I sat down with two wonderful historians and archivists, Lara Michels and Susan Morris, on March 22 to discuss the importance of preserving California Jewish history. We met up at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley as part of a celebration of 130 years of J., which was founded in late 1895.

Michels is head of archival processing at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, where she oversees collections that include the records of the Western Jewish History Center. Morris is a former curator and executive director at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, the precursor to the Magnes Collection, and the author of “A Traveler’s Guide to Pioneer Jewish Cemeteries of the California Gold Rush.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why even bother saving all of these bits and pieces of history? What’s the point of keeping all these records?

Michels: This is what I think about 24 hours a day. Archives are primary sources — the photographs, the documents, the letters, all the things that people create in their day-to-day lives. They are the primary sources upon which historical research is based. They’re part of keeping a society, organization or institution accountable.

The Jewish community in the Bay Area has kept its archives, at least some of them! They’re spread around a little bit.

These are not easy things to create or maintain. They are somewhat expensive. You need certain kinds of materials and climate and staff, so they take a huge amount of commitment. At the Bancroft, we have 100,000 linear feet of paper, and we have to maintain that … kind of forever.

Morris: I’m going to point out a particular object that we almost didn’t acquire when I was at Magnes. It’s a portrait of Max Lilienthal. [Lilienthal was an influential rabbi in the antislavery movement in Cincinnati and a key figure in early American Reform Judaism. The portrait was defaced in 1861 by Jacob A. Cohn, a Confederate captain who died a year later at Manassas.] 

What is scrawled on the portrait, what is boldly written, I quote: “Sir, since you have discarded the Lord and taken up the sword in defense of the Negro government, your picture, which has occupied a place in our southern homes, we here return to you, and may you present them to your beloved black friends. I shall be engaged actively in the field, and should be happy to rid Israel of the disgrace of your life.”

I was working at Magnes when [founder] Seymour Fromer learned this was going to be auctioned. He went to many prospective donors to say this is an important part of the holdings of the Magnes. In the end, members of the Lilienthal family helped to supply the funds needed to bid at that auction. This is such an important original piece of history.

How is it decided what will be preserved? How do you prioritize, when funds and space are not endless?

Michels: You have to remain connected to the community. We are short on space, short on paper, short on everything. But we have to make decisions. Sometimes our decisions do come down to: Do we have enough space?

They would have debates [at the Magnes] about what parts of the community they were capturing and which parts they weren’t. And they were sensitive to the fact that they were capturing more from the German Jewish community, from the Eastern European Jewish community, and they talked about that, and they were attempting to remedy that at various times.

In your work, are there collections or items that just stay with you?

Michels: I have collections that stay with me and that I think about all of the time. The Congregation Sherith Israel records — it’s a big collection, an amazing collection, going back into the 1850s. It is the only real significant organization whose records survived the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.

Its records document the history of the city in really interesting ways. I was committed to retaining almost everything. This collection is truly spectacular. I’m very happy that I got to work on it.

Morris: This is a rough translation of a letter written from Downieville, California, Mother Lode country, in November of 1856. The writer is Johanna Mayer Hirschfelder. She writes to her mother and brothers in Germany, describing her trip from New York to San Francisco a month earlier.

Let me read you just a couple of passages: “Our trip was, with God’s help, one of the best and most beautiful that has been made in a long time.” 

There are pages and pages about what she ate and how she spent her time. She says, “On October 2 in the morning, at nine o’clock, we left on the Panama Railroad via the isthmus from the Gulf of Darién, where it was awfully hot, and my arm, which held the umbrella, was blistered.”

The point is — these are human beings, like we are.

J.’s archives are online at env-jweekly-jweeklydev.kinsta.cloud. How can people access other records?

Michels: The Bancroft Library is open to the public. You have to request [the records] ahead of time. It’s a little more logistically challenging, but everybody is welcome to use the Bancroft Library and any of the collections. We do have reference librarians who can help you figure out how to access things.

What should people do when they have materials that might be worth preserving?  

Michels: Our curators will engage with you. They do an appraisal, where they’re trying to figure out whether this is the right fit for the Bancroft Library.

It could be a lengthy process, deciding whether we should add it to the collection. But we are collecting Jewish Americana to this day. We’re still bringing materials in from various families and organizations.

Morris: This has to do with your curiosity and alertness and awareness of the importance of documenting and preserving the diversity and complexity of the Jewish community you live in, of your family. Recognize that each of your stories is important. We are the holders of the future archives. We are the collectors of the breadth and the depth of the knowledge of the Jewish experience.

Updated March 31

How did you or your family come to call the Bay Area home? 

Perhaps you come from a multi-generation San Francisco family. Maybe you showed up in the East Bay or North Bay for the Summer of Love and never left. Perchance you are a recent arrival in Silicon Valley.

J. has been serving the Bay Area Jewish community since 1895. In celebration of our 130-year-old archive, we are launching an audio-history project to preserve individual histories in our region. We want to hear your story.

If you’re interested in participating in the project, call us at 415-263-7200 ext. 953 by April 15 and tell us how you or your family became a Bay Area resident..

In the message, be sure to include your full name and how you or your family came to call the Bay Area home. Because we are organizing the project in chronological order, we ask you to include important years in that story. (A ballpark estimate is fine.)

J. kicked off this project at our “History is Calling!” event on March 22 at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art in Berkeley, where we marked the 130th anniversary of our publication and archive, which is online.

Even though your message will be recorded via voicemail, just know we’re all ears. We’re looking forward to hearing from you. Again, please call us at 415-263-7200 ext. 953 by April 15.

Thank you for preserving a slice of Bay Area Jewish history.

Update on March 31: Ednah Beth Friedman’s name has been corrected in the caption.

Judy Stein’s 1957 bat mitzvah was a milestone in the history of Bay Area Jews. Held at Beth Sholom, a Conservative congregation, it was the first time a bat mitzvah ceremony took place in a San Francisco synagogue on a Saturday morning. Unlike other bat mitzvahs of the era, which took place on Friday nights, Stein’s “followed the bar mitzvah ritual,” as we wrote at the time.

Our coverage in 1957 was brief, though our editors did consider it important enough to be front-page news:

Bas Mitzvah Set For Tomorrow In Unique Ritual

“For what is believed to be the first time in San Francisco, a 13-year-old girl will be Bas Mitzvah during a regular Sabbath morning service tomorrow and will recite in Hebrew the prophetic Portion of the Week with appropriate blessings, following the same practice as do boys in Bar Mitzvah.

“The girl is Judy Stein, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Stein. Her father is area director of the Bonds for Israel organization.

“Judy for some time has been studying for her Bas Mitzvah with Rabbi Saul E. White and now looks forward to the event which it is believed will be a new departure in local Jewry. Bas Mitzvahs usually have been held on Friday nights and have not followed Bar Mitzvah ritual.”

That write-up makes it sound like everything was copacetic, but as Stein told me in a recent interview, that wasn’t exactly the case.

“I didn’t know this at the time because I was only 13, but my parents, they had to really argue for it,” she said. Stein is 81 and still lives in San Francisco. “I don’t know exactly how the conversations went in the shul, but from what my parents told me there were a lot of people who were very much against it, to the point of maybe even leaving the shul.”

Her parents, who were raised Orthodox, were always supportive of her receiving a Jewish education equal to the boys. “My mom actually went to a yeshiva high school in New York,” where she received a full Jewish education, similar to boys of the time, Stein said.

Stein’s parents were joined by Rabbi Saul E. White, the rabbi of Beth Sholom, who also advocated for her bat mitzvah, according to Stein. 

“And my guess is that that wasn’t an easy thing to do in those days,” she said. “When I said I wanted a bat mitzvah, they had offered me Friday night, lighting candles and making Kiddush, and I said, no, I wanted to do what the boys did. And it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t championed it.”

Despite White’s support, there was a compromise at the heart of Stein’s bat mitzvah, a detail our original article got wrong: It was not done exactly “following the same practice as boys do.” At the time, it was the norm for boys to have an aliyah to bless the Torah, but not read from it. Then they would read the haftarah, the passage from the prophetic books that accompanies each Torah portion.

The compromise that allowed Stein to have a Shabbat morning bat mitzvah did not allow her to have an aliyah. Instead, that honor was given to her father. However, she did get to read the haftarah, a portion from Zechariah that begins somewhat auspiciously given the occasion: “Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion, for, behold! I will come and dwell in your midst, says the Lord.”

“It’s kind of odd when I think back on it now, but that’s what they agreed to,” Stein said. “And I was doing the part that at least felt to me the most substantial.”

After years of shul hopping, today Stein is again a member of Beth Sholom. She said she was drawn back after her mother died in 2008. Now Stein is primarily involved as a volunteer in the synagogue office, answering phones, helping with mailings and special projects.

Her bat mitzvah wasn’t her family’s only feminist first at Beth Sholom. Her mother, Toby Stein, was the first woman to have an aliyah on the High Holidays at Beth Sholom.

“What they used to do was they would give the male members of the board aliyot on the High Holidays, but they never gave it to a woman,” Stein said. “And the story I heard is my mother went to Rabbi White and said, ‘Hey, we have bat mitzvah, we have men getting aliyot on the High Holidays — why are not women getting aliyot who are on the board on the High Holidays?’ And so he gave her an aliyah.”

Stein’s 1957 bat mitzvah was the first known Shabbat morning bat mitzvah in San Francisco, but not the first in the city overall. That distinction goes to Marilyn Angel 10 years earlier at Temple Beth Israel, another Conservative synagogue (it later merged with Temple Judea to form Congregation Beth Israel Judea, which in turn merged with B’nai Emunah to form Congregation Am Tikvah in 2021). Angel was one of a class of girls who had their bat mitzvahs on Friday nights, without a Torah service or haftarah reading at all.

Unlike Angel, who had other girls to study with, Stein was the lone girl in a class of boys. Today, though, she is happy to be among the many women and girls who have had bat mitzvahs at Beth Sholom.

“When I see [a bat mitzvah], I just feel we’ve come a long way,” Stein said. “Maybe I had the first one, but it wasn’t really completely authentic. But I started it, and women now have full rights. It makes me feel good.”

You should be skeptical of this article’s headline. The Jewish identity of William Leidesdorff, an entrepreneur who helped build San Francisco, is uncertain, given that he was buried in the Mission Dolores, a Catholic church. But his life story, marked by a series of firsts, reflects the wild diversity of early American Jews and the formative years of San Francisco.

This publication’s archives are replete with traces of the existence of Leidesdorff. His name lives on in the form of Leidesdorff Street, a three-block stretch between Pine and California Streets in the Financial District. Search “Leidesdorff” in our archives and one finds page upon page of ads and legal notices that refer to addresses on his eponymous street.

He could be considered San Francisco’s first Jew, depending on how one defines the term. His biography reads like an epic, and he is widely considered America’s first Black millionaire.

According to a 2005 book by Gary Mitchell Palgon, a descendant of Leidesdorff, he was born in the Virgin Islands to a Danish Jewish father and a Creole mother about whom little is known. Leidesdorff was not raised by his biological father. Sources cited by Paglon say his English adoptive father had him christened. 

