Marc Dollinger
The Jews of California

Professor Marc Dollinger | The Jews of California | 02.15.24

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- All right. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Today we are joined by Marc Dollinger, who is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. He has authored many articles and four books, including “Quest for Inclusion,” “Jews in Liberalism in Modern America,” “California Jews,” and “American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader,” and “Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s.” He’s currently writing his fifth book, “Power and Privilege: Jews, the Identity Project in the Modern University.” Today, Marc is speaking with us about the Jews of California. So when you’re ready, Marc, I will hand over to you.

• Thank you so much. This wonderful picture is from New Year’s Eve between 1905 and 1906, and yes, these are my great-grandparents, Albert and Sarah Dollinger. And that photograph was taken in San Francisco, California four months before the devastating earthquake and fire struck in April of 1906. And for Albert, at least, when his parents were in Eastern Europe in a place in Hush, Romania, they received a letter from friends of theirs who had immigrated earlier to the United States. And the letter said, “If you want to be poor all your life, go to New York, but if you want to be rich,” they said, “go to the other side.” And the other side for them was, of course, California. Today we’re going to answer the question, how does the California Jewish historical experience prove significant? When I teach my classes at SF State, they always get an historical question and they get the thesis so they’ll know at the front end what question we’re trying to answer and what my argument will be.

So with all due respect, to everyone here who have roots in New York or even New Jersey, I argue, contrary to the typical New York-centered historiography, we’ll get to that word in a moment, the American Jewish experience moves from west to east. California Jews situated on the edge of the continent, and I got this, the Reform Movement’s Rabbinic Association held their annual meeting a few years ago here in San Francisco, and I gave the keynote address. And the theme that they picked for their conference in San Francisco was American Jewish Life on the edge of the continent. And then they spent a few days here sort of reflecting on San Francisco and California. So California Jews situated on the edge of the continent face the greatest threats to Jewish identity, and we can certainly get into that in Q&A as well when it comes to the demographic numbers, just as they also innovate for the rest of the country. So for the former history majors amongst us, this will be a moment for you. If you’re watching with somebody else, you can impress your friends.

We’re going to start with an easy vocabulary word, and that is history. And this is really just a setup for what’s coming next. So we’ll just argue that history is the study of the past. This is the more challenging question. So for the English majors amongst us, you can try to do an etymology of this word. For the history majors, maybe you learned it as undergrads or perhaps even in graduate school. And here we want to look at this part of it where it says graph. So we have the graphing of history. So historiography is the history of the writing of history, because as it turns out, about every 20 years or so, well, one could say history changes. History doesn’t actually change. History is the same thing. But a new generation of history professors will go through graduate school, write their dissertations, publish their first books, and what they’re going to do is challenge all the earlier generations of scholars on whatever they thought was true. So we’re going to do a little bit of history today on “California Jews,” but mostly we’re going to do historiography.

So let’s get into this. Oh yes, from one of my teachers, the late rabbi, Professor Dr. Michael Signer most recently of Notre Dame, who says, “Why use a monosyllabic when a polysyllabic will do?” And here’s the definition of historiography. I want to get to this word. This is a really challenging polysyllabic. I’ll read it out loud for you. Fileopietistic. Fileopietistic. No fair looking at computer devices to get the translations of this. But if you think you know what it is, say it out loud. If you’re watch it on your own, tell tell the people you’re viewing with if you think you know the answer. And I’ll give it to you, it’s literally love, piety, from fileo, brothers or family. Literally, love of one’s own family, which in academic terms is ethnic self-congratulations. And since I’m in Jewish studies, it translates to aren’t the Jews great? And fileopietistic is the notion that when we write Jewish history, in this case, California Jewish history, we’re writing it from a perspective of celebration. And the first generation of scholarship in most all ethnic studies, Jewish studies, Black studies, women’s studies, I mean you can just pick the name.

The first generation of scholars are really writing about the contributions of that group to history. Because of the first to write it, because there is no historical literature yet written, they really want to be the ones to make the claim of how historic their group is. Of course, if you’re a graduate student and you want your dissertation to be accepted by a university press, you’ve got to have a thesis, which is, and here’s the word, historiographically significant, which means you are a new generation of historical writing looking on the previous generation and basically calling them idiots and calling yourself brilliant. So the second generation in the historiography will usually critique, in our case, “California Jews.” The third generation, that they’re going to say, “Oh, your last two generations are spending too much time bickering between, the truth is somewhere in the middle,” which is a challenge for the fourth generation. Like, what are they going to do now? So they typically find like a new theme in the history, like the environment, California Jews and the environment, and then they’re off and running as well. So I offer you a challenge.

