Shylock

Go here to pre-register by May 8. 

At the core of this class is an examination of seminal representations of Jews in English literature. The first three classes will be devoted to the three most iconic Jewish characters of the last 400 years: Shylock, Fagin, and Leopold Bloom. In our last class, we will look at a portrait of a Jew in present-day England, Samuel Finkler, by the contemporary novelist, Howard Jacobson.

In a way, this is a class for those of you who have been meaning to brush up on those classics that you read so many years ago (or perhaps never got around to!). But it’s also much more than that: it’s an exploration of the entanglements of history, politics, and literature—all through the lens of Jewishness. Though we will be dealing mostly with texts, each class will be multimedia in nature, as we’ll consider the complex history of visual representations of these characters; thus, we’ll look at how they’ve been portrayed on the stage and on the big screen, in comics and in the popular imagination. The goal is for the class to be as interactive as possible, and to include a fun mixture of debate, play-acting, and conversation.

Joshua Millstein

While images of Jews can be found in English literature as far back as the medieval period, in this class we will take 1605 as the starting point. This is when Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was first performed at the court of King James. In contrast to the transparently anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews that had long populated English literature, Shakespeare created a new type of Jew: one who is endowed with the gifts of dignity and pathos—one who is, ultimately, fully human.

In turning to Fagin, from Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and Leopold Bloom, from Joyce’s Ulysses, we will consider how these characters reflect changing attitudes toward Jews in 19th century England and 20th century Ireland. A counterpoint to such texts will be offered by a reading of Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question. This book, by a contemporary Jewish author, tells the story of a friendship between a non-Jew and a Jew in present-day-England, and in doing so it offers a profound meditation on the meaning of Jewishness and Jewish identity. It also provides an important perspective on the history of Jews in English literature.

More fundamentally, we will reflect on the deeper questions at stake here, such as: What are the powers and limits of imagining the life and worldview of another human being? What are the restrictions on the power of empathy? Do we feel able, in 21st-century America, to imagine the life and experiences of a stranger, someone who is — on the surface, at least — completely different from us?

Check out the courses here or see a PDF of the summer catalog here.

The Ginsberg programs are also in partnership with the Mechanics’ Institute Library, City Lights Booksellers, Poetry Flash, Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, and The Beat Museum.

Peretz Wolf-Prusan
(Photo by: Michael Krasnobrod)

Lehrhaus’ Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan is participating in three Shavuot events around the Bay Area in May.

On Tuesday, May 14, Rabbi Peretz is a teacher at Tikkun Leil Shavuot at the JCC East Bay in Berkeley. He is presenting An Unexpected Re-Creation: Chaos to Order and Back Again from 6:50-7:45 pm.

Register for the JCC East Bay’s program here.

Later that night, Rabbi Peretz heads to San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom for Shavuot Corridor Crawl: A Progressive Torah Study from Shul to Shul – Tikkun Leil Shavuot. From 10:30-11:30 pm, he leads a workshop titled An Unexpected Re-Creation of Chaos and Order in the Torah and Mishnah.

San Francisco’s complete Shavuot program, taking place at four locations, can be viewed here.

On Thursday, May 16, Rabbi Peretz is involved with the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s program RitLab: Create, Nosh, Shavuot from 5:30-8 pm. He has the first shift at Reboot’s Ask a Rabbi booth. Ask Rabbi Peretz your questions from approximately 5:30-6:15 pm.

More information on the CJM’s event is available here.

Steingroot shares additional thoughts about the importance of Kabbalah here:

The triumphant rational monotheism of medieval Jewish philosophy was in danger of stripping Judaism of compelling reasons for living a Jewish spiritual life.  Gershom Scholem called Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), “the vengeance of myth against its conquerors.” Kabbalah retrieved the lost sparks of myth and magic in the Tanach (Bible) and in the everyday practice of Judaism. In doing so, it saved Judaism from becoming merely Talmudic legalism or orthodox formalism. Simultaneously it carried on its own struggle with the dangers of Messianism, heresy and madness. The chef-d’oeuvre of Kabbalah is the monumental Zohar. Passages from the Zohar,  far from being dry, cryptic and abstruse, contain a deep poetic and mythic dimension that gives meaning to the fulfillment of the mitzvot (commandments). Composed in 13th century Spain, the Zohar is a  a poetic novel about Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his students traveling around an imaginary ancient Holy Land while crowning their adventures with a mystical commentary to sacred text. We will discover the key that opens up the esoteric aspects of this book, second only to the Tanach and Talmud in its importance to Jewish culture and endurance.

We will also consider how and why the great works of Kabbalah have influenced so many modern writers like W. B. Yeats, Franz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, Harold Bloom and Jorge Luis Borges. Whether you know nothing about the subject or have already done some reading in this area, the class should provide both a solid introduction as well as a unique perspective on a fascinating topic that is too often linked with charlatanry and New Age superficiality. In fact, the issues the Kabbalah raises are still central to the question of Jewish practice today: will we perform empty rituals and engage in casuistical arguments or will we accept the charge given to us by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook that “the old new may become new and the new may become holy.”