Leidesdorff broke off an engagement after his fiancee learned he was, in Liedesdorff’s words, “a mulatto,” a term used at the time to describe a person of both Black and white ancestry. He later sailed from New Orleans to San Francisco, then known as Yerba Buena, where he became a wealthy master of ships, later establishing the city’s first town council and serving as its treasurer. He is known to have launched the first steam ship to sail the San Francisco Bay. In a less savory footnote to that legacy, a hotel he owned hosted what is believed to be California’s first recorded minstrel show.

But in this paper, there has been just one telling of his life story, written in the distinct florid prose of our founding editor, Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger, in 1903.

Voorsanger seems sure of Leidesdorff’s Jewishness, although he admits “Captain Leidesdorff did not affiliate with the nascent Jewish community of San Francisco, for he lies buried in the Catholic graveyard at Mission Dolores.”

How did Voorsanger, writing in 1903, a half century after Leidesdorff’s death in 1848, even know of Liedesdorff’s Jewish descent? There is a tiny clue buried at the end of his brief write-up.

Leidesdorff died without leaving a will and his estate was contested. Voorsanger wrote that “his Jewish relatives, scattered throughout Austria and the Duchy of Posen [now roughly modern-day Poland], are somewhat late in their effort to recover [Leidesdorff’s estate].”

The San Francisco Chronicle also reported in 1904 that Hungarian descendants of Leidesdorff were seeking the state’s help in recovering his estate. One of them, Elias Haupt, made multiple visits to San Francisco attempting to get local lawyers interested in the case. It’s easy to imagine that Haupt or another of these distant Jewish relations made contact with Voorsanger, then the most prominent Jewish community leader in the city. 

We Jews are always eager to claim even the most tenuously Jew-ish notables and celebrities as Jewish. Leidesdorff was raised in a Christian home and buried in a Catholic cemetery. Calling Leidesdorff a Jew flattens what must have been a complex personal identity. At the same time, claiming him as a Jew also complicates our contemporary understanding of who American Jews are and have been. And that, I think, is worthwhile.

The year was 1942. People were being rounded up and sent to camps for no reason other than their ethnicity. They weren’t death camps — this was not Europe. They were internment camps for Japanese Americans during a racist panic in this country over the possibility of enemy agents hiding among those with Japanese ancestry.

Feb. 19 marks the federally recognized Day of Remembrance for the Japanese American internment. It was a shameful period in American history, and one that Bay Area Jews reacted to in mixed ways at the time.  

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an order that placed at least 110,000 Japanese Americans, mostly living in California and the Pacific Northwest, into incarceration camps. About two-thirds of them were born in the U.S., and none was charged with a crime. The rationalization was that the U.S. faced danger from Japanese Americans who might sympathize with a wartime enemy following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and the U.S. entrance into World War II the next day.

Our paper at the time was full of news of the war and the trickle of horrific reports from Europe’s Jews. We also reported on what was happening closer to home.

Looking back, our response to the internment of Japanese Americans was a mixed bag. The paper was definitely intensely patriotic, pro-war and pro-America. That fits in with the overall bent of our publication in those days, which sought to ensure that American Jews were thought of as truly American. It was also underpinned by a natural fear of the Nazis, with whom Japan was allied.

Yet Jews, too, were immigrants and a minority in America. And those circumstances colored how this paper discussed the internment. Jews here were sensitive to losses of rights and freedoms — but some were also either racist or afraid to speak up.

The ambivalence that greeted the internment order was apparent.

Clearly, there was anti-Japanese sentiment in our pages. In an “Editor’s Comment” from in 1942, we mentioned the “lust of the Japanese for conquest and their capacity for cruelty” in a piece that chastised San Franciscans for complaining about the loss of their Japanese servants to the camps.  

Yet, in another “Editor’s Comments” that year, we surfaced a sense of unease: “Despite the general support of the movement, there is still a tremor among long-range supporters of a constitutional democracy who fear that such a step sets a precedent to deny other minorities their legal guarantees under a pretext of guarding the nation’s safety.”

Again, in 1942, we wrote about the American Civil Liberties Union’s argument that targeting Italians and Germans in the U.S. made no sense if they were known to be anti-fascist. As part of that, we wrote, “As for United States citizens of Japanese extraction, the Union argued that ‘to evacuate those who have been outspoken opponents of Japanese militarism, or who served in our armed forces during the last war, seems particularly unfair.’”

As early as 1932, after Japan had invaded China the previous year, Rabbi Rudolph Coffee of Oakland pondered what we’d now call “implicit bias” in the context of showing kindness to a gardener of Japanese descent who clearly doesn’t expect that.

“Can it be that the white man is letting his innermost feelings about Japanese atrocities in China react upon this innocent gardener?” asks Coffee. “Unfortunately, some mass-minded individuals will link all Japanese in one groove, quite unconscious of the startling fact that a poor Japanese gardener in the United States may be just as opposed to Japanese militarism as were the innocent Germans in our midst to the tactics of Deutschland’s Kaiser.”

The internment order was rescinded in January 1945, but returning Japanese Americans were greeted with discrimination. That year, we reported on a speech by Robert Sproul, then president of the University of California system, that explicitly called for an end to bias against Japanese American citizens:

“Generally, it is a warning that once any class of American citizens can be deprived of those constitutional rights, no other minority can feel safe. Mr. Sproul puts the proposition succinctly and eloquently: ‘The dream of America will be over when the color of men’s skins or other physical characteristics, determines the communities in which they live.’’’

In a 1945 article in our pages, Teiko Ishida of the Japanese American Citizens League posed a related question while noting the large number of Japanese Americans who volunteered to serve in the U.S. military during WWII: “Thirteen thousand Yanks with Japanese faces are proving themselves worthy Americans on all fronts of battle. Will the Japanese Americans who are returning to their homes in California, Oregon and Washington be given a fair chance to prove themselves?”

It was an appropriate and reasonable question in reaction to an inappropriate and painfully unreasonable period in American history — one we need to remember.

We here at J. are proud that our paper goes back to 1895. We’re also grateful to UC Riverside’s California Newspaper Digital Collection and the National Library of Israel, both of which host our digitized archives.

J.’s archives at the National Library of Israel are part of the institution’s large Jewish press collection. Poking around to see what else of a similar vintage there is in English, I found a number of treasures. I was particularly interested in reading newspapers that were written not for Jews in big East Coast cities or the capitals of Europe, but at the margins of Jewish diaspora — as San Francisco was back then.

Even older than the Emanu-El, as our paper was first called, is the First Fruits of the West, a short-lived English-language Jewish journal published in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1844. Jews started coming in numbers to the island in the 18th century after it became an English territory, and Kingston at one point had several synagogues.

The inaugural issue of First Fruits consists of a lengthy opening statement (“We shall, on all occasions, be temperate in our remarks….”), a sermon, poetry, fiction and a history of the Jews of England.

However, proving that Jewish congregational life is pretty much the same everywhere at every time, they also published this note:

“We have received a letter signed ‘A Friend to Justice,’ in which the writer strongly animadverts on the mode in which one of the Kingston Congregations is governed… ‘A Friend to Justice’ had better address the President of the Congregation alluded to, as our pages cannot be made a vehicle for the expression of, what we conceive to be, uncalled for censure.”

The Israelite, a publication in Mumbai, India, is another wonder. Founded in 1917 and published for about a decade, it was written bilingually in English and Marathi. The opening statement, written most likely by editor David Solomon Erulkar, reflects the tumultuous times:

“We are living in a most remarkable era, and in the midst of a great, yet bewildering civilization, when castes, communities and even nations are striving each for a particular ideal as the goal. From out of the unceasing agitation and perturbation, ‘progress’ of some kind or other, resounds as the watchword of the age. The whole creation seems astir…. Thus we are made the spectators of the greatest events the world has ever seen.”

The paper was written by and for the Bene Israel community, an originally rural group of Jewish Indians whose origins are hard to nail down. (They probably descended from Jews who came to India and intermarried. They are separate from both Cochin Jews and the Baghdadi Jews, both of whom have their own long histories in India.)

In an article in that first issue, the paper describes the Bene Israel as a “riddle.”

“In a land where the horizon seemed to them quite clear for the spread of their knowledge of Jesus Christ, [missionaries] were puzzled to find on the Western Coast, a poor, but industrious and well behaved class of people, calling themselves Bene-Israels (Sons of Israel or Jacob), observing Saturday as the Sabbath, performing circumcision of their male children on the 8th day after birth, and saying in Hebrew the most important prayer of Israel, which proclaims the unity of God.”

The National Library of Israel also has issues of the Jewish Guild Journal, a newspaper in what is now Zimbabwe, which was then the British colony of Rhodesia. It was launched in 1919 and published out of the city of Bulawayo until the 1930s.

“It is our aim to provide the Rhodesian and Congo Jewish community with interesting and, we hope, instructive reading matter, combined with as much news as possible of the doings of our friends in different parts of the country. We ask for the assistance of everyone to supply us with local news. The smallest event may prove interesting to a number of people.… We ask the community to accept our best Pesach wishes — in spite of the lack of Matzos.”

Most of the Rhodesian Jews had Eastern European roots and were quite Zionist. The paper carried news of Russia and the British Mandate for Palestine, but also social news from cities around the country where Jews lived. From Gwelo (now Gweru), it was “Mr. and Mrs. M. Sher have now moved into their fine new house,” while from Gatooma (now Kadoma) it was “Messrs. R. Fleishman and R. Ross have both opened butcheries at Eiffel Flats. We wish them luck.”

At the time the paper was published, Zimbabwean Jews were reeling amid the aftermath of WWI. In a long and impassioned treatise imploring for order and cooperation on the international stage, race is not mentioned at all or, if so, only obliquely: “We have heard of atomic energy, but what power is comparable to the emancipated soul of man? The sap of life is rising in the masses, they are determined to escape from servitude and to attain the fullest possible measure of self-realisation.”

These are only a few gems that can be found in the library. There are also the wonderful Israel’s Messenger out of Shanghai, the Australasian Hebrew and many more. Almost all are defunct — J. is one of only a few left standing.

Times change, but it’s interesting to reflect on this take from the Bene Israel newspaper:

“It can never be gainsaid that healthy journalism is the most necessary factor in the progress of any people; it is the best instrument for the interchange of ideas, for the introduction of all that is good and wanting in us; and for the abolition of all that is bad and present in us.”

Maybe that’s not how journalism is viewed today, but it’s a reminder that these Jewish publications held together fragile communities that were precariously placed at the far edges of the Jewish diaspora and reminded these Jews that they were part of a wider whole.

“A little girl stands on a table. Oil lamps light the room. There is silence in the warm night. Around her, dimly, she sees bearded faces, the round, proud smiles of the women. She is very little, this child, but her voice is no pipe — rich, golden, it sings the happier songs of Israel’s exile, and the songs which belong to the exiles’ home.

“One old man, gray-bearded, wipes a tear from his eyes. He speaks, when she has finished, and around him rises a murmur of voices in agreement. ‘She is a great singer. She will make men and women cry with joy,’ he says. That all happened in a tiny Bessarabian village, many years ago, but the old man spoke truth.”