In the next week, if you can use the phrase, are you ready for this, fileopietistic historiographic analysis in conversation. Send me an email, I will send you a prize. No matter where in the world you are, you will get a prize. You can say that you went to the Zoom class and learned about fileopietistic historiographic analysis. That’s too easy. I’m going to keep repeating this phrase. You have to have an ongoing conversation for which the phrase, fileopietistic historiographic analysis, naturally occurs. Probably the best way to sort of describe, we’ll go back to the historiography word, is to imagine, let’s say you’re a student at the University of South Carolina, and let’s say 1840, if that’s the case, you’re going to be white, probably male. And at the University of South Carolina, let’s say you’re taking the first year U.S. History Survey course and you get the textbook, and let’s just say the textbook is published by the University of South Carolina Press. And you open up to the chapter on slavery, ‘cause that’s the week’s lesson is on slavery, and you read the chapter on slavery. What do you think in 1840, the University of South Carolina Press is going to say about slavery? And if you’re thinking it’s going to be complimentary, you are right. Because in the 1840s, there are actually seven distinct arguments in favour of enslaving, and these students are going to learn it.

All right, just to kind of dramatise the point, let’s make it 1860, let’s move you to the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and let’s make the textbook published by UMass Boston. We’ll put you in the same history class, same lesson on slavery, read the chapter on slavery. And what’s that chapter going to say? You got it. Boston is the centre of the abolitionist movement. It’s going to be very much anti-slavery. So just for academic fun, what if you could put those two chapters side by side. You get somebody who doesn’t know anything about anything to read those two chapters, they will have no idea they’re actually reading about the same historical moment. That to me is sort of the best and most dramatic illustration of what historiography is. So for that, I’ll say that the first generation is typically fileopietistic, it’s self-congratulatory, love of one’s own family, literally. And the book that I co-edited, “California Jews,” with Ava Kahn is actually, this is already the third or fourth historiographic generation, but what I’m going to do today is really talk about the way we understood or have understood California Jewish history in the past against what the most recent scholarship has been telling us.

So first I want to give credit to the artist here, Robbie Saslow, who created this particular image. You know, this is for my family history. But what’s nice is it shows us a really great graph. And certainly, if you’ve got California Jewish roots anywhere and you know anything about your genealogy, you might be able to to trace here how your family arrived. But here, and we’re talking about the Ashkenazi immigration to California, or the European countries, some, of course, did the classic trip across the Atlantic. Of course, this would be Ellis Island, although the early migration to California predated the Statue of Liberty. And then there would be an overland route. And prior to the Civil War, that would have to be done on horseback. And after reconstruction ends and the Transcontinental Railroad is finished, then you can start doing that. Others came here, actually, I don’t have it listed here, but they actually went to Nicaragua. 'Cause Nicaragua prior to Panama really was kind of the best spot to get off the ship.

It’s about 50 miles of land there. And then you get on a new ship in the Pacific and then you head up to the north. Others sailed all the way around the Cape of Good Horn, around the tip of South America, and then sailed all the way back up here, ultimately, landing here on the West Coast of the United States in San Francisco. My family actually came around Cape Horn here, and then ultimately to Panama, and then made their way to San Francisco. So I’ve got some pop quiz questions for you. Because we’re in the webinar format, there’s no way that you can boast or brag that you know the answers to everyone who’s viewing, but you can at least shout it out to where you are. This is a hard one to start. If anyone knows who this person might be, and I’ll give you a moment just to think about it or to say it out. And now I’ll give away the answer.

This is Henrietta Szold. And Henrietta Szold is most famous as the founder of Hadassah. And while she was founding Hadassah and working on the early Zionist movement, she loved California. In fact, she considered California to be like its own version of a Promised Land. And in fact, in 1915, which was the time of the Second Aliyah, Szold thought that they should bring Zionists who were planning on making Aliyah, planning on immigrating to what was in Ottoman Palestine, bring them out to California. And she said that it would be a good training ground, and these are her words, “Because California resembles it.” It, meaning Ottoman Palestine. “California resembles it so closely in climate, geological formation, and agricultural problems and advantages while surpassing it in prosperity and technical progress.” I’ll share that she was most interested in the area around San Jose, California, the South Bay of Northern California, which is Silicon Valley today. Oh, if you can imagine if in 1915, she decided to buy up all that land as training ground, how good that would be today?

All right, pop quiz question number two is a bit easier. I hope more of you will see this person and know it is Louis Brandeis, associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the first Jewish person to sit on the court, of course. And he, oh, by the way, he also was the president of the American Zionist Federation. He was sort of like the leading American Jewish Zionist in his day. And in that spirit, he called Israel, quote, “A miniature California.” And here it’s a stained glass window installed at Congregation Shearith Israel in San Francisco in 1905. And this, again, is significant because the stained glass window was put up months before the earthquake and fire hit in April of '06. There’s a little bit of damage to it. Fortunately, it largely survived and they were able to take it down and repair the damage and put it back up. Okay, the part that’s somewhat obvious in this picture is that that’s Moses, Moshe Rabbeinu in Hebrew, Moses is carrying the 10 Commandments, delivering them from Sinai. Except when congregation share with Israel in San Francisco in 1905, decided they wanted a stained glass window of revelation, of the moment that God gives Torah to the Jewish people.

