Leslie Aronzon:
Welcome, everybody. And thank you for attending this virtual event on California Jews with our very special guest, Dr. Marc Dollinger. My name is Leslie Aronzon, and I am a proud member of the Brandeis University Class of 1984. And I'm a proud member of the Brandeis University Board of Trustees. It is my pleasure to welcome you all to this evening's program. This is a true California-wide event, and is proudly presented by the Brandeis Alumni Club of Northern California, and the Brandeis Alumni Club of Southern California.
Leslie Aronzon:
A tiny bit about me, I was born and raised in Los Angeles, I still live here. I lived in a world, I grew up in a world that's described in the book. And when I stepped onto the Brandeis campus in 1980, I thought, "Well, this is a little bit different." So, I'm very interested in Marc's presentation tonight. And now, it is my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker, Dr. Mark Dollinger. He has such an extensive bio, I have to read it. Dr. Dollinger holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University. He has served as research fellow at Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion, as well as the Andrew W. Melon Post-doctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Humanities at Bryn Mawr College, where he coordinated the program in Jewish Studies. Professor Dollinger, is author of four scholarly books in American Jewish history, most recently Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s. He has published entries in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Encyclopaedia of Anti-Semitism, and the Encyclopaedia of African American Education.
Leslie Aronzon:
His next project, A Tale of Two Campuses: Jews and Identity Politics in the Golden State, traces his experiences as a Jewish professor at both right-wing and left-wing universities. Dr. Dollinger is a past president of both the Jewish Community High School of the Bay and Brandeis Hillel Day School. Dr. Dollinger serves on the boards of the Jewish Community Foundation, the Osher Marin JCC, the URJ Camp Newman. He sits on the California Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, was named Volunteer of the Year by the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation and was awarded the San Francisco JCRC's Courageous Leader Award. Quite a bit. Well, Dr. Dollinger is not a Brandeishian himself, we'll forgive you for that, his wife, Marcy is, from the class of 1987. So, by extension, he's part of our community. We are privileged to have Marc, join us this evening and look forward to learning from him. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Marc Dollinger.
Marc Dollinger:
Thank you so much. Good evening. Great to be here. I'm going to go right to share screen so we can have a multimedia presentation. And one moment it looks like my screen share does not want to work. So, I'm going to try another way here and see if we can make this happen. Okay, here we go. So, our story this evening, begins in the late 19 century, as it was for so many American Jews whose ancestors lived in Eastern Europe. But for this family living in the settle of Hoosh Romania, they were told that if you want to be poor all your life, go to New York. Okay. So I'm just assuming if we've got a California Jew's talk for Brandeis University alum, you're either Californians now, or were Californians at one point, we may have some New Yorkers here, but I'll just say that the story was if you want to be rich, go to the other side, meaning California where the discovery of gold a couple decades earlier, gave a promise which not even New York City could offer.
Marc Dollinger:
So yes, here are the two of the descendants of that couple because this is my great grandfather, Albert Jerome Dollinger and my great grandmother, Sara Clara Rice Dollinger, and I love this picture because it is their wedding day, New Year's Eve, 1905. December 31st 1905, which of course for those of us who know something about California history, is going to become quite significant because the earthquake is going to hit just four months later. So, these are the roots which many immigrants took from Eastern Europe, ultimately to California. I don't know if you can see I've got the pointer here and I've got the pointer in Eastern Europe. For most of if you're Eastern European Jewish ancestry, for most of your ancestors, they went from here, they crossed the Atlantic, they landed here on the East Coast of the United States, and then would have either come on horseback this direction, or after the transcontinental railroad was completed after reconstruction, they could have taken the railroad.
Marc Dollinger:
Another route, which is possible is to sail to what was then the isthmus at Nicaragua, and you'd cross over land, you could go to the isthmus at Panama, and of course, after 1914 when the Panama Canal was complete, you could cross the isthmus there. For my particular family though, the route went all the way down actually. This map isn't totally correct. Around the very tip of South America, and then moving all the way up to get to California, right here. Well, I'm going to do a little pop quiz for all of you. If you go to your chat, now we've disabled chat for the crowd, but you can chat me individually. And pop quiz question number one, and we're in finals week at SF State, so I'm in a grading kind of mood. Who is this?