Or, rather, not exactly the truth — since that whole vignette was invented for a fawning fan fiction-like introduction to the singer Isa Kremer in our paper in 1934. But it was true that Kremer, a published poet and trained opera soprano, and a Russian-turned-American-turned-Argentine, was once known around the world as an innovator in bringing Yiddish and other folk music to the stage for large popular audiences.

Although she’s little known today, if you were going to the theater 100 years ago in San Francisco, you would have had many opportunities to see the world-famous diva.

As we wrote in 1925, “Of the many concert artists who have come to America in recent years, perhaps no one has eclipsed the popularity gained by Isa Kremer, the singer of folk songs and ballads.”

Kremer was born in Belz, Russia (now part of Ukraine), in 1887, in a comfortable Jewish family. She was a trained classical singer who worked professionally in Russian opera theaters.

But then politics caught up to her. Kremer had married the editor of the Odessa News, which published her poetry, and moved in the intellectual, modern Jewish circles of the city. When the revolution happened, Kremer was singing in Istanbul; her husband was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for being the wrong kind of progressive and later was smuggled out, along with the couple’s daughter.

Kremer came to the U.S. in the 1920s, first on tour, then to stay. (Her husband remained in Europe and was killed by the Nazis.)

“Isa Kremer has sung in almost every music center in Europe. The fact that ‘she took America by storm’ can be judged when it became known that she gave in her first season six concerts in Carnegie Hall, four in Chicago, and sang return dates in Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee, Toronto, Cleveland,” we wrote in 1925.

While she was classically trained, her passion was folk music. Not only Yiddish folk music, but Arabic, Russian, French and African American songs as well.

“She can sing an Italian folk song that will make every son of Sunny Italy stand up and shout ‘brava,’ we wrote in 1924. “The French numbers would cause a whole regiment of poilus [infantry] to applaud, while with the Russian(s), Jews and the other inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe, she could sing for hours and not one would leave the hall.”

From reviews of her concerts, it seems her voice wasn’t the only pull; Kremer was an extremely charismatic and animated performer. However, she was most lauded among Jewish audiences for her Yiddish songs, which were wildly popular.

After a career in which she sang in front of huge audiences, including Albert Einstein and Israel Zangwill, among other luminaries, Kremer died of cancer in 1956 in Argentina. She’d moved there to marry leftist thinker and psychiatrist Gregorio Bermann, and the couple fell afoul of the right-wing government there, but Kremer continued performing as long as she could.

In 1950, a few years before her death, she was again performing at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

“Her program listed songs in seven languages. She sang and mimed them with a gusto and human feeling that had her sizable audience guffawing and applauding happily.”

Kremer was unabashedly proud of her heritage; she did many benefits for groups like Hadassah, and was a supporter of Zionism. She truly believed in the power of Jewish music to reach people.

“Do you know that this revival of Jewish music is doing something that our Jewish leaders have been trying to do for years?” she told the paper in 1926 in an interview that ran across the front page. “Here it is bringing religion back to thousands upon thousands who for years have been what you would call passive about their Judaism. For what is a greater appeal to the heart and the soul of man but music?”

This piece was published in cooperation with the Forward.

Long before FIFA, the World Cup’s organizer, created a peace prize, an international roster of Jewish soccer players, many of whom would become refugees from fascist Europe, raced across American fields. Jewish media on both coasts helped readers follow along — sometimes even in Yiddish.

Sports coverage in the earliest days of the Forverts, America’s longtime Yiddish daily, was sparse and eclectic. Eventually its reporters would write about chess matches, cover boxing competitions, explain the ethos of baseball to new immigrants and, as late as the 1950s, even feature a column about fishing called “Yidn Khapn Fish” — “Jews Catch Fish.”

In November 1897, though, a mere seven months after the founding of the Forverts, front-page real estate was devoted to a dramatically violent story of a 17-year-old’s mishap with a soccer ball. The youth was shot by a police officer who attempted to stop him from advancing the ball down the Upper West Side and then charged the poor young chap with disorderly conduct.

In 1911, on the West Coast, a more playful soccer scenario was reported by The Emanu-El, the original name of J. As part of a series of vaudeville performances, a British act known as “Ninton and Wooten” would perform an exhibition soccer match on bicycles at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre, using their tires rather than their feet to kick it around.

A decade later, by 1920, the Forverts expressed its delight at how Polish Jewish youth were creating soccer clubs and reported on Krakow’s soccer match between Polish Jewish and Polish Gentile youth. 

“Krakow’s Maccabee Club is in first place” the article stated. “It’s been in existence for several years already, and has several hundred members.” While the Maccabee Club was largely identified with Zionism, another club, Morgenshtern, belonged to the Jewish socialists. 

A 1920 Emanu-El item shone the light of science on the nascent discussion of Jews and soccer, presenting data gathered by a recent Menorah Society study that showed Jewish soccer skills were among the talents helping Jewish boys find “respect” on campus. 

By the mid-1920s, with the rise of fascism in Europe, Jewish sports societies like Maccabi and Hakoah enabled talented Jewish players to find a home for their skills, and sent them on tour in America playing exhibition games. With the worsening situation in Europe, many who first came to tour and play in America later found themselves seeking asylum here as refugees from Hitler.

Enter Erno Schwarz’s mad soccer skills. 

It was front-page news and of note on both coasts when Hungarian Jewish soccer star Schwarz’s Hakoah (“The Strength” in Hebrew) team played the Brooklyn Wanderers in 1926. 

Again, Emanu-El presented data to back up the East Coast soccer nachas. Hakoah, Emanu-El told readers, had over 260,000 members. The Viennese club was about to become a prominent face of American sports, said the Bay Area’s Jewish paper of note. 

Schwarz’s performance against the Brooklyn team that day in 1926 took place at Ebbets Field in Crown Heights, then home of the Dodgers. The Forverts made sure readers were on time for the match of the year, warning them: “The game starts promptly at 4 p.m. Should you happen to be even 5 minutes late, you’ll lose those 5 minutes of watching their splendid game.”

Schwarz, Hakoah’s acclaimed forward, manager and the first Jew to coach the U.S. men’s soccer team, was there, offering his talents. Their competition, the Brooklyn Wanderers, made a home for refugee players and local Jewish players who were unwelcome on other teams.

A bit of internal communal tsuris, or trouble, followed Hakoah though, when the Emanu-El reported that the team was scheduled to play on Shabbat: “The Board of Jewish Ministers has learned with great regret that the Jewish soccer team ‘Hakoah’ now visiting the United States, is scheduled to play and charge admission fees on the Jewish Sabbath in violation of the tenets of Judaism and deplores this failure of the ‘Hakoah’ team and management to respect the sensibilities of religious Jews.” 

Hakoah left, according to Emanu-El, after playing 10 games against some of the best American teams, winning six, losing two and tying two, in front of 200,000 attendees. When they returned in the early 1930s, Schwarz was aided in securing refugee status and played exhibition games to fundraise for his fellow European Jewish refugees who no longer had homes to return to. 

This year in June, the World Cup will be hosted by three countries: Canada, Mexico and the United States. 

Echoes of fascism, refugees and soccer heroes rise up from Brooklyn’s old Ebbets Fields. Dos redl dreyt zikh — the wheel keeps turning — and so does dos fusbol. 

We covered Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s visit to the Bay Area earlier this month. As the first Asian American rabbi, she holds a special place in U.S. Jewish history. 

Of course we also carried news of Buchdahl when she became a cantor in 1999 and then after she became a rabbi in 2001, just as we reported the ordination of the first woman rabbi in the U.S., Sally Priesand, in 1972; the hiring of the first woman to head a U.S. congregation, Rabbi Michal Bernstein (now Michal Mendelsohn), at San Jose’s Temple Beth El Shalom in 1976; and research uncovering that the first woman rabbi, Regina Jonas, was ordained in Germany on the eve of the Holocaust. 

Depending on how you look at it, there was another “first” woman rabbi: Rachel “Ray” Frank, known as the “girl rabbi.” This San Francisco native was one of the first American women to preach from the bimah at a synagogue. A dynamic and beloved speaker and writer, she took on just enough elements of the rabbinic role to be considered a rabbi by some, although she never officially helmed a synagogue.

She was born in 1861 and lived and worked mostly in Oakland, where she became a Sunday school principal and a writer known for her eloquence on Jewish issues. She became a sought-after speaker, even a celebrity, and was featured often in our paper. (“Miss Ray Frank is, we are sorry to report, confined to her home with quite a severe cold,” we wrote in May 1896.)

“Miss Ray Frank is pursuing her noble work in the cause of Judaism, and winning golden opinions in the Press, at home and abroad,” we wrote a year earlier, in 1895, in our East Bay column, titled “Our Oakland Neighbors.”

Again in 1896, we described a talk she gave at Stanford on “The Moral Law in Nature” as offered with “eloquent and noble words.”

“She spoke of the underlying principle which unifies animate and inanimate nature; man, beast, bird and tree. That unless one looked deeply into nature, one could not discern the all-pervading obedience to a universal, guiding will,” we wrote.

Her first preaching experience came, according to the American Jewish Historical Society, almost by accident, in 1890, when she was in Spokane Falls, Washington, during the High Holidays. There was no synagogue, so she stepped in to lead the community in prayer with “A Lay Sermon by a Young Lady.”

“My position this evening is a novel one,” she said. “From time immemorial the Jewish woman has remained in the background of history, quite content to let the fathers and brothers be the principals in a picture wherein she shone only by a reflected light. And it is well that it has been so; for while she has let the stronger ones do battle for her throughout centuries of darkness and opposition, she has gathered strength and courage to come forward in an age of progressive enlightenment…”

“To think that perhaps I am to-night the one Jewish woman in the world, mayhap the first since the time of the prophets to be called on to speak to such an audience as I now see before me, is indeed a great honor, an event in my life which I can never forget.”

In 1893, the Modesto Bee ran a fulsome description of her.

“Ray Frank is a young California Jewess who will soon have attained a distinction beyond that of any Hebrew woman since the days of Deborah, the prophetess. She is to be regularly ordained as a rabbi or preacher to a synagogue, an office in which she has never had a woman predecessor,” the newspaper reported.

“Miss Frank is already quite well enough prepared, from an ordinary point of view, to undertake the duties of the ministry and has had a flattering offer from some wealthy Jews in Chicago who desire to form a congregation with her as their rabbi, but she feels the need of further study before she is willing to be ordained.”

“She is an excellent Hebrew and German scholar and has from childhood felt a strong inclination for Hebrew history and philosophy. Her name is Rachel, but she is much better known by the more familiar Ray,” the article noted.

The Chicago plan never came to fruition, and most sources say she was not, in fact, ordained. In 1901, she married Simon Litman, who taught at UC Berkeley and later at the University of Illinois, and withdrew from preaching. As she continued to lecture and write, the question of just how rabbinic she was became a point of contention.

Frank was the subject of a snarky aside by our editor in 1895, who complained about a Dutch news report that said Frank had officiated at Emanu-El in San Francisco for the High Holidays.