They didn’t place it in Sinai. And now, in the Californians, you have a little advantage, and look in the background, this is El Capitan and Half Dome. Yes, Moses is in Yosemite. According to California Jews, the Torah comes from central California, which I suppose if we’re going to rewrite Jewish history, maybe the tablets broke at Bridalveil Falls in Yosemite Valley. Maybe the Jews wandered 40 years in Fresno, California. And then, and only then did they make their way north to the corners of California and Buchanan Streets in San Francisco where the stained glass window came up. It’s great to see you all. It’s a pleasure and a thrill to get to teach in this really extraordinary programme. Here’s the book that I’m really going to be referencing today and just love that image of Moses in Yosemite Valley. So Professor Khan and I said that we definitely wanted to make that the cover of the book so people can see that. This is part of a book series that Brandeis University Press has published. And so if you’re from different cities in the United States, go check the website.

This is “Jews of Brooklyn,” and of course, there’s a whole lot of Jews in Brooklyn. And what they wanted to do with this book series was get professors to write a book for informed lay readers. So it is an academic book in that we’re trying to sort of push the limits of knowledge, and it’s written in a style and with vocabulary that we want everybody to be able to read and digest and enjoy. And probably the most challenging part of this is the editors at Brandeis Press told Professor Khan and I, no footnotes allowed. You imagine how hard it is to tell professors that they have to write an academic chapter in a book and they can’t use footnotes. So if you get the book, you’ll find out we’ve been mostly successful in preventing our contributors from using footnotes. I wanted to put the “Jews of Brooklyn” book up here to talk about historiography here, which is that the first major challenge to the historiography, the first major way that we wanted our book to sort of give a new generational perspective this is not New York. And the experience of Jews in California really differed. New York City has pretty much always been the centre of American Jewish life, demographically, economically, organizationally.

Therefore, anytime there’s a book called, I don’t know, “American Jewish History” on the cover, if you open the book up, it’s really New York Jewish history. So those of us who live out here in the west, and there are this “Jews of Texas” book that they’ve published as well. You know, we would like to bring some attention to the theme of regionalism. That it does matter which part of the country you’re raised in and which part of the country you live when it comes to what Jewish life looks like. So this was also graphically the first book written on California Jews probably in 25 or 30 years. So there had been a lot of knowledge that had been acquired since the previous, and now I’ll use the word historiographic generation of books were written, and here’s the first. Okay, so this is from the election of 1992. And not to give away the ending of it, but two California Jewish women, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, were elected to represent the State of California in the United States Senate. This is huge.

All right, first I want to say, okay, if you read the earlier versions of California history, the earlier historiography, you would only pretty much be reading about half the population. 'Cause back in the old days, they didn’t write about women. They wrote about men, they wrote about politics. And women were essentially erased from the history and from the historiography. So something that Professor Khan and I wanted to do early in this book is centre gender and centre the lives of California Jewish women because it is just remarkable. First to have two women elected to the Senate is great, but the fact that they’re two Jewish women and this happened in California, we thought was really meaningful. This one here for you. All right, so it’s a little bit more of a challenging picture. So my question to you is, who’s standing at the microphone? I actually don’t expect anyone to get the answer. This is not an easy one. But the one that you may be more interested in is who is seated at the table behind the speaker. And I’ll give a moment for both. I’ll start with the person at the table behind. That’s Eleanor Roosevelt, absolutely. The wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and an extraordinary woman who made great changes in this country.

So sometimes even by having to push back against her husband, certainly, on issues of civil rights and racial equality. She was way in the lead back in the 1930s. The woman at the microphone is named Florence Prag Kahn. And Florence Prag Kahn is actually the first Jewish woman elected to the United States Congress. Florence Prag Kahn from San Francisco, a member of the U.S. Congress. And as was often the case back in the day, her husband, Julius Kahn had the seat, and then he died while in office. And then she, well, she finished the term of her late husband, which oftentimes they appoint the spouse. But then she ran for reelection, and she kept getting reelected over and over again from California until she was voted out of office in 1936. So now how was it or why was it that she lost election in 1936? And I’m testing those of you that know FDR in the New Deal, we’re going back. Yes, it’s because she was a Republican. FDR was a Democrat, he won by huge numbers in 1932, 90% of American Jews in 1936 voted for FDR for president. It’s almost unanimous, But this is also another reason why we want to study California Jews.