Steingroot’s classes are always warmly received. We hope you will join us! Here is what one student had to say about him:

“Ira is a wonderful combination of academic and regular guy. When he was teaching about pagan sources, he spoke of God’s phallus very matter-of-factly, but he still got laughs from the class.” — Dawn Kepler

Building Jewish Bridges Director Dawn Kepler discusses the motivation for the What Color Are Jews? programs.

A 2004 study of the Bay Area Jewish population found that 14% of families in our community include Jews of color. That means that at least every 10th Jew you see is a multiracial Jew or lives in a multiracial family. But that was nine years ago. That percentage can only have grown.

You would think that San Francisco is the ideal place to grow up Jewish and Asian. Certainly there are more Asian Jews here than in Chicago. But a slightly elevated number of Asian Jews has not stopped whites, Jewish or not, from saying, “Gee, you don’t look Jewish.”  What is it like to live as a Jew whose identity is constantly questioned?  There are advantages to growing up being told you are a Jew.  But there are also advantages to being an adult, better able to put stupid comments into perspective. How does the experience of a Jew who converts as an adult differ from that of the child who grows up going to Hebrew school, has a Bar or Bat mitzvah and a trip to Israel?

In the 1960s, a nice Jewish boy married a nice Chinese girl, bought a house in San Francisco and joined Sherith Israel. The deed to their new home stated that the property could not be sold to Jews or Chinese. In some ways, that was a long time ago and things have certainly changed since then, but what challenges remain to being Jewish and Chinese?

On May 5, Building Jewish Bridges, a program of Lehrhaus Judaica, will partner with Sherith Israel to present a panel of Asian Jews telling their stories. Some of these individuals grew up at Sherith Israel and attended Hebrew school. How has their experience impacted their identity, their own decisions about raising children, and what would they ask us, their fellow Jews, to do in order to better support their Jewish lives? How can we be better allies to our fellow Jews?

We hope through these community discussions to develop a more sensitive community, ready to care for each other, to help raise all our children, and to integrate those who come to our community and are seeking a connection.

Hear UCSF Medical Center professionals present the latest on healthy living.

Engage with local businesses and organizations that provide valuable resources to stay
energized.

Tune into insights, opportunities and challenges supporting active, creative aging.

Take advantage of classes, health screenings, chair massage, raffles, giveaways and much,
much more!

Thursday, April 25, 2013
Speakers: 9:30 am – 2:45 pm
Resource Fair: 10:00 am – 2:00 pm

The Jewish Community Center of San Francisco
3200 California Street @ Presidio

Free – Everyone is welcome

Advance registration highly recommended – Please call 415.292.1200
For more information, contact Shiva Schulz @ sschulz@jccsf.org or 415. 292.1260.
Sponsored by UCSF Medical Center

Presented by Renowned Israeli Concert Pianist and Scholar, Dr. Astrith Baltsan

You are invited to enjoy a special musical performance of Hatikvah. On Friday, April 5, 8:30 p.m., the Beth Am Israel Awareness Committee has the honor of welcoming the renowned Israeli concert pianist and scholar Dr. Astrith Baltsan, who will present her astonishing Hatikvah program at Beth Am. The program is described as, “…a special show presenting revolutionary, up-to-date research on Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah – from ancient Sephardic Jewish prayer, to classical music by Mozart and Smetana; from Rumanian folk songs to the first Jewish settlements in Israel.”

Learn more at www.betham.org/onegisrael           Please watch a video clip at http://youtu.be/NbirbjMkpdY

The program is free, but your contribution is very much appreciated, and allows Beth Am to continue offering these Israeli cultural programs. Please send your donation to Congregation Beth Am with a note “For Oneg Israel.” Please note that parking space is available across the street at the Stanford University lot if the Beth Am lot is full.

This award winning documentary is a remarkable chronicle of thirty eight Ukrainian Jews who lived in a cave for eighteen months to hide from pursuing Nazis.  Their story remained untold for over fifty years, until an American cave enthusiast uncovered the secrets they left underground: a child’s shoe, a broken button, an unlikely bed. In No Place on Earth, the survivors tell their story for the first time after keeping it quiet for so long, if only because it was too impossible to believe.

Directed by Janet Tobias

April 12th – 18th at Embarcadero Center Cinema

1 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, CA 94111

For advance tickets & group sales at either theater, please contact: sara@filmpresence.com

“A substantial contribution to Holocaust cinema, “No Place on Earth” defies the notion that the era has been exhausted of its stories, or the ways they can be told.” - Variety

In 1996, Chris Nicola, an ex-NYC cop and world-renowned cave explorer, makes a discovery deep underground in the largest cave system in the Ukraine. Buttons, shoes, a key and names scrawled on the cave wall, are mute testimonies to what happened here long ago. The story that Nicola has stumbled upon begins in 1942, when Ukrainian authorities, in conjunction with the Nazi occupiers, begin rounding up the Jews for deportation to concentration camps. Encouraged by one mother’s burning wish to save her children, five families defy the soldiers and descend into the eerie cave system outside of their town. It is the beginning of a 544 day odyssey into a dark, damp maze and never-ending night. No Place On Earth recounts the longest recorded underground survival in human history.