“Considering that Miss Frank officiated last Kippur in Victoria, B. C., in an Orthodox congregation, that, nominally at least, is under the spiritual supervision of Dr. Adler, her presence in San Francisco on that day is rather remarkable,” wrote Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger.

“The Dutch editor’s amiable commentary that female Rabbis are better than male hypocrites is insufficient to justify his ignorance of American Jewish conditions. Miss Frank is no Rabbi, nor has she ever aspired to be, and any sneer at our accomplished young townswoman in that connection is as unjust as it is in execrable taste.”

(To be fair to the Dutch reporter, Emanu-El was already at that point the home of the world’s first known female cantor, Madam Julie Rosewald.)

It’s not clear whether Frank ever had thoughts of officially becoming a rabbi, not that a path for that existed at the time.

Nevertheless, a woman interpreting and discussing Judaism from the bimah, standing in front of a group of men in the synagogue, was unusual enough to be noteworthy in her day. Moreover, what makes someone a rabbi has long been under discussion. Even if Frank didn’t consider herself one, historians and contemporary successors may take a different view in the long run. Again, there is no evidence that she was ordained, but her fame seems to have made that fact irrelevant.

In 1930, we wrote that “among the distinguished savants who will be immortalized in the Cyclopedia Judaica will be Ray Frank Litman, who is widely known as a scholar and lecturer upon Jewish thought and literature. Mrs. Litman has the honor of being the first woman to become an ordained Rabbi and her brilliancy as a pulpit orator has placed her in the front ranks as an exponent of Biblical history and Talmudic lore.”

In a 1934 social column that described the comings and goings of the Jewish world, we mentioned that “Mrs. Litman was the first woman to receive a degree at the Hebrew Union College. Her brilliant sermons were widely discussed wherever she preached. She will be remembered as Miss Ray Frank of Oakland and San Francisco.”

So was she a rabbi or not? Maybe that’s not the right question.

Perhaps the real question is how we should celebrate women like her, who were famous for their intellect, zeal and love for Judaism at a time when women’s roles were limited and their ability to gain the title of rabbi was nearly impossible. One way to celebrate them is, of course, by telling their stories.

Rob Reiner was a director and actor who influenced American cultural life over decades through iconic films and TV shows. He was also unabashedly proud to be Jewish and said he put politics at the center of his life due to his Jewish moral code.

It was natural, he said. “It’s part of our social legacy,” he told J. in a 2005 interview.

Reiner was killed alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, in a Dec. 14 stabbing in his home. The couple’s son, Nick Reiner, had at the time of writing been charged with murder.

In 2005, Reiner was in the Bay Area and speaking to J. not about his films, but about his social activism. He was a passionate advocate for a range of issues, from early childhood education to gay rights. It was something that came, he said, from his Jewish upbringing.

He was visiting Northern California to speak at a one-day social justice conference in Oakland, co-hosted by a range of Jewish institutions and run by former Oakland Temple Sinai leader Rabbi Suzanne Singer (Michele’s sister). Reiner had been successful in helping pass a ballot measure that funded early childhood education through taxes on tobacco in 1998.

But that year, Reiner’s priority was the “Preschool for All” ballot initiative, which would have guaranteed preschool for all 4-year-olds, financed by a state income tax increase. To him, supporting childhood education was the smart thing to do, though the measure was defeated by voters.

“We have an education system that educates one out of every eight kids,” he told J.’s Dan Pine. “This economy is dependent on whether we have a high-quality education system and workforce.”

Fewer people knew Reiner’s wife, Michele, who was the child of a Holocaust survivor. But she was part of his political work. She met him while working as an on-set photographer, and they married in 1989.

“In 1997, he and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, formed the I Am Your Child Foundation (now Parent Action for Children), which has produced educational materials on topics of interest to parents and caregivers of young children, and also has spearheaded legislative action on behalf of kids,” Pine wrote in 2005. “‘This keeps me very busy,’ [Reiner] says. ‘Over the course of the year, I spend half my time on political issues.’”

The other half? Filmmaking, of course.

Already famous for his role in the groundbreaking 1970s TV show “All in the Family,” Reiner went on to direct a host of iconic films starting in the mid-’80s. They included “This Is Spinal Tap,” “Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally…,” “Misery,” “The American President,” “The Bucket List” and the recently released “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.”

In 1992, he spoke with J. about his film “A Few Good Men,” a tense legal drama about uncovering secrets in the Marine Corp. starring Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise.

In that interview with J. contributor Paul Freeman, Reiner said he was interested in the film because of the parallels with Nazis and those who said they were only following orders.

“That’s what happened in Nazi Germany. What we’re saying in the film is that each of us has to take responsibility for our own actions. If you don’t, you should be punished for it. That was the verdict in the Nuremberg trials,” he said.

“There are moral guidelines that must be followed. Any system that tries to dictate to you that you should blindly follow orders is wrong. Great religious leaders teach you to do your own soul-searching. Of all religions, Judaism most stresses thinking for yourself.

“We need the Marine Corps. We need the police. But they have to have guidelines. When the power is abused, you wind up with Nazi Germany, with Calley at My Lai, with a Rodney King situation. This has to be stated and restated, so we never forget,” he said.

Freeman’s article continued: “Another element of the film appealed to Reiner. The Navy lawyer (Cruise) was encumbered by the fact that his father had excelled in the same field. Reiner, whose father is legendary comedian Carl Reiner, could certainly relate to that.”

“‘I knew exactly what the character was going through, a young guy working in the shadow of a famous father, trying to find his own identity and carve out his own niche,” Reiner told J. “For me, it was a terrible struggle, because not only is my father incredibly talented and acclaimed, he’s also a great guy. Growing up, all I heard was, ‘Your dad’s the nicest man in the world.’”

Carl Reiner, who collaborated with fellow Jewish comedian Mel Brooks in the 1950s and ’60s (they had dinner together every night into their 90s), not only gave his son a moral base but also a sense of humor.

“I think the Jews have always been the funniest people,” Rob Reiner said. “That’s because they’ve always had the most difficulty. They’ve had it rougher than any other group of people since the beginning of time. They discovered that humor was an effective way to deal with pain and suffering.

“If you’ve been put upon for so long, you have sympathy for the downtrodden. Jewish people have always been real good about helping the underprivileged, about standing up for human rights.”

Welcome to the second installment of our look back at J.’s history to mark our 130th birthday. (Gifts are welcome, by the way.)

Our first issue was Nov. 22, 1895. In the first half of this series celebrating our anniversary, we looked at a single article from a November issue in each decade, which took us up to 1935.

The ’40s: The “Palestine Problem,” Nov. 15, 1945

The hope that postwar Palestine would be a home for the Jews was a complicated diplomatic wrangle that we followed in great detail. We also reported on the ongoing situation on the ground in what would become the State of Israel, then still under British control.

“An 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew was proclaimed by military authorities for all vehicular traffic outside municipal areas following fifty simultaneous attacks on Palestine’s railway system and blasts in Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa. Nine persons were killed, seven injured and the country’s transport network disrupted. The attacks, attributed in an official police communique to Jews, were preceded by a time bomb explosion that rocked Jerusalem.…In Cairo widespread rioting started as a protest by the Arabs on the 28th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration and continued for several days. Nine persons were killed in Alexandria.”

The ’50s: Seeking relatives, Nov. 25, 1955

In a plaintive reminder of how both World War II and the Iron Curtain severed families, here’s a personal ad looking for a local connection. There were lots of ads like this in our paper in the 1950s, usually sponsored by local charities helping families reunite.

“SEEKS RELATIVE: Mrs. Gita, niece of Zora Bay, born Mendlesohn, from Mitava, Latvia, seeks information on the whereabouts of her aunt, Zora Bay, of San Francisco. Anyone having information please call Mrs. John Yalovoy, 338 Fulton Street, San Francisco, WE 1-7559.”

The ’60s: Vietnam and civil rights, Nov. 19, 1965

A meeting of Reform rabbis made a call for the U.S. to leave Vietnam, we reported, and to support the Civil Rights Movement.

They “overwhelmingly called upon President Johnson to seek an armistice in the conflict in Vietnam… in a resolution on Judaism and world peace, which proved to be the most heated controversy of the convocation.” Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath, then president of the Reform rabbinical association, “called upon members of Reform Judaism for renewed involvement and action to make real the integration of the Negro into the mainstream of American life. He urged them to ‘picket, boycott, attend rallies… watch at the polls, solicit contributions and if necessary, limit our own spending in order to help aid the cause of the American Negro.’”

The ’70s: Is Zionism racism? Nov. 21, 1975

This issue was filled with news about a controversial U.N. resolution that had just passed that defined Zionism as racism. It was revoked in 1991.

“A rare public showing of wide interracial and interreligious unity marked a protest here against the U.N. resolution equating Zionism with racism. Representatives of various ethnic and religious groups joined nearly 2,000 San Franciscans at a Union Square Rally last Sunday to emphasize that the resolution was an affront not just to Jews but to all people.  

The ’80s: Saving Soviet Jewry, Nov. 22, 1985

The Bay Area was a major center of the effort to help the “refuseniks,” as they were called, get out of the Soviet Union, which blocked most Jews from leaving the country for many years.

“Fifty-five local activists, 54 of them Jewish, were arrested in San Francisco Monday for participating in civil disobedience as they protested the harassment of Soviet Jews and other dissidents by the Soviet government. While TV cameras rolled and supporters sang ‘We Shall Overcome,’ 20 rabbis marched solemnly through San Francisco police barricades to padlock themselves to the fence surrounding the consulate. Exclaimed Lillian Foreman, one of the many Jewish lay leaders arrested, ‘We will never forget them. We will never stop doing this, not until the last Jew is free to leave.’”

The ’90s: Rabin falls, Nov. 17, 1995

This issue of the newspaper was consumed by the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 4, an event that shocked and horrified Jews in Israel and around the world. We reported on how local educators and leaders were making sense of it all.

“In tragedy there is often a lesson. Bay Area Jewish educators agree the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin provides a springboard into many difficult-to-teach subjects among them, morality, ethics and Israel. In the classrooms, some teachers attempted to dissect a map of the Middle East. Others jumped online to surf the Internet for Rabin-related information.”

The 2000s: Tough Jews, Nov. 25, 2005

This decade was a time of general security for Jews, so we often turned to human interest stories. In this article, we talked with Rebecca Rosenblatt, a Palo Alto police officer, about stereotypes and expectations.

“‘You know Jewish parents want doctors and lawyers,’ said Rosenblatt. Police work ‘is not what they were hoping for. My mom is not a big fan. She thinks it is too dangerous. But I’m trained to defend myself.’ Rosenblatt’s experience of having to confront resistance within her own family is not so unusual. ‘Where you get the resistance is from the Jewish community itself, from Jews,’ noted Art Krinsky, the president of Shomrim, national organization of Jewish public safety officers. The typical question, he said, is: What’s a nice Jewish boy doing being in law enforcement?’”

The 2010s: Whither the potato? Nov. 27, 2015

Not everything in our paper was about serious stuff. Ten years ago, we went deep into the relationship of Jews with the humble potato.