Because in San Francisco, it was the Republican Party that was quite popular with Jews rather than the Democratic Party. I also have to say that the Republican Party of the turn of the 20th century and the early 20th century was very different than the one it is now. The Theodore Roosevelt, probably the most famous reformer, who is also a Republican. But if we’re going to get a more textured and complex understanding of “American Jewish History,” we’ve got to look at the regional differences. And in this case, we’ve got to look at California, 'cause we have had two senators who were Jewish women. The first Jewish woman came from California and she was a Republican. Oh, I love this ad. It’s for Levi’s Jeans. But depending on what kind of screen you have, if you look closely at this ad, you’ll see that it’s in Spanish. See the Levi’s company, which was San Francisco-based, Levi Strauss, probably the most famous San Francisco Jew of the Gold rush era, was selling his blue jeans, which, of course, what made that company famous and very successful, to Spanish-speaking population 'cause California especially, now Southern California, has a very large Spanish-speaking population. And if you want to sell jeans to them, you have to put an ad out like this.

Now what’s interesting about the historiography of the, what we call the historiographic significance of this ad, in most of “American Jewish History,” when we talk about writing the history of race relations in America, it’s usually Jews and Blacks, and it’s usually the north versus the south. That that tends to be what interracialness is and understood. But what if you’re taking a California-centered, and here we have it again, historiographic view? Now we need to look at Latinx populations, native Spanish speakers, and we have to see that if we look at the relationship between Jews and Latinos in California and then we can pair that between the relationship of Jews and blacks in the north and the south, then we can get a better understanding of what’s actually at the heart of these ethnic and racial differences. And we want to make sure we’re not universalizing an east coast or north south experience just because it’s the only one that we’ve studied. This is one example of race relations.

Here’s one that’s more sad. World War II, 67,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese descent were incarcerated. Now we used to use the word internment, and you’re probably familiar with the internment of Japanese Americans. We don’t use the word internment anymore because that was basically a word invented by those who were doing it. So they wouldn’t have to admit what they were really doing, which was incarcerating U.S. citizens. Taking away their property, taking away their constitutional rights, putting them into these various camps in the west. And so what you see here are some notices that were put up. This one is in San Francisco, which was the centre of the Japanese American population in the U.S. L.A. had a lot. Seattle and Portland, of course, as well, after FDR Signed Executive order 9066, which basically made the entire west coast a military base. And once he did that, he could have his general sort of order who gets to go where on the military base. So historiographically, we kind study how California Jews and even American Jews responded to this incarceration. And for my first book, for “Quest for Inclusion,” that was my dissertation, I started writing on it. And there wasn’t much to write because there, well, there’s been no scholarship on it, which is like a good reason to start writing on it. And sadly, there’s not much historical evidence because it turns out California Jews didn’t really do that much. I was at a academic conference.

Oh, so it turned out there were three of us in “American Jewish History” who’ve written on this incarceration. I wrote on it 'cause I was writing on liberalism and social justice. My colleague, Cheryl Greenberg, who just retired from Trinity, she was trained, she’s a white Jewish woman trained in Black history. So she was looking at it through sort of a racial lens. And Ellen Eisenberg, who is department chair in Salem, Oregon, she was writing this from the perspective of West Coast Jewish history. And as these academic conferences go, the elevator door opened, I walked in the elevator, and of course, you stare at everybody’s name tag to see who they are and what book they wrote, and you compliment them on their book, you know? And I found that Ellen and Cheryl were standing in the elevator. And at this point we, the three of us were all in our 30s, and we’re like, “We’re the only three writing about incarceration,” we called it internment then, “and we’re all about the same age.” And then it dawned on us that is an historiographic insight that our parents’ generation of scholars we’re not writing about that. And during Q&A, if you want, we can get into that. There’s lots of reasons why that didn’t come up.

And those of us in the next generation, three of us came to the topic from three different academic directions. And I just have to say that was a great elevator ride ‘cause we were able to like quickly sort of chat up, chat on that. In terms of historiography, the most historiography-rich topic in Jewish studies, which is a fancy way of saying what subject in Jewish studies has more academic pages published than any other. Okay, my first thought was the Bible or the Torah, 'cause you would think the Bible would be the number one subject of study. Sadly it’s not. It’s the Holocaust, the Shoah, and that does make sense. To flip it around, if everybody is writing in during the World War II period about what was happening in Europe, nobody was talking about the World War II period and what was happening on the home front. And this is one of the reasons why the incarceration of US citizens of Japanese descent was not getting a lot of attention. This is Congregation Emanu-El. This is three buildings ago. This one sadly burned in a fire prior to 1906. And this was built in 1854. The Gold rush was in 1849. I just have to say the 49ers, it’s not a good week for the 9ers, but five years after the Gold Rush brought massive amounts of Jews to California.

