The CJM Blog

Every city has its history, which is easy to ignore when you live there. Cultural pilgrimages often end when the urban honeymoon is over, and you complete the transformation from starry-eyed visitor to jaded inhabitant. But there are stories everywhere, and few stories are as good as those from the Beat Generation, which came of age and influence in 1950s San Francisco.

It all began with a nonexistent sandwich. Leo Beckerman and Evan Bloom wanted a quality pastrami sandwich but could not find it in San Francisco. 

 The two southern California men met in Hillel’s kitchen while attending UC Berkeley, where they started a weekly kosher barbeque. They used a camp stove that served the 200-250 attendants; it became so successful that they had ten people helping in the kitchen. Their theme was not always Jewish: they made jambalaya, Mexican food, and Chinese food. But the recurring motif was creating community over food.



100 people armed with cameras descended on Jessie Square Plaza in front of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, ready to hunt. They were searching for images inspired by the street photography exhibition The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1919-1939 . Vince Donovan, proprietor of the shop/polaroid and tintype studio Photobooth and one of the judges of what we called #SFphotohunt, talked to a few of the pursuers about why they showed up on a crisp January morning to take photographs: Bill: "I'm just a point and shoot guy. I've always looked at life that way, I'm just into freezing time and capturing moments."

Just before launching into the world premiere of her gorgeous new song “The Arrow and the Bow,” commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum in connection with its exhibition Jacques Lipchitz : Hagar in the Desert , musician Alicia Jo Rabins invoked the young inter-disciplinary muse Miranda July: “Limitations are where art begins.”

by James G. Leventhal Jaron Lanier came to speak at the Contemporary Jewish Museum as part of the Museum's LINK program,, a Jewish, Art, and Technology initiative at the CJM.

1) Portion dough 2) Knead dough 3) Sculpt dough 4) Brush with egg 5) Arrange on baking sheet 6) Sprinkle with poppy seeds 7) Place in oven and bake at 350 degrees until it is golden brown 8) Allow to cool on rack 9) Enjoy!

This is a transcript of the talk delivered by Scribe Julie Seltzer at the opening of the exhibition, As It Is Written: Project 304,805 . Julie will be periodically be sharing her thoughts on what she is writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view. These words were offered in memory of my mother, Chaya bat Pinchas v'Batsheva. This weekend is Simchat Torah , the Celebration of Torah, which marks the end of the yearly Torah reading cycle. It feels like a particularly auspicious time to begin writing a Torah. On Simchat Torah we read the very end of the Torah, and then immediately read the beginning, making the Torah more like a circular document than a linear one.

Roger Bennett, co-curator of Jews on Viny, co-founder of Idelsohn Society Part of the reason we formed the Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation was to change the legacy of the performers we meet. Over the past five years we have uncovered a lost world of Jewish music replete with performers whose careers have been in danger of being written out of history. Our efforts have been focused on recording their stories, documenting their career arcs, and in many cases, giving them the opportunity to take the stage again, so a young audience can rock out to their sound and appreciate their legacy. Thanks to Connie Wolf and the board and staff at CJM, we were able to do this in fine style at the Jews on Vinyl Revue—and in perhaps the highlight of our work so far, Idelsohn co-founder David Katznelson was able to present Irving "Fabulous Fingers" Fields with a proclamation from Mayor Gavin Newsom, declaring that it was officially Irving Fields Day throughout the city. For thi...

By Dan Schifrin, Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence When Brenda Way, Artistic Director of the ODC Dance Company , spoke at the Museum in March about her new work “In the Memory of the Forest,” she was careful to note that the dance, based on an oral history of her Polish mother-in-law, was not created as a work “on the Holocaust.” Instead, the multi-media production, which explores Iza Ehrlich’s hiding in the forests outside of Warsaw during Word War II, was designed to explore the unique character of one brave and complex person, who was neither defined nor destroyed by the Holocaust. The individuality of Iza Erlich’s narrative, along with Brenda Way’s unique ability to listen to it, suggest that the transmission of one person’s story to another is perhaps the most powerful and humane way of keeping alive not just the memory of one person, but a context to mourn those whose memories and stories were forever silenced in Auschwitz and Treblinka. On Thursday, April...

By Dan Schifrin, Director of Public Programs and Writer in Reside nce Not every boy dr eams of growing up to write cartoons for The New Yorker , or books for child ren. But I did. In high s chool I often brought on e-panel cartoons into my English class, hoping that my witty reference t o Kafka and S hakespeare would boost my popularity (sadly, I only got extra cr edit, which at 16 seemed quite the b ooby prize). Growing up with a younger sister, for whom I often improvised stories, songs and sometimes e ntire musicals, I felt it was theoretically possible to invent stories as strangely rich as those written by Hans Christian A ndersen, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Shel Silverstein. It was later in life when I realized that one man , William S teig, had managed to create both canonical cartoons and children’s books, as well as a museum full of drawings evoking the absurdity and pathos of life. William Steig, "I got my first haircut at Ditchick's Barbershop," fin...