“While it is hard to imagine Hanukkah without also picturing a plate of hot, crispy potato pancakes, it was relatively recently — a couple hundred years ago — that East European Jews were introduced to the potato, the ingredient essential to the latke’s latke-ness. Brought over from Peru in the 16th century, it made its way first to Spain and the British Isles, and then slowly to the rest of Europe. Unlike other New World products that caught on relatively quickly, the potato wasn’t an instant hit in Europe, especially Eastern Europe.”

The 2020s: 130 years of J.!

This year, our Nov. 28 issue marked 130 years of this publication. We’re still looking out for the community, reporting on everything from public schools flying Palestinian flags to what’s new on the burgeoning Bay Area bagel scene. But we couldn’t do it without our readers.

Do you have a favorite article, recipe or photo from the last decade (or two… or four… or six!)? We’d love to hear about what in J. has touched you over the years. Drop us a line at maya@jweekly.com. And here’s to another 130 years together!

This paper is 130 years old. That’s over 6,700 Shabbats, not to mention scores of Hanukkahs, Thanksgivings, Passovers and even quite a few Jewish Christmases.

When this paper was founded in 1895, California had only been part of the U.S. for 45 years, but the city had a robust population of close to 300,000 and a thriving mercantile scene that arose during the rough-and-tumble boom of the Gold Rush. While the Jewish community may have been a bit sparse outside the city, there were also Jews (and synagogues and cemeteries) scattered throughout the countryside and towns. 

Now San Francisco is almost three times larger than it was in 1895, while the Greater Bay Area has almost 8 million residents. Jews are an integral part of the state at every level, not to mention a big part of the region’s current economic boom. This time, it’s the likes of Mark Zuckerberg in place of giants like Levi Strauss.

To commemorate our 130th year in the Jewish news business — or our b’nai mitzvah times 10, if you prefer — we’ll take a stroll through history over the next two J. Archives columns, ambling through 13 decades of The Emanu-El (our original name), onto several versions of “The Bulletin” and, finally, to J. For each decade, we’ll pick out one story that was published around the paper’s November anniversary.

These selections will give only a small taste of where we’ve been, but there’s much more to explore in our digitized archives, which are available online to browse for free.

The 1890s: The first issue, dated Nov. 22, 1895

Most of our first edition was an introduction and an answer to the question, “Why another Jewish paper?” There were others in California at the time, including a couple in S.F., but founding editor Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger, who led S.F. Temple Emanu-El, wanted to create a “rational” paper that would present local news but also support American Reform Judaism, which was only about 50 years old at the time.

Along with local news, ads and a society page in that first issue, there was also this bit of news from Berlin, decades before the Holocaust, about a notoriously antisemitic German politician; the optimistic note is chilling in hindsight.

“Rector Ahlwardt, whose ghost will not down [sic], has prepared a bill confiscating all Jewish wealth to the State, and reducing the Jews, by law, to the position of day-laborers. One cannot avoid looking at the humorous side of such suggestions. They tend to show the hopeless want of both cause and logic in the attitude of the anti-Semites. As a political measure, called into existence by Bismarckian influences, anti-Semitism is dead.”

The aughts: The Russians are coming, Nov. 24, 1905 

Russian territories were in the grip of pogroms that would eventually lead to a surge in immigration to the U.S., which itself would cause some soul-searching for the Jews already here. American Jews were raising money, and an editorial by Voorsanger also called for a central body to organize help.

“The critical times that confront the Jewish people demand heroic measures. Eight millions of Jews in Russia and Roumania, not to mention those of the farther east, await the hour of their deliverance with impatient tears. The womanhood of our people has been degraded and outraged in the late Russian massacres, which have made the Russian countries infamous… The world is loth to help us in this gigantic effort: its pulse does not stir for the calamities of the unhappy Jew. If we remain indifferent, another century and twenty revolutions will overlook the Russian Jew.”

On the next page, a list of West Coast donors to the Russian Jewish Relief fund was published; it had raised $28,500 so far — the equivalent of over $1 million today.

The teens: Lamps for the needy, Nov. 19, 1915

There are many, many instances in the paper of calls for charity over the years. Jews in America were clearly ready to both ask and give, as this call from the Children’s Auxiliary of the Hebrew Board of Relief shows.

“Under uncertain, flickering gas jets, set up near the ceiling, nearly all of our little children spend hours every evening doing home work and reading newspapers, books, etc. The purses in these homes are not elastic enough for all needs. Children have to eat first and headaches and weak eyes do not cost anything; at least, not in dollars and cents, for there are free clinics. Perhaps somewhere in your storerooms or cellars there may be an unused gas lamp or even a good coal oil lamp with a shade. If so, will you please let us have them to put into those needy homes? While you are looking for those lamps it is possible that you may find that there is a forgotten baby buggy or cart that you are not likely to use again.”

The ’20s: Expanding to Oakland, Nov. 20, 1925

The Emanu-El was (and still is!) headquartered in San Francisco, but it was a paper for the whole of Northern California. In 1925, prominent rabbi Rudolph Coffee wrote for the paper about 50 years of Jewish life in Oakland, dating back to the first steps taken toward an official community in November 1875 at a meeting “in the store of Nathan Rosenberg.”

“Oakland is a growing community and its present rate of progress is excelled by few cities in the country. Its industrial development, its splendid schools, its temperate climate and many other natural advantages lead to the hope that here will develop in time one of the greatest cities on the Pacific Coast. The members of Temple Sinai believe that the coming growth of Oakland means the building here of a large Jewish center. While there will never be as many Jews in Oakland as across the bay, the possibilities for growth and for service to God and country must not be overlooked.”

The ’30s: The Nazi Olympics, Nov. 15, 1935

In 1935, this paper was often occupied with the controversy over whether America would boycott the Olympics being held in Nazi Germany. (We didn’t, by the way.) Meanwhile, experts were predicting the imminent fall of Naziism for economic reasons.

“David A. Brown, national chairman of the $500,000 American ORT campaign, on his return to this country, predicted the beginning of the end of Hitlerism. ‘The German people,’ said the ORT chairman, who has just completed a survey of the organization’s European activities, ‘have lost confidence in their own currency. Nothing, not even the butter lines in Berlin, is as indicative of the panicky condition of the national state of mind as is this illicit emigration of capital from Germany. This flight of capital from a country has preceded economic wreckage in Russia, post-war Germany and in all other countries that have so suffered since the World War. Nothing that has developed, as yet, is as encouraging to the foes of Nazism.’”

We end here, in 1935, with another eight decades to travel in our next column. What will we find in the war years, the postwar boom, the hippie years and beyond?

“Is it a shondah for Jews to celebrate Halloween?”

It’s a question that a rabbi asked in our newspaper in 1984. He wasn’t alone. Quite a few Jews were asking the same thing throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. For example, in 1994 one of our reporters explored the question: “Is it OK for Jewish children to trick or treat, or should they shun the holiday … because of its Christian associations?” And in 1997, a columnist pondered what to do when Halloween fell on Shabbat: “Well, parents, there is a Hell and it is coming at the end of this month. Halloween on Shabbat.”

Another writer revisited the topic in 1999. “I’m not a Halloween advocate. I’m also adamantly opposed to Jews celebrating intrinsically religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter,” Jane Ullman wrote in our pages. “I just want to point out that holidays, like people, are complicated and are not always unadulterated.”

Complicated or not, this debate is relatively modern. In earlier decades, our readers fully embraced the celebration of this identifiably non-Jewish holiday.

In the first half of the 20th century, for instance, Jews in San Francisco society threw Halloween parties with great vim.

The first mention was in 1908, in the society pages, but it clearly wasn’t a new thing.

“Miss Rietta Bloom was pleasantly surprised by the members of the Delta Omega Epsilon Sorority with a Hallowe’en party,” we wrote. “The decorations of the house and tables were in keeping with the weird occasion, Jack o’ lanterns, pumpkins, black cats and other mysterious devices being used in great profusion. At midnight an elaborate repast was served, after which the guests, who numbered about forty, were entertained until the early morning hours, the usual Hallowe’en festivities prevailing.”

In 1909, “an enjoyable Hallowe’en party was given last Saturday evening at Foresters’ Hall, by three dainty little hostesses, Helen Abrahamson, Miriam and Eleanor Hoffman. They entertained about twenty-four young friends with the games of the season, and dancing, and dainty refreshments were served in the upper hall, which had been darkened and appropriately decorated with jack-o’-lanterns and other emblems.”

And in 1911, “Hallowe’en, which is a time for mirth and laughter, came in the crisp cool end of October, and the very dawn of November, too, for the festive scenes were not over until the break of day,” we reported.

There were plenty of institutional events for the holiday too, from bridge teas to a JCC dance. Emanu-El, San Francisco’s generally staid congregation, hosted a massive dance party for the holiday in 1948: “Some 500 young people are expected at the Temple Emanu- EI Alumni Association annual Hallowe’en dance to be held in the Temple gym Sunday. Dick Lieber and his eight-piece band will provide the music and refreshments will be served.”

One of more eclectic parties took place in 1949. “‘Funz a brewing’ and ‘cornz a poppin’ in preparation for the zany and completely mad-cap Halloween shindig being dreamed up by Peninsula Bnai Brith Lodge for tomorrow night. This is strictly a fun affair, not a fund-raising affair, according to Harry Lehrfeld, chairman, who reported that ‘no one will be admitted unless he or she is attired in costume — the more outlandish, the better. We don’t care what you choose for your dress-up idea just as long as you enter into the spirit of the evening, which is being dedicated to tomfoolery at its best.’”

Clearly, the Jews of the Bay Area adored Halloween (and Christmas, as we’ve noted before). So when did Jews begin to think of the holiday as explicitly un-Jewish?

As generations brought up during a wave of post-war assimilation began to question the wholesale adoption of “American” quasi-religious holidays, including Halloween, they began to draw back from the whole-hearted adoption of rituals that seemed connected to other faiths.

“Halloween may be looked upon as a children’s festival of fun and games, yet thoughtful Jews wonder if they should join in the celebration,” wrote Rabbi Bernard Raskas in 1984. “After all, Halloween originated as a pagan festival, then became a Christian holiday and is still observed as such in certain church rituals.”

“‘I tell parents it’s not a Jewish festival,’ said Rabbi David Bassous of Sephardic Congregation Etz Ahaim in Highland Park, N.J.,” according to an article in our paper in 1997. “He said that by celebrating Halloween, parents affirm to their children that such things as witches exist. ‘People become evil because they believe in evil,’ he said.”

In 1994, Oakland Hebrew Day School head Maria Cohen wrote to the paper to confirm that the school had a strict anti-Halloween policy.

“While the school marks appropriate secular holidays such as Thanksgiving and Presidents Day, please note that we will not participate in observance of non-Jewish holidays such as Christmas, Halloween or St. Valentine’s Day.”

The Torah and rabbinical commentaries can definitely be interpreted as telling Jews to avoid the festivals of other cultures. In addition, Jews have our own dress-up day on Purim. But, as shown in our pages, it’s not so simple. Assimilation, celebration, multiculturalism and the tension between the Jewish denominations are all bound up in the ’80s and ’90s debate about Halloween.