Marc Dollinger:
And oh, by the way, for this and all other pop quiz questions, you cannot use the internet, your computer, your phone, that's officially cheating. Okay. So, Janet says, Ishi. This is probably a reference to Ishi the last Yahi from Cal Berkeley actually. My undergraduate alma mater. Speaking of which Larry, I think Larry's here. I saw you. Larry is my roommate from Cal Berkeley. So, great to see you here. Other guesses on who this could be. All right. It's Henrietta Szold. Now, that I've given you the name, go ahead and type in who you think Henrietta Szold is, if you remember that person. And if you are a graduate of Brandeis University, it would be a good idea to know who she is. Because Henrietta Szold was the founder of Hadassah.
Marc Dollinger:
And in 1915, in 1915, she said that California would be a great training ground for the Zionist Movement. As she wrote, "California resembles it." Meaning what was in Ottoman Palestine. "California resembles it so closely in climate, geological formation, and agricultural problems and advantages, while surpassing it in prosperity, and technical progress." All right. For those of you who are coming from the northern part of the state of California, can you imagine a variety of technological progress in Silicon Valley in 1915, if you would have bought up some real estate at that point. All right. I just want you to know, this is my standard California Jews book talk, so the next slide is not actually supposed to be a giveaway. But please, everybody, let us know who that is. And this... Oh, my goodness! You have a member of the board here who is going to be very upset if everyone doesn't get it.
Marc Dollinger:
And just so you know, we're getting, Louis Brandeis, L.B, absolutely, this is the namesake of your hallowed institution. And according to Brandeis himself, Israel was, "a miniature California." Okay, even before we get too far into this, I'm just going to let you know that I have attitude on this, not only am I a scholar, I am also a California and I'm actually fifth generation native California. And for that reason, we are going to take a California focused view of Jewish America and the world. And here's the book cover. And the book cover has an image which is a stained glass window, from Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco. If you're a member of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco, you cannot share or text a friend who's watching to give them the answer. This is a picture of Moses, of Moshe Rabbenu, delivering the 10 commandments at Mount Sinai. Although, if you look closely at this image, there's something very different about this giving of Torah at Sinai than others.
Marc Dollinger:
So, feel free, type, direct message me in the chat. By the way, here is your Zoom lesson for the day. It used to be called private message, now what's called direct message. And that's because you have to know it's not actually private, because the person who owns that account can actually read your messages. That's why they're now direct. The flags, absolutely, the flags is great. Debra, you have it. Yes, the answer is Yosemite. If you look here in the background, you have El Capitan and Half Dome. This is the Yiddish word chutzpah. This is nerve, right? That the Jews of San Francisco, that California Jews are rewriting Shavuot, which we just celebrated, the giving of the law. No longer was the Sinai, the place where Judaism began. Now, it was in Yosemite Valley in Central California. And, wow!
Marc Dollinger:
So if this were true, and we were going to rewrite the writing of Torah, then we probably have to have the Israelites wandering somewhere around Fresno for about 40 years before the tablets were broken and they ended up on the on California and Buchanan Street in San Francisco, which is where this window is. And it will be important in a moment, this window was put up in 1905. And also in the chutzpadik part, this window is in the sanctuary itself, at Sherith Israel. So, if you are going to really challenge Jewish theology, and challenge what it means to be Jewish, and you put it anywhere in the synagogue, it's bad enough, but to put it actually where Kol Nidre, is being chanted each and every year, I think if a picture is worth 1000 words, this is the only image we need know, to center the California Jewish experience. And Ava Khan, my co editor had the great idea of putting this particular image on the cover. All right. So, this is a letter from Abe Ruef.