They were not looking for gold. They were opening up the stores that sold things to the people coming to look for gold. And that of course, was a much more profitable business. Ellen Eisenberg was the one who actually figured this out in her chapter, and here’s what she figured out. During World War II, when the incarceration began, pretty much every Jewish person in the country was silent on incarceration. And I don’t want to just criticise Jews here because the Democratic Party supported incarceration. The Republican Party supported incarceration. It was really, I mean, pretty much everyone did, even the national board of the ACU, American Civil Liberties Union. The group you would think would be most opposed to what had just happened. They actually overturned the Seattle Chapter 'cause the Seattle Chapter said, “We don’t like it,” and national overturned. So the deeper question is what happens to democracies in times of war? That said, Professor Eisenberg realised that the San Francisco reform movement rabbis at Congregation Emanu-El opposed internment incarceration.

And they did that because they loved being California Jews. And they loved what this country and the State of California, and in their case, the city of San Francisco, gave them as Jews, which was almost unprecedented in terms of the success they enjoyed and not much antisemitism and business success and social inclusion. And because so many of Japanese ancestry also lived in San Francisco, they looked and saw their neighbours getting sent away. And they were like, “We don’t want that to happen 'cause we love America.” So it turns out, these rabbis were both anti-incarceration and anti-Zionist. They were not anti-Zionists like we have today. Today anti-Zionism is what we get on the college campuses, like my campus, it’s from the political left. It’s leftist anti-Zionism. This is right wing anti-Zionism. This is super patriotic, I love America, I don’t need a Jewish homeland, I’m perfectly fine living in California anti-Zionism. And Professor Eisenberg was the one who said, “Of course, if you love America so much that you don’t need to immigrate to what would become Israel, you are also going to love the America and love the Constitution enough to call it out when it’s being abused by your neighbours.”

So the Yiddish word is chutzpah. It means to have nerve or gull. And here’s a little bit of nerve and gull that Professor Khan and I had while we were putting this book together. We wanted a chapter written by an Israeli. Because if Israel is the Promised Land of the Jews and we were going to write a book about California being a Promised Land for the Jews, wouldn’t it be great to have an Israel chapter in there somewhere? So we found a professor at Tel Aviv University who had written a book about Israelis who left Israel and moved to Los Angeles. In fact, if anyone was here from L.A. or has L.A. connections, they lived where I used to live before I moved up here in the San Fernando Valley, which is north of downtown. And we called that, she called her book “Kibbutz San Fernando” because a lot of kibbutzniks left Israel and they came to the San Fernando Valley. So here’s kind of the funny story, a little bit embarrassing. If you read an academic book and also in “California Jews,” the introduction has a summary of each chapter. It’s basically each chapter’s thesis in one paragraph.

I tell my undergrads, “Read the introduction of every academic book slowly. 'Cause if you read that slowly and let it sink in, you’ll understand the entire book. And then you can move more quickly through the 300 pages that follow because all they’re going to do is support what you already have learned from the introduction.” So I read the chapter, “Kibbutz San Fernando,” I wrote up the paragraph for the introduction. And as a courtesy, I send each of those to the author of that chapter to make sure you know they like it. And the professor from Tel Aviv University wrote back and said, “You have completely missed the thesis of my chapter. You have it 180 degrees wrong,” which is really embarrassing to read and get it wrong. So I reread it and I got it right, at least in my own mind I got it right. So I wrote back, I said, “I think I got it right.” And then she wrote back and said, “I wrote a chapter that Kibbutzniks went to L.A., were really unhappy and are going to come back. And you wrote in the intro, 'A bunch of Israelis from Kibbutz moved to the San Fernando Valley, they’re happy and they’re staying.’”

And then I realised we have a difference between an Israeli Jew and an American Jew about whether or not those Israelis that came to California are going to go back or not go back. And of course, if you read the introduction, I used hers and not mine ‘cause she is the author. The editors told us, “Go write a chapter on Jewish surfing in California.” And Brandeis University Press then was headquartered in New Hampshire in Northern New England. And we’re like, “Of course someone from Northern New England thinks about California. It’s all going to be surfing.” We said, “No, we’re not going to do a chapter on surfing.” By the way, I’ve later learned that the championship surfer of the world or whatever in the 1950s was a California Jew. So maybe we could have actually had that chapter. But what Professor Khan and I, when we were talking about the historiography here, we said, “Surfing may not be our topic, but the Pacific Ocean should be. Because if we want to understand regional history in its own way and in a new way, it really, really is important that California sits alongside an ocean.”