Still, American Jews live in America, and children really do love Halloween.

As Yosef Abramowitz wrote in 1998, “Let’s face it. More Jewish families with children observe Halloween than Purim, and Halloween is more anticipated and treasured than even the Sabbath. Instead of fighting an uphill battle to convince your children to abandon the celebration, let’s try to co-opt it.”

That year, Halloween fell on a Saturday.

“Why not introduce havdallah, the mystical ceremony ending Shabbat that involves a flickering flame, sweet spices and a glass of wine? So mark the end of sacred time and then let your children trick-or-treat,” Abramovitz wrote. “By saying goodbye to Shabbat, we acknowledge that we live in a world where everything else is not yet holy.”

In an era when newspapers referred to most women by their husbands’ surnames, the name “Madam Julie Rosewald” leapt off our pages. That’s how this publication always referred to Rosewald, now widely recognized as the first woman cantor for her years of service at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. She was married to a renowned composer and musician, but her prominence in the community as “the Cantor Soprano” meant that even in the 19th century, she was a woman of her own name.

Rosewald was born Julie Eichberg in 1847 in Stuttgart, Germany, the daughter of a prominent synagogue cantor. According to a 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia article written by none other than Henrietta Szold, Rosewald attended the Stuttgart Conservatorium, before moving to Baltimore and marrying violinist and conductor Jacob Rosewald. She sang across Europe with a touring opera company, before moving to another opera company that employed both her and her husband.

In 1884, the Rosewalds settled in San Francisco, where she “became a popular teacher of singing, her success in preparing pupils for church choirs, the concert hall and the operatic stage being largely due to her thorough knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the throat,” the Jewish Encyclopedia tells us.

She began working at Emanu-El as lead soprano in the synagogue’s professional choir. But as the daughter of a leading German cantor, she had more to offer than singing her part. Almost immediately, she was thrust into the spotlight. Cantor Max Wolff died unexpectedly, and Emanu-El needed somebody to lead High Holidays services, writes the Jewish Museum of the American West. Rosewald turned out to be just the person.

Her leadership of those High Holidays services turned out to be a hit. “The singing was a feature of the service, Mrs. Rosewald at the Temple Emanu-El filling her arduous position with great credit,” wrote The Jewish Progress. 

Until 1893, Rosewald served, essentially, as cantor of Emanu-El.

“During all these years Madam Rosewald, often lovingly called the ‘Cantor Soprano,’ made her services a source of the greatest delight to all of her hearers,” read her 1906 obituary in our pages by Jacob Voorsanger, Emanu-El rabbi and founder of this paper. 

“She combined the highest degree of musical ability with a pious disposition and a fair understanding of Hebrew, having been trained in the school of her late father who was Cantor at Stuttgart, Germany,” Voorsanger wrote. “It was this remarkable combination that made the services of the Temple in her time attractive in the highest degree and gave pleasure as well as edification to the numerous attendants.”

It’s unclear whether people thought of her as a true cantor at the time, or what they made of her position, which remained officially “leading soprano.” But she led the cantorial parts of the service and worked with her husband and the synagogue organist to choose and arrange music for the congregation. Voorsanger, ever eager to prove the forward-thinking nature of the Jews of the West, wrote in Rosewald’s glowing obituary that “her position… was exceedingly unique.”

By 1926, 20 years after Rosewald died, we were referring to her straightforwardly as a cantor. “The first woman cantor was Mrs. Julie Rosewald, wife of the musician and composer, and herself a singer of note and remarkable gifts,” we wrote in an article about “women’s work” in Emanu-El’s early years. “She appreciated the needs of the service and greatly delighted the congregation with her musical numbers. Through her singing, she won the hearts and admiration of the entire congregation.”

Rosewald appeared in our pages often, frequently in small notes in the social column, where readers posted notices about when they would be out of town, when their visiting in-laws would be receiving guests, the date of an upcoming bar mitzvah, and so forth.

“Madam Julie Rosewald of San Francisco, accompanied by D. Oppenheimer, wife of Ernest H. Oppenheimer of Baltimore, Md., have gone to Del Monte after a week’s visit to San Jose,” one typical notice reads. 

After she left Emanu-El, Rosewald became a professor of singing at Mills College in Oakland and continued to be a prominent member of the community. She died in 1906 at age 56 during a visit to Germany. Her will, which we reported on in great detail, left money to Emanu-El and Mills College and established the Rosewald Memorial Fund to help disadvantaged students at UC Berkeley.

The oldest description of breast cancer dates back to about 3000 BCE in Egypt, but the disease wasn’t mentioned in our pages until 1953.

Three local doctors performed a groundbreaking (but now severely outdated) experimental surgical procedure for the first time on a human patient that year. It involved removing the adrenal glands and placing a small portion of one of them near the spleen to slow (though not stop) the development of breast cancer.

The understanding and treatment of breast cancer has changed dramatically, from rudimentary surgeries in the early to mid 20th century to targeted therapies, genetic testing and personalized medicine today.

October is recognized globally as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a time dedicated to supporting those affected by the disease and promoting early detection and more research. Once taboo and little understood, breast cancer is now symbolized by the iconic pink ribbon and supported by awareness campaigns, fundraising and advocacy.

In a matter of decades, the survival rates and quality of life for many patients have improved dramatically. One crucial breakthrough was the discovery of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations, which are strongly linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. Ashkenazi Jewish women are disproportionately affected. They are about 10 times more likely than the general population to carry mutations in these genes, according to Sharsheret, a Jewish organization that supports people diagnosed with or at high risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

The breast cancer survival rate in the early 1950s is difficult to determine but at least one study from the MD Anderson Cancer Clinic estimates it was as low as 25%. That compares with today’s survival rate of more than 90%, according to the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

In 1955, a significant effort began at San Francisco’s Mount Zion Hospital (now a campus of the UCSF Medical Center) toward decreasing the fatality rate. That year, the same three doctors mentioned above — Donald E. Bernstein, Gerson R. Biskind and A. Lincoln Brown — made headlines again for their “discovery of a new surgery for cancer of the breast.” 

This time, we wrote, they successfully removed and transplanted the “ovaries to a position next to the bowel wall where their secretions, particularly estrogen, are forced to filter through the liver. It was already known that the female hormone estrogen stimulates the growth of some breast cancer, and that the liver somehow rids estrogen of its cancer stimulating power.” 

The surgery was performed on “a number” of unnamed women and was considered successful because “besides causing shrinkage or disappearance of some cancers, the operation has relieved patients of pain, restored their appetite, resulted in substantial gains in weight and sent some patients back to their normal useful routines.”

While on the cutting edge at the time, such transplantation procedures are now considered ineffective in treating breast cancer.

Over the next few decades in the U.S., radical mastectomies became standard practice. In this surgery, the entire breast, all of the lymph nodes under the arm, and sometimes the chest wall muscles were removed in a single procedure at the same time a biopsy was performed if cancer was found. Although radical mastectomies were a generally effective treatment, the procedure was intense, leaving patients disfigured and often traumatized.

By the 1970s, breast cancer became recognized as one of the leading causes of death for women in the U.S. and began to shed its taboo status.

In 1972, the first in a series of chilling advertisements by the Cancer Awareness Plan titled “Cancer Will Strike” were featured in our pages. The ads doubled as public service announcements that listed facts, symptoms and statistics about the disease from the National Cancer Institute. They warned that breast cancer “causes more deaths than any other form of cancer” and advised women to purchase separate cancer-specific insurance policies. In 1973, three years before the American Cancer Society began recommending routine breast cancer screenings, one of these ads urged readers to conduct monthly self-examinations to search for possible tumors.

The Bay Area Jewish community began organizing seminars, panels, classes and fundraisers that aimed to better understand, treat and prevent the disease. 

In the 1980s, research showed for the first time that Jewish women had a slightly higher incidence of breast cancer than other women. Experts at the time believed that this was due to diet and health habits, we wrote, such as “eating richer, fatty foods, consuming little fiber and exercising little or not at all.” 

Dr. Ernest H. Rosenbaum, a cancer specialist at Mount Zion Hospital, even theorized that “there is probably not a genetic predisposition for breast or colon cancer in Jewish women and they are probably at the same risk as other Caucasians.” (This is now known to be completely wrong.)

Although understanding and treating cancer had come a long way, the disease remained a mystery.

“After a hundred years of research we still don’t know the exact cause of cancer except for smoking-related diseases such as lung cancer,” Rosenbaum acknowledged in 1986.

“Jewish women should shop smartly and buy fiber and low-fat foods,” he advised. “They should learn to be clever cooks, using less butter and schmaltz, and to be conservative about their eating habits.”

With the beginning of third-wave feminism in the early 1990s, more women than ever were speaking out about breast cancer, advocating for more research and better treatments and addressing the trauma of disease for patients and their loved ones. Our publication featured stories about plays, poems and memoirs that tackled topics like grief, faith, identity and even post-mastectomy sex.

In 1991, our staff reporter Tamar Kaufman wrote intimately about her battle with breast cancer.

“Officially, it’s not a ‘Jewish disease,’ but it feels like one,” she reflected. “While I was undergoing chemotherapy, it seemed everyone in the Jewish community knew someone who either had breast cancer or had had it in the past. The American Cancer Society says that being a Jewish woman of European ancestry is a high risk factor as are the high-fat, low-fiber foods central to Ashkenazi cooking. How much damage did Grandma’s grivenes do? My cousins and I used to fight over the combination of fried chicken fat, skin and onions; I have to admit, the memory has my mouth watering again.”

The next year, Kaufman wrote about the ethical questions raised by the Human Genome Project, an international scientific research effort partially based at UCSF to map and sequence all human DNA. There was much speculation about DNA and genetics during this time. Then, a huge breakthrough occurred with the discovery of the BRCA1 gene in 1994 and the BRCA2 gene the following year. 

Tragically, also in 1994, Kaufman died at age 45 from her third bout of cancer, which had spread to her brain.

“Despite a new report warning that Ashkenazi Jews have a significantly higher genetic predisposition to breast cancer, researchers and activists say women should not panic,” reported then staff writer and now senior editor Natalie Weinstein on the matter in 1995.

“I don’t think all women should run out and get tested,” said Dr. Debu Tripathy, a medical oncologist in UCSF-Mount Zion Cancer Center’s breast care division. “We don’t quite know what to do with the information yet.”

The following years saw rapid advancements in breast cancer research and treatment as understanding grew about the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Although Jewish women were not advised to receive genetic testing three decades ago, today it has become a common method of cancer prevention.

In 2000, a study of the BRCA genes found that while the mutation increased the chances of carriers developing breast and ovarian cancers, it also made them more responsive to chemotherapy. It was a long-awaited positive finding after years of bad news for Jewish women.

A 2008 cover story in our pages explored the plight of young Jewish women who carried BRCA gene mutations as they weighed their options for breast cancer prevention and treatment. While still an extremely difficult experience, women shared how they felt more empowered to choose the care plan that was best for them compared with breast cancer patients of the past.

Mara Langer, then 40, had faced cancer twice, the first time when she was 30. She had both her breasts removed after her first cancer diagnosis.