Marc Dollinger:
Abe Ruef was not the mayor of San Francisco, Abe Ruef was the tyrant of local politics of San Francisco. Never elected to office, but he essentially ran the city. And it turns out... All right, it turns out sadly, in April of '06 six, when the earthquake hit, the San Francisco City Hall was destroyed, and the courtroom was destroyed. And they were rebuilding. Sherith Israel survived. That stained glass window here, it had some damage, they took it down and repaired the damage. And in a great civic move, the president at Sherith Israel, offered the city and county of San Francisco, the ability to use its sanctuary as their courtroom. Abe Ruef was put on trial on the bema of Congregation Sherith Israel. I really wanted him to be a member of Sherith Israel and get put on trial in his synagogue, because that would make church state separation such a great question. I did a little research and found out that he actually came from Beth Shalom across the city. But his rabbi did come and sit on the bema as a character witness to talk about what a good guy he was.
Marc Dollinger:
It turns out he wasn't a good guy, and he was corrupt. And he ended up going to jail for it. And in a certain way, we can argue that if... Well, you know Ben Gurion's dream for Zionism was so that Israel would be a nation among the nations of the world. And if we're going to translate this idea to California Jews, and in this case, San Francisco Jews, if we are going to be fully assimilated, fully acculturated, absolutely part of the dominant culture, what better way than to have a real political criminal, who gets arrested and thrown in jail to see how that goes? Okay. So, this is from the time that the book came out. And of course, we'll talk a little bit more and I know, some questions are already coming on demographics. So the different colors here are each of the counties. And I want to give you all an incentive, I know they'll probably be incentivized later, you're going to get a discount if you want to buy the book.
Marc Dollinger:
It's really expensive to produce sort of coffee table gift book kinds of things. And we were able to get a whole lot of really beautiful color images in the book, which I'll be including some later. This one, we couldn't get in the book, just because of the way that the technology operates a single colored sheet like this just didn't go. So, this image is in the book, but it's in black and white. So, I want all of you to feel really special, that you have the opportunity to see something that you wouldn't ordinarily see in the book. And what we have here, of course, is probably unsurprising to most of us if we're Californians, which is that LA has a very dense Jewish population down here in the south, San Francisco Bay Area also has a large population and then most of the rest the State of California tends to have a smaller Jewish population. And here we go. Okay. So now, former Brandeis University history majors are not permitted to answer this question, because it's too easy. But the first question is an easy one. What is history?
Marc Dollinger:
Go, ahead and type a direct message to me and I'll let you know this is not a trick question, I have a trick question coming up later. This is a straightforward question. What is history? Oh, Rob, Bob, Shepard. Yes, the story of the victors are very cynical, but it is true. Rob had an argument about the past. Thank you. Yeah. So, we could say the history is simply the study... Oh, Olive you have... Olive just literally wrote what I put here on the PowerPoint. So, Olive, you get the Radar O'Reilly Award of the evening, which means that you have the telescopic ability to see what the next PowerPoint slide was before I put it up. So history is the study of the past. That's easy. This is a more challenging question, historiography. And my wife, Marcy, Brandeis class of '87 was an English major. So if we have any other English majors here, you can do a little bit of the etymology of this word historiography.
Marc Dollinger:
Bruce, the study of writing about the past. That is so correct. I don't know if you are a history major, or maybe an academic historian now, but well done. Here's how this works. Graphing is writing. So, this is the history of historical writing. It turns out that every 20 years or so, it seems history changes. Okay? History doesn't actually change, but the way in which history professors write and view the same historical moment, change, because we bring our generational perspective. We bring our gender, race, class, orientation, take whatever identity markers you want. And when we look at a topic which previous scholars have studied, we are going to see it from our particular viewpoint. The late Rabbi Dr. Professor Michael Signer, blessed memory, he used to teach at Hebrew Union College in LA. One of my favorite sayings. "Why a monosyllabic when a polysyllabic will do? So, let's see. Yes. So, the study of how historians have studied the past. Yeah.
