area family philanthropies.

Alla Efimova, Ph.D., Jacques and Esther Reutlinger Director, is a curator and art historian with a particular interest in the visual culture of modern Jewry. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History/Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. A former lecturer at the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Art History, Alla has contributed many essays to art history and film journals, museum catalogs, and edited volumes. Before coming to the Judah L. Magnes Museum, Alla was Associate Curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she brought interdisciplinary, culturally comparative perspective to exhibitions ranging in themes from 18th-century decorative arts to contemporary media and photography.

Ellen Eisenberg (Between Wars Panel and a Workshop) is the Dwight and Margaret Lear Professor of American History at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She is the author of Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey, 1882-1920 (1995) and co-authored Jews of the Pacific Coast: Reinventing Community on America’s Edge (2009) with Ava Kahn and Bill Toll. Her monograph, The First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII, was a 2008 National Jewish Book Award finalist.

Mary Ann Irwin (Pioneer Period Panel) teaches history at San Francisco Bay Area colleges, including Diablo Valley College, Chabot College, Laney, San Francisco State University, and California State University, East Bay. Her published works include: Robert W. Cherny, Mary Ann Irwin, and Ann Marie Wilson, eds., Women and Politics: California from the Gold Rush to the Great Depression (University of Nebraska Press, October 2011); Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, Richard J. Orsi, and Mary Ann Irwin, The Elusive Eden: A New History of California (4th ed.) (McGraw-Hill, September, 2011); “Sex, War, and Community Service: The Battle for San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 32, Issue 1 (May 2011) (winner, National Coalition of Independent Scholars Eisenstein-DeLacy Award best article award); and “‘The Air is Becoming Full of War:’ Jewish San Francisco and World War I,” Pacific Historical Review,  Vol. 74, Issue 3 (August 2005).

Ava F. Kahn (Pioneer Period Panel & Workshop) holds a Ph.D. in history from UCSB. Upon graduation she accepted an appointment as Research Associate at the Western Jewish History Center of the Magnes Museum. Since leaving the Magnes, Kahn served as a visiting scholar at the California Studies Center, University of California, Berkeley and continued to teach. Her publications include: Jews of the Pacific Coast: Reinventing Community on America’s Edge (2010) co-authored; California Jews (2003, paperback 2011) co-edited; Jewish Life in the American West: Immigration, Settlement and Community (2002); Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush: A Documentary History, 1849-1880 (2002). This year Kahn received Prinz Memorial Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives for her research on American Jewish military doctors and their families during WWI.

Kenneth Kann is a historian who has written two books on Jewish-American history: Joe Rapoport, the Life of a Jewish Radical (Temple University Press, 1981) and Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, the Story of a California Jewish Community (Cornell University Press, 1993).

Rabbi Yoel Kahn, Ph.D. (Panel: 60s to the Present) is Rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Berkeley.  He was the rabbi of Congregation Sha’ar Zaha, between 1985-1996 and has been a leader for gay visibility and rights in the Reform rabbinate and Reform Judaism throughouthis rabbinate.   His book, The Three Blessings: Boundaries, Censorship and Identity in Jewish Liturgy, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011.

Deborah Kaufman (Panel: 60s to the Present) is a documentary filmmaker based in Berkeley. Prior to her work in film, she was the founder and Director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the first and largest of its kind in the world.

Marc S. Klein (Panel Chair and Workshop: From the mid ’80s Until Today: The Community Controversies and How the Jewish Bulletin/J Covered Them)  is the retired editor and publisher of J. the Jewish news weekly of Northern California. Klein led the weekly newspaper for close to 28 years. Under his direction, J — earlier known as the Jewish Bulletin — became the first Jewish newspaper in America to publish its entire contents online beginning in 1995. Klein in 1995 also operated the only Jewish area on America Online at keyword Jewish and at www.jewish.com. Prior to coming to the Bulletin, he was editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia for two and a half years. Before that Klein worked for daily newspapers and at age 30 became the youngest assistant managing editor of the former Philadelphia Bulletin.  Klein and his wife live in the East Bay. They have two adult daughters.

Steve Rivo (Workshop: America’s First Jewish Photographer Goes West) is an award-winning documentary producer and the founder of Down Low Pictures. He has produced, directed or written documentaries for PBS, MTV, Discovery, MSNBC, TruTV, Court TV, VH1 and independently. Over a 17-year career in non-fiction film and TV, he has received major industry honors including Emmys, Du-Pont-Columbia, Peabody, IDA, Telly and Cine Golden Eagle awards.  He is co-producer of the PBS series New York: A Documentary Film (directed by Rick Burns), producer of two of Burns’ films for PBS’ American Experience: Eugene O’Neill and Ansel Adams, producer/director of NYC: Inside/Out for Discovery Channel, director, and producer and writer of numerous true-crime documentaries for Court TV’s The Investigators and Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege and Justice, and Senior Producer for The Vice Guide to Everything.  Steve has also completed a number of film projects for non-profit groups and institutions including the American Institute of Architects, the Center for Online Judaic Studies, Columbia University and Random House, Inc. A graduate of Columbia University, he teaches film and television in the MFA program at Hofstra University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Francesco Spagnolo (Panel Chair) is a multidisciplinary scholar focusing on Jewish studies, music and digital media, is the Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley. Intersecting textual, visual and musical cultures, he actively contributes to academic, cultural heritage and archival institutions, as well as live and electronic media in Europe, Israel and the United States. A fo r mer lecturer at the University of Milan and at UC Santa Cruz, and host for the cultural programs of Italian National Radio, he frequently lectures at academic institutions worldwide, publishes on a variety of subjects, and curates exhibitions and digital programs. Francesco holds a Laurea in Philosophy from the University of Milan (1994) and a PhD in Musicology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2007).

Regina (Gina) Waldman:  The Struggle for Soviet Jewry Gina Waldman was born in Libya and spent her early childhood there. When she was 19, following the 1967 War she and her family fled under growing threat of violence from their neighbors and government  (see her story at: http://www.jimena.org/gw.htm).  Having settled in the Bay Area, she co-founded the movement to free Soviet Jewry, acting as its Director from 1970 to 1987.  Ten years ago she returned to her roots and founded JIMENA- Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, which “seeks recognition for the nearly one million Jews indigenous to the Middel East and North Africa who were displaced from their country of origin… and is dedicated ot he preservation of Mizrahi iand Sephardi culture and history.” Gina has testified before the UN about the displacement and property disenfranchisement of about one million Jews of North African and Middle Eastern countries. She has received many honors including the Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award and the Woman of the Year Award from the State Assembly of California.

Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan (Workshop: Camp Swig: Summers of Love, Art and Creating Jewish Identity) After volunteering in Israel in 1973, Peretz came to the Bay Area to teach art at UAHC Camp Swig and study at the San Francisco Art Institute.  After a decade of creating Ketubot, printmaking, and working in informal education, he, along with his wife, Becki and one-year-old Leora, traveled back to Israel (1985) to learn at the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem and Cincinnati (best of all, adding Avital and Noah to the family along the way). For twenty years Peretz served Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco, as rabbi and senior educator. In 2002 he was awarded the Covenant Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the transmission of Jewish knowledge, values, and identity. Peretz joined the leadership team and teaching faculty of Lehrhaus Judaica in October 2010.  He is currently also a Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

Register here.