So this is one of the images from the book, and it’s from Tashlich, which is a Jewish ritual that’s done, in the holidays, Rosh Hashanah, where you go to a free flowing body of water and you cast bread or seeds, depends on what you want to do to keep the birds healthy. You throw them into the ocean as a way of symbolically and ritually casting away your sins for the year. I know there’s a bunch of you that are in landlocked areas right now, and I know that there’s going to be some bodies of water if you’d like to observe this ritual of Tashlich, of casting away your sins. But if you’ve got, this is L.A., this is Venice Beach actually. If you have an ocean, and this is a synagogue, Mishkan Tefila, right on the beach. So for the people who pray there, they literally just walk out the front door, take off their shoes into the sand, and they can have a lot of Jewish religious observance because they’re California Jews.

Here is the Sutter Street Synagogue. This is a different version of Congregation Emanu-El. And I wanted to put this up here because, is for the architects amongst us? All right, there are stars of David on this building, if you look closely. But if you took away those stars of David and I don’t know, just put a cross up in its place, the building would work as a church. And that’s the point. Because when California Jews built their synagogues, they were living in such a wonderful sense of equality with their Christian neighbours that they, first of all, they had the money to put up a synagogue like this, in the early 20th century, which is show successful they were, and they also wanted to show that Jews can live side by side with Christians. And I make up a story to kind of talk about this, which is imagine a couple, like in the 1920s, so walking down the street on the Sutter Street Synagogue and they both look up at this gorgeous building, and one says to the other, “Look at that incredible church, I wonder who prays in that church?” And then their friend, who of course, knows, said, “Oh no, that’s not a church, that’s a synagogue. Jewish people pray there.” And then the first one would say, “Oh, well, those Jewish people, they pray in a wonderful church, you know?”

And that kind of illustrates for me what it was like for Jews who came to California to be able to experience a level of acceptance more quickly and deeper than most of the rest of the U.S. And I think we can make an argument for a whole lot of Jewish history, it wasn’t as good as that. We’re going to go back to the artwork of Robbie Saslow. He is a ketubah artist. Now the ketubah is the Jewish wedding contract. And in the mediaeval times, the ketubah, by the Jewish wedding contract, was what they called an illuminated manuscript. It’s a work of art. It was just gorgeous and meticulous and beautiful. And then over the centuries, and, well, by the time my parents were married in 1960, it was basically a mimeographed 8 ½ by 11 document that you folded in thirds and put in your safety deposit box. Thanks to the 1960s and the countercultural revolution, which has strong California roots, the ketubah returned to the notion of a piece of art, an illuminated manuscript.

This is a wedding ketubah of Vivien Braley and Ruben Arquilevich, who were also dear friends of mine. And I love this one because they incorporated the coastline of California here. They happen to meet at the Jewish summer camp in L.A. So this is sort of where they met at summer camp. This is Sedona in Arizona 'cause that’s where they were engaged. And here on the right, they were married at their summer camp in L.A. So they put that picture there. And then in the middle, they’ve got Hebrew and English, and these are modern egalitarian text. So it’s been sort of revised. So this is a California Jewish version of a traditional mediaeval Jewish document. And in terms of historiography of trying to do something different in our generation, love art, I love the colour and the imagery and the idea that we as students of history can learn from images, as well as just reading words in a book. To me was great. Robbie did the ketubah for Marci and I, for my wife. So I won’t say that.

The next one is my favourite ketubah 'cause it’s my favourite ketubah is mine, but here is my second favourite ketubah. And this belongs to Sari Scherer and Joel Poremba. And okay, I’ll tell you, they’re from L.A., and they are Dodger fans, like you wouldn’t believe. And they made their ketubah like Dodger’s Stadium. Now the funny part was when we got the page proofs on this, just when the book was in its final stages, this was a square. And I called them up and I said, “You got to move it 45 degrees. It has to be a diamond.” And they’re like, “Oh, can’t really do a diamond on the page. It doesn’t really fit very well.” I said, “You kind of have to understand that this image does not work as a square because it is a baseball diamond.” And then they found a way to work the spatials of the graphics to make it work. And so what I love here is that they have, all right, so basically, California Jewish identity is expressed visually in their ketubah. So here we have the contours of the skyline of Jerusalem in the infield. And all right, for those of you who are baseball fans, that gives a whole new meaning to the Infield Fly Rule if balls are going in here to Jerusalem. The infield, of course, is the text of their ketubah. And then in the outfield, they have put different images from their lives, from their dating, and from Judaism, right?