Marc Dollinger:
We'll go right to this. This is my favorite polysyllabic. It's pronounced filiopietistic. Okay, I'll give you a hint. It's from the Latin. All right, anyone want to guess on filiopietistic without looking it up in the dictionary? Love of one's own brother. Really, love of one's own family. Used mostly as ethnic self-congratulations, which for our purposes is going to be aren't the Jews great? Oh, the Jews are just fantastic. So, this is how historiography works. In ethnic studies, women's studies, black studies, Jewish studies, LGBTQ studies, whichever one you have, the first generation of books in the field has to talk about all the incredible contributions of your group to history, filiopietistism. That's how you get published if you're a grad student writing a dissertation. Well, if all those books get written, and you're in the next generation of grad students, and you got to read all the filiopietistic books, and you have to get published, you need to write a book on the same event that says the Jews were awful. And then you have all the Jews are awful books that get published.
Marc Dollinger:
And when those get worn out, the third generation says to the first two, "Oh, stop bickering, the truth is somewhere in the middle." Leaving the fourth generation to have nothing to say. So they go, "Oh, well, you know what? You're all asking the wrong questions. It's all about the environment." And then they do the environment in Jewish history. And they go from there. So, I'm going to give you all... This is going to be a week long pop quiz. All right? And you can send your answer to the Brandeis University Alumni Association, or just send it on my email. A challenge to use the phrase, filiopietistic, historiographic analysis in conversation. Now two things, be COVID safe of course, in terms of face to face as we're doing it, and you can say, "Oh, I went to a Brandeis University Alumni Zoom and we learned about filiopietistic, historiographic analysis. That's too easy.
Marc Dollinger:
You have to have an ongoing conversation for which the phrase filial filiopietistic, historiographic analysis, naturally occurs and I will send you in the mail a prize if you can achieve that. So, here's what we're doing tonight. We're not doing the history of California Jews, we're doing the historiography of California Jews, which is to say that this is an academic adventure. This is looking through the way in which... Oh, thank you. Okay, so now my email is in the chat if you haven't seen it, so now I'm really going to... Now I'm committed to sending those prizes. So, scholars are really in debate with one another. And this book, is more than just the history of California Jews, it's a challenge to the way all the earlier generations of scholars have looked at our history in the Golden State. So, with that, we'll get started here. Yeah, ethnic self-congratulations, or love of one's own family. So first, I'll do a promo, which is to say that the California Jews book is just one in the series that Brandeis University Press offers.
Marc Dollinger:
They got the Jews of Texas, you can see here, Jews of Brooklyn. So here's something that they don't really tell. And this is, for those of you in the greater New York area, and New Jersey counts, they don't tell you when you have a book that says on the cover American Jewish History, it's not actually American Jewish history. It's actually New York Jewish history, they just don't want to admit it on the cover. Because when you open the pages, all you're really learning about is the Northeast... Now I realize I might be disrespecting the New England roots of Brandeis University, but we're just going to say here, that the purpose of a regional history is not only to tell the stories that don't get told locally, but also to challenge the way in which scholars who are looking at national histories are telling their stories. So, in the book, there's no footnotes, we wrote this specifically for lay readers. And it's kind of tough to tell the professors who contributed to this book that they couldn't put in footnotes.
Marc Dollinger:
Somebody did, you have to get the book to go see who it is, and I did my best to get it cut out. But apparently, there were legal reasons on why we needed it. So, the first historic graphic thing that this book did, was moved American Jewish history out of New York, and out of Brooklyn, and out of so many of the assumptions that we have about American Jewish life, that are actually informed by an Eastern perspective that we're not even aware of. So, this was the first book on California Jews that was written in probably about a 30 year span. And what's the best way historiographically, to know that it's been a long time since someone wrote on this? Well, with all due respect to the earlier books on California Jews and I'm about to insult them, so I'm not going to give you any of the titles.
Marc Dollinger:
It was... Well, here's the problem. There were no women in California Jewish history, it seems until this book came out. Or there we say it, the earlier versions of history were all male centered, written by men about men, with the stories of men framed in arguments and historical questions that are centered on the male experience. And when we wrote this book, not only that Ava and I discovered that there were Jewish women in California, but we had two Jewish women representing the state of California in the United States Senate, Feinstein and Boxer. And that's huge. And if we're looking to see the way in which the experience of Jews in California is different than the other 49 states, absolutely. We have a chapter that we brought in on understanding gender and what it is to have two Jewish woman so prominently placed.