“You finally have a way of making a decision, of getting in front of the cancer and telling the cancer, ‘I’m taking care of this. I’m getting every last morsel of you out of me,’” she said.

Langer has now been cancer free for over a decade. She currently lives in Reno and is the director of community engagement for Jewish Nevada, and has continued to be an advocate for genetic testing and early cancer detection.

The year was 1935, and our publication was recognizing a landmark event.

“After 31 years on the faculty of the University of California, Dr. Jessica B. Peixotto will retire this month with the distinction of becoming the first woman emeritus professor in the history of the institution,” we wrote.

Jessica Peixotto is not a household name, but she was a leading light in economics and social science at a time when almost no women served in leadership roles at American universities.

In 1900, she became the second woman to earn a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. Four years later, she became the first full-time female professor there, specializing in cost of living for American households. She was initially hired in the economics department and later founded Cal’s social welfare school.

As we wrote in 1924, “Dr. Jessica Blanche Peixotto of the University of California has the distinction of being the only woman occupying a chair of economics in an American college. In a recent interview, she stated that she had the satisfaction of helping to establish the first social training course at the University of California, where she found real joy in her work.”

According to a 1980 profile written for us by historian Norton Stern, “She was born in 1864, the only daughter and the eldest of the five children of the Raphael Peixottos. She was raised in San Francisco. Of Sephardic descent, her grandfather had arrived in America from Amsterdam in 1807.”

Raphael Peixotto, who lived from 1837 to 1905, served as president of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El. He was a “merchant by day, a student by night,” our founding editor Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger, said of him in a 1947 article.

Raphael co-founded a dry-goods company in the city and then turned to real estate and other retail endeavors. “To him, however, business was only a means to a livelihood,” we wrote. “Fond of literature and of religion, he spent all of his leisure time at study and in contributions to the cultural life of his city.”

Despite his interest in culture and study, he didn’t seem especially interested in his only daughter’s academic ambitions.

She graduated from high school. But “because her father disapproved of college for girls she stayed home for over a decade,” according to our 1980 profile of her.

In that one sentence, there’s a lot of room for imagination about Jessica’s goals and plans. But she couldn’t be dissuaded.

“In 1891 she enrolled at the University of California and received her bachelor’s degree in 1894,” we continued. “In 1900 she was awarded her doctorate, the second given to a woman by the university.… She attained the rank of full professor in 1918, being the first woman at the university to attain that position.”

We also noted that “Dr. Peixotto was described as blue-eyed, dark-haired and a modest dresser. She was said to have been strong-minded, self-sufficient and a polished hostess. Jessica cherished her Jewish heritage.”

Whether or not she was a polished hostess, she was definitely a polished academic who served on many boards and was a lauded public speaker.

“A lecture on ‘Labor and Leisure’ was delivered last night at Equality Hall, 139 Albion Avenue, by Miss Jessica Peixotto, at the invitation of the Socialist organization,” we wrote in 1908.

“The discourse was heard with evident interest by the audience which nearly filled the hall. Miss Peixotto expressed the opinion that the social problem, which she said is now going through a crisis, must be worked out collectively and not individually, if success is to be accomplished. She held that individual effort would merely tend to inequality.… Heaven pictured as a place of rest, she believed, is not the goal of man, because men would weary of eternal leisure. They would not be content to stand still.”

Peixotto didn’t marry. She died in 1941 at her Berkeley home. In her obituary, we wrote, “Dr. Peixotto recently celebrated her 77th birthday when she received the good wishes of hosts of admiring friends.”

According to UC Berkeley, her status was unique: No women were hired after Peixotto in the economics department until the mid-1970s. But her most lasting contribution is likely in the realm of uniting pure economics with a sensible, person-first, proto-feminist point of view.

Here are her own words, from 1924: 

“Economics has been called the ‘dismal science,’ and pure economics is rather forbidding. There is nothing of the spirit in it. Everything is desperately materialistic.

“Mere human beings seem to be left out of the equation of economics. They seem buried under the materialistic mass. They seem to exist for the sake of things, not the things for the sake of men, women and children.

“Social economics gets away from this point of view. It is more human. It recognizes that the great resource is not steel or timber or coal or power or land — it is human life.”

Our readers love food.

That’s clear today, and it was clear back in the early days of this paper. From fulsome recipe columns to rows of restaurant advertisements, our readers gobbled up news of social teas, benefit dim-sum lunches and home-style cooking.

And they loved to eat out.

Many of the establishments that advertised in our paper were longstanding city favorites and part of the urban landscape. In the early decades of the 20th century, a wide variety of Jewish restaurants studded the city, providing a taste of home for immigrants and the children of immigrants.

For example, here is a 1929 advertisement: “Zukerman’s Hungarian Restaurant, 177 Eddy Street, near Taylor, serves dainty luncheons and dinners prepared especially for those observing Passover. The dainty dishes at Zukerman’s during Passover Week always attract people from all over the city.”

Or this ad from 1956: “Hy’s Restaurant at the Broadmoor Hotel, specializing in kosher-style and American foods, is operated by Hy Weinberg, widely known in San Francisco. The restaurant has ample parking for customers. The address is Sutter and Gough Sts., telephone ORdway 3-1932.”

(Hy’s is gone. The Broadmoor still stands but is now a senior living center. Where Zukerman’s stood is a fried-chicken takeout joint.)

Besides “kosher-style,” there were numerous legitimate kosher restaurants, from Schindler’s to Diller’s to Oberlander’s, though all have since closed.

But Jews didn’t only eat Jewish food, as the ads in our paper attest.

“A long-felt want, a new feature for the exposition city, San Francisco, with its many kinds of restaurants, is to have something unique. This is the first Spanish cafe in the city where a genuine Spanish cuisine may be had. The management has been fortunate in getting a man who has been the chef of ex-President Diaz of Mexico for four years. The Castilian, at 311 Sutter Street, is now open and will be run in conjunction with the Hotel Berkeley, a high class and elegantly furnished hotel,” the newspaper noted in 1912.

Campi’s restaurant was one of the city’s oldest Italian dining establishments, having opened in 1859. This ran in our pages in 1910: “While patrons of Campi’s Restaurant on Montgomery Street regretted to see the place closed up, it is a source of satisfaction to them to know that this well-known eating house is located at 707 Market Street, with an additional entrance on Third Street. Campi’s is one of the oldest restaurants in this city and known all over the country for their fine dishes. Under its present management Campi’s will no doubt retain its high standard of excellence in its cuisine and general treatment of its patrons.”

It’s no secret that American Jews love Chinese food, and that seems to have been true 100 years ago as well, judging by this publication’s output.

One restaurant, located in what is today still Oakland’s Chinatown, was described in this paper in 1925: “Situated in the heart of the business section of Oakland is the newly erected Pekin Low Restaurant, which has added a charm and attraction and has brought tourists and sightseers to view the unique building located at Seventh and Webster streets. The architect. W. K. Owen, who designed the structure, is being congratulated for the skill shown in the workmanship and artistic plans. Pekin Low represents the progress made by the Chinese merchants of Oakland. The Chinese dishes served at Pekin Low are the talk of the town.”

Back in the city, we had the Cathay House, described in Frank Kay’s 1939 column on the city’s night life: “At the Cathay House, San Francisco’s newest and most interesting Chinese restaurant, the kitchen is entirely open to view and the curious can watch their food being prepared in traditional Chinese manner. You’ll see an authentic ‘Wok Lo’ in use, in a spotless Canton kitchen. The ‘Wok Lo’ is a Chinese range with a past of 5000 years, and was made especially for the Cathay House.

“For those unfamiliar with real Chinese food, luncheons and dinners at the Cathay House are delightful surprises. Barbecued duck and apricot sauce, whole fried squab Cantonese, boneless potted duck and toasted almonds, egg flower soup, Chinese sweet peas, Chow mein…and many other delectable suggestions.”

Hold on, I’m too hungry to continue writing! See you at dinner — I’ll keep a place for you. In the meantime, I’ll end this column with a humorous story we ran from 1926 called “Of Two Evils He Chose the Least.”

“A pious Jew once went to his rabbi for a ‘penance.’

“‘What have you done?’ inquired the rabbi. ‘Oh, I ate a meal without washing my hands,’ said the penitent one. Although the rabbi did not consider such a breach of custom very serious, he decided to give him the penance in order to stimulate his ardor. Curious, however, he asked how the sinner had come to forget. 

“‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I was in a goyishe restaurant, where they didn’t have any washing basins.’

“The rabbi stared at him in amazement. ‘Well, how did you come to be in a trefah place and not in a Jewish restaurant?’ he asked.

“‘Well, rabbi, it was Yom Kippur and all the Jewish restaurants were closed.’”

Twenty-five years ago this month, Jews across America kvelled at the news of then-presidential candidate Al Gore’s pick for his running mate. Joe Lieberman, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, became the first Jewish candidate on a major party presidential ticket.

The front page of this publication on Aug. 11, 2000, led with a headline conveying both intrigue and a hint of skepticism: “A Jewish vice president?” 

The article that followed, written by our longtime reporter and columnist Alix Wall, noted that it wasn’t his Modern Orthodox identity that might sway Jewish Republicans into voting Democrat. It was Lieberman’s stand on political issues — aligned more with Gore’s opponent, George W. Bush, than with Gore himself — that could attract them. Lieberman’s rebuke of President Bill Clinton in 1998 was also considered a plus among Jewish Republicans.

“Widely respected by both parties, the Democratic vice presidential designee has been called ‘the conscience of the Senate’ for, among other things, his outspoken condemnation of President Clinton’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair,” Wall wrote.

Our newspaper included a special section in that issue called “Campaign 2000: The First Jewish Candidate,” filling several pages with articles ranging from the reaction of Lieberman’s proud mother about her “mensch” son to the mezuzah and tzedakah boxes adorning his Senate office.

Lieberman himself called Gore’s decision an “act of chutzpah.” And in some ways, he was right. Back in 1984, then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein was reportedly floated as a running mate for Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale, but “her Jewishness was considered a detriment,” according to a story we ran in August 2000.

“It’s taken a while, but America has finally come of age,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in 2000 of Lieberman’s candidacy. “I think people now recognize that these are public servants who happen to be Jews, not Jews who happen to be public servants.”

Some Jews feared an antisemitic backlash, while others dismissed those fears as needless hand-wringing.

“I realized that America is ready. And if it isn’t, it should be,” Tracy Salkowitz, regional executive director of the American Jewish Congress, told us after she came to terms with her own concerns over Lieberman’s selection.

Some Bay Area rabbis noted that the fears of possible antisemitism reflected an unsettling concern buried within the Jewish community.

“Perhaps we don’t feel as secure here as we thought we did.… Perhaps the fear of latent anti-semitism lies much closer to the surface of our lives than we have imagined,” said Rabbi Alan Lew of Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco.

Yitzhak Santis, Peninsula director for the Jewish Community Relations Council, disagreed.

“We live in a whole new world. This country is not what it was 40 years ago,” Santis said. “Or even 20 years ago.”

Many Jews rushed to donate to the campaign.

