There are some Jews who say that in the 21st century, performing a brit milah (ritual circumcision) on a baby boy is neither desirable nor necessary. For San Francisco residents, however, there is a chance that it may also become illegal. In the city known for being on the cutting edge of many trends, a…
Gaucho’s “Pearl,” released last month on Porto Franco Records and launched at the Jewish Music Festival of Berkeley, Calif., is the perfect accompaniment to a lazy autumn afternoon. Channeling the sounds of 1930s Paris, the San Francisco-based sextet plays the kind of gentle, sometimes-jubilant, sometimes-melancholy swing that doesn’t make you want to get up and…
With the opening of San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School of the Bay’s (JCHS) new building on Ellis Street in 2002, the city’s organized Jewish community finally returned to the Fillmore. Only local Jewish history buffs appreciated the significance; the neighborhood in which the school is situated — now called The Western Addition — was…
The title of a current exhibition of works by the late German Jewish American photographer John Gutmann, “An Emigrant’s Visual Discovery of a New World,” says it all. An immigrant to the United States, Gutmann brought to the striking black and white images he created the eye and sensibility, not only of a foreigner, but…
Streetcar bells clang, workers hurry to their offices, and shoppers and tourists meander along the crowded sidewalk. Lital Dotan, a fair-skinned young woman with long, frizzy, strawberry blond hair, clad in a white terrycloth bathrobe, stares out at the busy downtown San Francisco scene from a couch in the front window of the Marina Abramovic…
Carlton Evans likes to shift paradigms. Whether it’s the way Jews daven together or the way people make and watch films, he’s known for bucking convention. An early organizer of San Francisco’s Mission Minyan, a lay-led, non-denominational, highly participatory, egalitarian, queer-friendly and halachically oriented community, Evans has more recently focused his energies on co-founding and…
As a bit of a New York chauvinist, the intensity of the San Francisco art scene initially surprised me. The city is a delight to perform in. The crowds are fantastic and intelligent and surprisingly attuned to new Jewish culture. This affinity for experimentation with tradition was very much on display last Saturday night at…
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