Marc Dollinger:
Okay. So now, I'm going to have two pop quiz questions here. I'm going to give you the easier one first. Who is seated at the table in the back of this photograph? Can you see who's seated on the table? And go ahead and give me a direct message, if you can see it. Thank you. Dafna gets it. Bruce, Robin, Eleanor Roosevelt. And I just want to know, do you know how well people know that's Eleanor Roosevelt? Most people are just writing Eleanor, which is either I don't need to write her last name or I want to make sure I get to be the first one to answer, well done. Eleanor Roosevelt is listening to a speech by another individual, a woman who... Put it in if you know who this is, I'd be really impressed if anyone knows who this is. I'll just give it a second. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Excellent guest Bob. Incorrect answer but well done on the guessing. It is Florence Prag Khan. And Florence Prag Kahn is important because she was the first Jewish woman elected to the United States Congress.
Marc Dollinger:
Most people think it's Bella Abzug, but she actually came in the 1920s, her husband, Julius Kahn, had the seat and then he died and as it was often the case, his wife ran for his seat and won his seat. She represented San Francisco. So, this is impressive that a California Jewish woman was the first Jewish woman, it was not a New Yorker or someone from the East Coast that made it to Congress. But here's the challenging part. She was thrown out of office in the 1936 election. So, my question to you, why did she lose in 1936? And if you're a good trivia person, you know that you actually don't have to know the story or the answer to know the correct answer. There's other information in the question itself that could help you out. Anyone have a sense of why it was that Florence Prag Kahn was thrown out in 1936? Oh, yes, she was a Republican. And Franklin D. Roosevelt won in 1932 with 82% of the American Jewish vote, in 1936, he got 90% of the American Jewish vote. And now we have the first Jewish woman who is a Republican.
Marc Dollinger:
So now we have a political divergence, at least here at Bay area Jews in the 1930s, against the rest of Jewish America, as well as gender differentiation. I have to tell you, as a scholar, this stuff's fantastic, right? When you can find all these different ways that we are turning the rest of American Jewish history upside down. And look closely at this ad, you don't have to put it into the chat, because I think you'll be able to see it's a Levi Strauss ad in Spanish. Because California, in terms of its second language, very much is Spanish due to the Spanish speaking origins of our state of Mexico, and of course, before that, even Spain. So, here's where it becomes important historiographically. And I'm guilty of this, because much of my work is on Jews and race and the relationship between white Jews and blacks.
Marc Dollinger:
So, when you talk about inter-group relations, generally it's normally black people and white people, that's how you do an inter-group or interracial, or if it's religious, it's Jewish, Protestant. And with north, south. Right? All of the studies are north, south, black, white, Jewish, Protestant. And then you come to California. And now in the West, we have Jewish, Latino, Jewish Latinx. So the question is, if we study the relationship between Jews in California, and the Latinx population in California, are we going to find a similar pattern of the black Jewish relationship? Is it going to be similar to the regions of the north versus the south, when we're out here in the west?
Marc Dollinger:
And so we of course, commissioned a chapter to talk about this, and Steven Windmueller, who is now retired from Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, wrote this chapter for us to demonstrate the ways in which inter-ethnic, interracial alliances are really dependent on what region and what state you're in, and that California offers its... So not only does California offer its own history. If what happened in California is different than what happened on the East Coast, then maybe what happened on the East Coast, is more regional in and of itself, than it is actually national. All right. This is a challenging subject. Ellen Eisenberg wrote this chapter for us. And she went on to write I think two more specific books here. We used to call it internment, we now call it incarceration, because It actually was incarceration of 67,000, United States citizens of Japanese descent. Well, first of all, let's just talk about the topic itself. Historiographically, there has been nothing written on incarceration.