We reported on Nov. 3, 2000 — four days before the election — that Lieberman had “turned into a kosher cash cow” for Democrats.

“At a Silicon Valley fund-raiser early last month, the take was $3.2 million, a record for a vice presidential candidate; the audience was a mix of high-tech executives and Jewish leaders,” we reported.

Despite the robust campaign dollars, Bush and his vice presidential candidate, Dick Cheney, eked out a win. A tumultuous investigation into hanging chads on Florida ballots and a historic controversy over a recount were resolved in Bush’s favor by a single vote in the U.S. Supreme Court more than a month after the election. 

Jews, as usual, voted overwhelmingly Democrat, although Jewish turnout for the Gore-Lieberman ticket wasn’t remarkably different from previous elections. Exit polls showed that Gore-Lieberman captured 79 percent of the Jewish vote: 1 percentage point more than Clinton received in 1996, and 1 percentage point less than Clinton received in 1992.

This wouldn’t be the end of Lieberman’s White House aspirations. In January 2003, he announced he was seeking the Democratic nomination for president.

That same month, we wrote about “An Amazing Adventure,” a memoir written by Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, that detailed how they maneuvered running a vice presidential campaign as an Orthodox family. 

“Kosher food was brought to their hotels throughout the campaign by Lubavitch rabbis who knew their locales even though they were supposed to be a secret. And a Sukkah booth was crafted next to the Secret Service station outside the Liebermans’ Washington home,” the article said.

Lieberman dropped out of the presidential race in February 2004 when Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts swept the Democratic primaries. Two years later, Lieberman ran for Senate again and won — as an independent in the general election after losing the Democratic primary.

Lieberman died in March 2024 at age 82. His legacy among Democrats was mixed in the end. Even so, his vice presidential candidacy at the turn of the century was not only historic, but also inspirational for American Jews. Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said after Lieberman ended his run for president in 2004: “He has blazed a path for future candidates who might one day be president of the United States.”

J. columnist Howard Freedman recently wrote an eloquent review of a book about a Jewish Argentine woman who desperately searched for her daughter and grandson after they were “disappeared” by the military dictatorship that held sway in the country from 1976 to 1983.

The tragedy of the tens of thousands of kidnap victims in Argentina is well known, but it took on a Jewish angle in the pages of this paper at the time. 

It is estimated that the right-wing dictatorship murdered around 30,000 people — the number is disputed — whom it considered opponents. Of those, around 2,000 were Jewish, a much higher proportion than in the general public.

This paper was well aware that Jews were being targeted and that strong antisemitic tendencies ran through Argentinian society.

“Action alert: Argentina,” wrote columnist and Jewish community leader Earl Raab in 1976, after the right-wing military coup.

“The ‘right,’ currently under the leadership of General Jorge Videla, who took over in March of this year, has opened the door more widely than ever to neo-Nazi publications and activities,” Raab wrote. “The ‘left’ opposition, meanwhile, is ideologically ‘third world’ in orientation and anti-Zionist. The long range lesson in Jewish history is that Jews are in trouble in any politically unstable country, especially one which is not curbed by democratic restraints.”

Rumors swirled, and Videla eventually felt obliged to address them, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported in 1977. He said, ominously, that Jews weren’t targeted for being Jewish, but for their politics.

“Videla said that Argentina is not a Nazi state. He expressed himself as ‘very grateful’ for the cultural contributions of the ‘great’ Jewish community,” the JTA article stated. “Lately, he said, Jewish names have appeared in activities inimical to the state and the image of Argentina has become deformed by apprehensions that there may be discrimination against Jews.”

Around 300,000 Jews lived in Argentina at the time, according to a 1981 Jewish Currents report. (Other estimates are even higher — up to 450,000.) How did they get there? Many, of course, came after World War II. Most famously, so did many Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann.

But most came before that, as part of a plan to settle Jews from Russian territories in the late 1800s. Baron Maurice de Hirsch was a German financier and philanthropist who donated huge sums of money to various programs, first for secular education for the Jews of Europe and then to settle Jews abroad. That included Argentina.

An 1896 obituary for Hirsch noted that “it is mainly to his energy and generosity that thousands of Russian Jews owe the facilities afforded them of emigrating to the United States and Argentina. In all this Baron Hirsch acted on the reasonable conviction that Jews are quite as capable as Christians of becoming skilled artisans and successful agriculturists, if only they obtain fair play; and before his death he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had completely proved his case.”

A report from 1898 on his project showed that 1,364 families had been settled in Argentina:

“We cannot say that at this hour the population which has been transplanted to Argentina has acquired all the qualities of old agricultural nations; the education of the colonists is not yet finished. But we are happy to state that great progress has been made; the last crop has been satisfactory.”

The Argentine contingent survived and prospered.

In 1979, we carried this report from the London Jewish Chronicle Service:

“Descendants of the refugees escaping the persecutions in Czarist Russia who pioneered Moisesville, the ‘mother’ of the Jewish agricultural settlements in Argentina, are celebrating the 90th anniversary of its foundation. The 824 original settlers who landed in Buenos Aires on Aug. 14, 1889, endured enormous hardships when they began working the desert land some months later. No fewer than 60 children, aged between five and 14, died from cholera. Yet, they persevered, and led by Rabbi Aaron Goldman, a shochet, a mohel and faithful helpers, the community maintained Jewish traditions, and according to the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ of Oct. 1889, it was possible to eat kosher meat for the first time in Argentina.”

It continued: “Thousands of new immigrants, not only from Eastern Europe, but from the Near East, Turkey and other countries, came to people the settlements or live in the cities as the forerunners of the present day Argentine Jewish community, which at 450,000 is the fifth largest in the world, after the United States, Israel, the Soviet Union and France.” 

Argentina’s military dictatorship was toppled in 1983. The next year, we ran a JTA cover story by David Landau with the headline: “Few cried for Jews of Argentina.”

“The Jewish community here is stirred and troubled even more than the general public over the brief and bloody history of the military dictatorship. There is profound and at times acrimonious heart-searching within the community over the question of whether the leadership did enough to protect and save young Jews persecuted by the military,” he wrote.

“While statistics are still sketchy and investigations and revelations continue, it is already quite clear that the Jews suffered proportionately to their strength in the population considerably more than other groups. There were perhaps four times as many disappeared persons among the Jews than among the general population…. The evidence clearly shows that Jews, once incarcerated, were brutally tortured and treated worse than other prisoners.”

The disappearance of about 1,500 Jewish Argentines was under investigation in 1984.

“Complicating the controversy,” Landau’s article continued, “is a subdebate over the role of Israel. On the one hand, Israeli diplomats and other emissaries here were active discreetly in rescuing your Jews. Hundreds were quietly flown to Israel, and even now much of the story is untold and unknown. On the other hand, the Israeli government had and indeed still has a close arms supply relationship with Argentina.”

The brutal end for so many people remains a tragedy four decades later. The people of Argentina weathered a terrifying period, but many are still looking for answers and for the truth of what happened to the “disappeared.”

In July 1925, Jewish San Francisco was gripped by a battle of beliefs that was unfolding in a small town courtroom on the other side of the country.

On the stand was a worldview that looked to science to explain the mysteries of the universe. In opposition, and supported by the law of the land, was a fundamental belief that the Bible should be interpreted literally. 

Known as the Scopes trial, it was a test of the right to teach evolution in schools. Journalist H.L. Mencken coined it the Scopes Monkey Trial, and the nickname stuck. Although it was a trial about Tennessee law, the soundness of Darwin’s theory of evolution was also put on the stand.

Just as in the rest of the country, the Jewish community in San Francisco took a deep interest in the trial. The editors of this paper published a particularly Jewish take on the debate.

Rabbis and leaders opined on the subject, writing with measured passion about both their love for Torah and their commitment to science. S.F. Temple Emanu-El Rabbi Louis Newman summed it up well in a piece published on June 26 as the country prepared for the trial.

“It is our confidence in the validity and permanence of Judaism which has enabled us to incorporate into the content of our theology the best of new knowledge as science places it before us,” he stated. “We Jews have nothing to lose and everything to gain for Judaism by accepting the teachings of science.”

The trial of high school teacher John Scopes began on July 10, 1925. But even before then, it was a cause célèbre. Tennessee banned the teaching of evolution in schools, and Scopes, who was only 24 at the time, volunteered to challenge the ban. The trial was broadcast live on radio, transfixing the nation.

“It is with pride that the modern Jew can state that Judaism and science are in complete harmony, and that Jews have always been staunch defenders of evolution,” Newman wrote, commenting on the upcoming trial. (He also spoke before the state’s education board to defend science-based textbooks.)

“Jewish teachers should not hesitate to go on record as being champions both of the Bible and of evolution,” Newman wrote. “We Jews can render an historic service to the cause of truth by proclaiming our allegiance to both the Bible of our Fathers and the Bible of Nature.”

He did admit that maybe some Jews (not Reform like him, of course) might be a little less enthusiastic. But on the whole, he said, Jews supported “the progress of free thought and investigation.” Newman suggested that even the Jewish thinkers of the past would have accepted evolution if they’d had access to the science of 1925.

Rabbi Rudolph Coffee of Oakland’s Temple Sinai was also a supporter of teaching evolution in schools. He wrote about it on June 19, 1925, in what was introduced by our editors as “a convincing argument.”

“It is very sad that the Bible, the most wonderful book ever written, should be used to hold back the hands of progress,” he wrote. “Is it not high time that we turn from the Bible as a textbook in every scientific domain and permit the latest advances by university professors to be our real guide?”

“Why shall we not use the Bible for what it is, the most glorious source of spiritual solace and inspiration which this world has ever known?”

The trial lasted just over a week. Defended by Clarence Darrow, Scopes lost, although the verdict was later reversed on a technicality. But the issues it raised remained very much in the public discourse.

On Sept, 18, we published an article by S.F.-born Rabbi Edgar Magnin reflecting on the conflict between religion and science through a particularly Jewish lens.

“Jews went through this struggle a hundred years ago and more, when Reform Judaism was born,” he wrote. “Even then, the case is not quite parallel. For Orthodox Judaism, which is theoretically opposed to critical science as applied to the Bible, rarely fought about beliefs or stressed them to any degree.”

The Tennessee case was a fight between freedom and tyranny, he said.

“They believe that if you can control the schools, you can control the men and women of the future,” he wrote. “Of course, they cannot see that such tactics are ridiculous, un-American and dangerous, that the young people are too wise and independent these days to be bamboozled by old fogy notions.”

The famous trial happened 100 years ago this month. Though Scopes lost in court, he won in the court of public opinion, including among Reform Jews on the West Coast. Would the rabbis, and the Jews who read their words, be surprised that Biblical literalism in the classroom would still be a topic a century later? In November 2024, Texas decided it would allow Bible-based curriculum in public schools.

“It is time for men and women who believe in freedom of teaching, freedom of press, freedom of speech and belief, to rally around the forces defending science,” Newman wrote in 1925. “If we fail now, America will become the victim of an oligarchy of bigots, raiding every State Legislature in the land, and eventually capturing Congress for a union of Church and State.”