From Sukkot, we have the Torah here, the State of Israel, to show Zionism. Sadly, of course, Holocaust consciousness. The memory of the Shoah is something that is really in the post World War II generations of California Jews been a meaningful part that they, of course want, want to remember. Over here on the far left, we have Rosh Hashanah with the shofar and the apple and the honey. So I’ll share with you that some people have asked when I’ve done this talk about the score, about the points. And I said, well first of all, the bride is always going to win the game, on the wedding day, especially. We are commanded that the bride should smile on her wedding day. So I called Sari up and I said, “Okay, what the numbers? What significance are there?” And she said, “There’s no significance to the score of the game. That’s totally random.” But if you believe in the Kabbalah, you believe in Jewish mysticism, you believe in Hebrew numerology and the secret meanings hidden in there’s got to be some meaning. So if any of you are Kabbalahs, maybe take a screenshot of that and let me know if there’s deep meaning there 'cause I’ll use it in future versions of the talk. Historiographically speaking, oh, so, oh, thank you.

So this is Valley Beth Shalom in L.A., it’s in Encino, a conservative movement synagogue. And they commissioned the artists David and Michelle Plachte-Zuieback, who used to do secular stained glass, their Jewish artists up in the North Bay of California. And they turned to Judaism. And they began working on Jewish ritual stained glass. And Valley Beth Shalom brought them in, and this is just stunning. And I’ll just personally, that’s the spot I signed the ketubah for my wedding 'cause it’s where my wife was raised. And what I loved about their story is they were born and raised in L.A. They became artists. They’re like hippies from the '60s. And then they went up to Willits, California, the far north of the state. And they basically built a house with their own two hands on 10 acres of land. And they became artists, living the dream of the sort of '60s counterculture and secular. And then they came into Jewish life, back into Jewish life and did this Jewish art. And then from the Jewish art, churches started to see this artwork in synagogues and called them and said, “Will you do Christian religious art for us?” And then they started doing church work. So I thought, “Wow, what a great arc for this couple, for David and Michelle to sort of go from secular to Jewish to Christian.”

And I thought that sort of universal spirit is also something that’s really California. Most history that’s more than maybe 50 years old is called political history. It’s the history of presidents, of wars, bullets, bombs, and battles is sometimes the way we describe that kind of history. And what we’ve been trying to do, at least since the 1960s, is called social history. Social history is a history of ordinary people rather than the history of the elites. So when I was doing my genealogy, I found this. This is the handwritten diary entry of my great-grandmother, Sarah. She was the one you saw in that opening picture on her wedding day, December 31st, 1905. And she wrote this to describe what it was like for her and her husband to be in the great earthquake and fire of 1906 in San Francisco. And I’ll read what it says here. “On the 17th day of April, about four months after we were married, my husband came home from work. And after supper, worked on my princess suit,” he was a tailor, “that he was making me for picnics this summer.

We were up till about 11 when we went to bed. About four o'clock the next morning, I woke up and kissed my husband, good morning. Just 16 minutes after 5:00, the house began to shake. And I thought we would soon pass as the others had, we had had many, many amount of them,” that’s earthquakes, “all winter. But this one continued and it got worse each second until the house fairly rocked from side to side. I jumped to the floor, intending to run for the door, but my husband held me back. We both sat on the bed, terror-stricken at the sound of falling plaster, crockery, and the stove, and dozens of other things. I thought it was the end of the world. All I could say was, 'My God, my God.’ My husband and I will certainly not forget that experience as long as we live. Every minute I thought we’d be buried under the ruins of our home. One side of the wall in our bedroom was hanging, ready to fall. Over the mantle, all the plaster was lying in a heap together with pictures in our clock. In the kitchen, the stove and falling had covered everything with soot. As soon as the shock had subsided, we ran for the door, which my husband had to take off the hinges. I came back, got my engagement ring, my gold watch, our marriage licence, bank book, pulled a skirt and jacket over my night dress, and we hurried across the street,” signed Sara Rice-Dollinger.

Do that to me is history, and it’s history told from ordinary people. This is an image from a journal that my great-grandfather Albert wrote. And for those who may know California, there is a rivalry between the University of California and Stanford University. And this is one of the first football games in the 1890s between the two schools. And what they’ve done here on the left is they’ve written out all the cheers. This is the Oskie cheer and give them the acts, and Oh Stanford, for people who might know that. And I love that I had like the actual document from the fifth or sixth big game. So I called up my favourite of those universities to loan it to them for the 100th anniversary of the big game between the two schools. And I’ll just let you know, I sent that to Berkeley, to the University of California. Albert, my great-grandfather, decided to do what many people do, which is change their names when they come to America. And what a great reflection on sort of what the Americanization process is.

And as he wrote in his diary, “Just about this time, an epidemic of name changing broke out among the boys in our neighbourhood. One of the boys’ names was, Yankalah. We called him Jake or Jakey, which he didn’t mind too much, but his mother would always come out of the house, calling at the top of her voice, ‘Yankalah!’ which seemed to humiliate him very much. Most of us had similar troubles not only with our parents calling us by our Yiddish names, but others in the neighbourhood making fun of us. So a group of 10 of us got together and said the only way to solve our problem was not to fight them, but in fact to Americanize our names, thereby, establishing our American rights. We were sitting on the front steps of Yankalah’s house. So it was only natural for us to help him choose another name.