Marc Dollinger:
When I was writing my first book, I did all the research on it, I came up with a paragraph that I could find in the sources on Jewish attitudes towards what was an internment. And I brought it to my doctoral advisor at UCLA. And she really criticized me, I actually cried as a consequence of all the stuff she said to me, including the words, "How can you call yourself a scholar of Jews and liberalism, and only have one paragraph on internment?" And I said, "I did all the research, there's only one paragraph out there." And she said, "Okay, I need 10 pages on why there's only one paragraph." Which is the history of why there's no history. And so why wasn't there history in the primary sources? And why wasn't there any in the secondary sources? So, I went to this academic conference at the time, we were writing this book, and met up in the elevator with two of my colleagues, Ellen Eisenberg, who's up in Salem, Oregon, and Cheryl Greenberg, who is at Trinity College in Hartford. And the three of us had all independently come to this topic from different perspectives, right?
Marc Dollinger:
I'm doing it from liberalism, Ellen was doing it from California Jews, and Cheryl was doing it from an African American studies perspective, and we were all then in our 30s. And when you go to academic conferences, you're looking at everyone's name tag to see what book they wrote, you just got to connect them to their book. And this is the first time we'd literally seen one another and realized we're all within a couple years of each other. And then we realized, why didn't our parents generation of scholars want to write about internment? And why did the three of us write about it and come at it from three different perspective? This is now the historiography of historiography. And that's because it was embarrassing. And that's because... Well, first, I should say, the Republicans supported interment, incarceration, the Democrats supported incarceration, even the ACLU supported incarceration. The Seattle Chapter opposed it, but the national of the ACLU, overturned them. So, this is not just a Jewish story, it's about what happens to a democracy and war.
Marc Dollinger:
And what Ellen Eisenberg, Professor Eisenberg, who wrote this chapter in this book discovered, was that there was only one group of Jews in the entire country who made strong public stands against incarceration of US citizens of Japanese descent, and that was the rabbi's of Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. And what made them important, is they were anti-Zionist. Now, I want to be clear, they were not anti-Zionist, from the political left, that's what we get on college campuses today, they were anti-Zionist from the political right, meaning they were loyal and patriotic Americans. They loved America and California and San Francisco so much that they couldn't imagine needing to go to a Jewish homeland. So, when the Zionist movement began, because Jewish people understood they could never live a full life if they weren't in a Jewish nation, these rabbis in San Francisco were like, "Well, look what they did to Emanu-El." They moved Shavuot to Yosemite, and they were very happy just to stay in San Francisco. And they did.
Marc Dollinger:
And as Professor Eisenberg argued in the book, if you love California so much, that you're willing to be anti-Zionist about it, you do not want that country you love to deny your fellow citizens their constitutional rights. So, she found a link between Jewish anti-Zionism and Jewish opposition to incarceration. And I thought it was sort of a brilliant way to analyze a group of California Jews who were typically criticized for their anti-Zionism. And by the way, I'm basically dropping the thesis for each of the chapters on you and when we get to Q&A, you can feel free to ask questions to dive into whichever ones you like. So, we were interested not only in history and words, we're also interested in visual history. So we commissioned a chapter on architecture, because we're fascinated with the architecture of California and the way in which synagogues are going to emulate the various types of buildings on the back cover, we put the first synagogue in California, which is in Stockton, so you can see what that looks like. This is a first Congregation Emanu-El, which sadly, did not survive to today.
Marc Dollinger:
Okay. All right. I'm giving you that backstory, and even though we're sponsored now by Brandeis University, I'm going to tell you, some of what the Brandeis University Press editors were saying to us during it. And at this time, Brandeis University Press was being run out of Northern New England, near Dartmouth, and they wanted a chapter on surfing. And I thought they were just making fun of us. It's a book on California Jews, you got to have a chapter on Jewish surfers, and we rejected the idea of Jewish surfers. Now, subsequently, I've learned that there actually was a Jewish surfer in the 1950s, who apparently won whatever that surfing championship is. But we did actually turn the surfing question into our own, which has to do with the Pacific Ocean. California is important because we're on the coast and water is incredibly important in Judaism. It has incredible ritual meaning.