One of the boys came up with a bright idea. ‘Didn’t the Swedes or Norwegians pronounce their J’s as Y? Why not change Yankalah to John Keller?’ ‘Wait a minute,’ one of the boys said. Said, ‘John Kelly, how does that look and sound?’ Poor Yankalah was so overcome, he was almost in tears until his mom came out of the house and yelled, ‘Yankalah!’ And then when she was corrected, said, ‘John Kelly, that’s a good Yiddish American Irish rename, my own Johnny called.’ And henceforth, he was known as John Kelly.” Well, name changing, sports, and other ways was an important way that California Jewish immigrants and all immigrants became American. For us, the literal or figurative way of challenging or changing your name to become American is maybe something we can all relate to in every generation, no matter where we come from. Thanks so much. And we’ve got a few minutes for some questions.

Q&A and Comments

• [Host] Thanks so much. We do have a few questions.

Q: Someone’s asking if there’s any truth that Edison and Henry Ford push the Jews out of New York because someone was suing Jews who were infringing on Edison inventions in the movies and the Jews moved to California to avoid lawsuits. A: Oh, that’s fascinating. And, Elliot, thank you for asking that question. I don’t know specifically about that detail. Of course, a great amount of literature has been written on the creation of Hollywood by the moguls. Almost all of whom were Jewish in the 1910s and 1920s. And in all the books I’ve read on that, I haven’t heard that story, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

• [Host] Thank you. Diane is asking,

Q: “Culturally, what did the Jews of California create and contribute? My grandfather, Sam Berger, was an artist, wood carver for Hearst Castle, the Archdiocese of the San Francisco, and many of the buildings designed by Julia Morgan.” A: Oh, fantastic. And I just want you to know, when I was an undergrad at Berkeley, I lived in the Berkeley Bayit, the Jewish House there, which was designed by Julia Morgan. That’s fantastic. All right, so this, we’re going to do a rivalry between Northern and Southern California. And I will say the Southern Californians will say the greatest cultural contribution was Hollywood because here we had first and then later second generation American Jews who were defining for Christian America what it meant to be American through the movies that they made. It’s an extraordinary story. And that’s ‘cause I was raised in L.A. But I live in Northern California now. So I’ll say the Gold rush. The gold rush was what brought Jews to California to begin with. And thanks to Levi Strauss and Adolph Sutro and other San Francisco Jews, they were able to really create a basis of Jewish life in this state that also had national implications.

• [Host] Thank you. Carol’s asking,

Q: “What happened? Did the Israelis stay in California or go back?” A: I think most of the Israelis stayed. I still do. The South Bay of Northern California has a very high Israeli population and a lot of them are involved in Silicon Valley. And of course, L.A. is very dense, with tens of thousands of Israelis or Israeli Americans.

• [Host] Thank you. Sandy’s asking if you can explain your last name in light of-

• Dollinger. Oh, thank you. Literally, it means pastor meadow of the patient one. But really, it was purchased on a passport after the May Laws were passed in Eastern Europe, forbidding Jews to leave the country. So they got the passport in order to get, they got the name in order to be able to leave the country. In my genealogical research, I found that Dollinger is a very common name in Austria, but very few are Jewish. And I actually, back before the internet, wrote a letter to every Dollinger I could find in the library and every phone book kind of thing, and I learned that of all the 13 Dollingers, that Jewish Dollingers that wrote back, those that knew where they came from, we all came from the very same small district in Romania. So maybe they’re all my relatives or maybe everybody used the same name to get out.

• [Host] Great, thanks. Francine’s wondering if her grandfather, Louise Herman, or sorry, Louis Herman, arrived from a city near the Romanian-Ukrainian border in 1890. She was wondering if he was related to your family.

• Oh, thank you. Not that I know of. As soon as I finish my current book, I’m going to actually go back to the genealogy. And I just want everyone to know that Francine used the word fileopietistic as she typed that question in. So a bonus point for you. Well done.

• [Host] And I think the perfect question to end on is from Nina.

Q: Has any Jew in California achieved a higher status in regard than Sandy Koufax? A: Okay. I’m a big Sandy Koufax fan back, but when you could go to the gate at the airport at LAX, he was actually sitting there and I got to shake his hand. Oh my God, that’s incredible. So I will just leave to all of you to decide, is it Sandy Koufax or Barbara Streisand?

• [Host] Ooh, tough choice. Thank you so much for an excellent talk, Marc. We loved having you on. And it was so great to learn more about California and Jewish people who have lived and will continue to live there. So thank you and thank you to all our participants for joining us. And enjoy the rest of your days and evenings.