Marc Dollinger:
And we wanted to know about the intersection of Judaism and water in the Pacific and the way in which California Jewish life will develop because we're at the ocean. So, you can see here from the caption, this is Mishkon Tephilo in LA. And this is Tashlikh for Rosh Hashanah. And just assuming a lot of California Jews are listening, many of you probably for Rosh Hashanah go to the ocean and castaway your sins there. And next time you do that, just think about our brethren in Kansas City, who don't have the opportunity of having an ocean right there in order to do that. And also, I don't have the slide up for it, but we got really good chutzpadik really nervy because it turns out, and now I'm going to speak to those of you in LA, and maybe some of you are listening. There's a lot of Israelis who moved to LA. And we thought that this was fascinating that Israelis would leave the promised land, in order to come to what we would like to call the new promised land of Los Angeles.
Marc Dollinger:
And we found an Israeli scholar, who had written a book on members of kibbutz from the Kibbutz movement, who came to the San Fernando Valley of LA. And I'm a former resident of Sherman Oaks and Toluca Lake and my wife from Woodland Hills for all of you out there in LA. And we titled The chapter Kibbutz San Fernando. And so here's how it goes. When you read an academic book, the introduction to the book is basically the reader's digest version of each chapter. And I give this tip to my undergraduates, which is, if you read carefully the intro to an academic book, you'll get the thesis of each chapter and you can move through the chapters more quickly, because you'll already be familiar with the argument. So, what Ava and I had to do as the editors, is read each chapter and then write its thesis in a paragraph in the intro. And I wrote it, and of course, you send it to the author to get their approval, and I sent it to our Israeli scholar, and she wrote back to say I got the thesis wrong.
Marc Dollinger:
And this is really embarrassing. If you read something and you write the thesis, and the author who wrote it tells you you don't even understand their argument. So I had to reread the chapter, I reread my paragraph. I was convinced I had it right. So I reached back to the author. I said, "I think I got it right." And she said, "No." So I said, they were on Kibbutz, they came to LA, they're not going home. Because they love LA so much. And the author said, "They came from Kibbutz, they moved to LA, they're coming back to Israel." And then we argued about whether or not they're coming back to Israel. Ultimately, I did have to change it to hers because she gets to represent it as she does. But I made the case that we still have a very large and vibrant Israeli Angeleno community in Los Angeles now.
Marc Dollinger:
Oh, so here is another image of a later Emanu-El and I wanted to put this up here because it basically looks like a church. It does have a star of David Imogene David there, but you could take the star of David off and put up a cross and it would look Like a church. And we wanted to put this in the book to show that California Jews really assimilated to the larger California culture. And so much of what California meant to the United States, Jews wanted to make it too, which meant in this case, this is a 19th century edifice. Jews were financially quite successful and did really well in California to the point that they could donate to the building fund at the synagogue, and put this structure up. And I'm just imagining two Christians walking on the street, and looking up at that building and saying, "Oh, my gosh, that's an incredible church. I wonder who prays in that church!" And then their friend, of course, who knows, says, "No, that's not a church. That's a synagogue, Jewish people pray there."
Marc Dollinger:
And then the first one goes, "Wow, they must be really impressive those Jewish people that they put up that gigantic church for themselves." The moment that conversation happens, California Jews have become a part of mainstream California, and one of the arguments we make is that this happened in the 19th century, in the 1800s, in California. In San Francisco after the Gold Rush, and then LA, especially after the movie industry, where the moguls were predominantly Jewish. So, unlike the rest of America, where it took to the second or third generation to get full assimilation, California, pretty much the immigrants themselves were able to achieve that. So I want to give credit to Rabbi Sazla, who lives in the LA area, and he is an extraordinary artist. And we featured a collection of his art in the book, in color, that's where we get the color prints. The ketubah is the Jewish wedding contract. Now, in the medieval period, the ketubah was an illuminated manuscript.
Marc Dollinger:
It was gorgeous and large and colorful, and complex. And over the years, it became by the 1950s, a mimeographed eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper that you signed folded in thirds and put in your safety deposit box forever. So what Robbie has done, is bring back the illuminated medieval manuscript form of the ketubah. And because he's a California Jew, and because most of his clients were California Jews getting married, he would sit with the couple, and they would share their story. And together, they would create the wedding contract based upon their story. So, we are now looking as you can see at the bottom, the wedding contract of Vivian Brawley and Ruben Arquilevich. Vivian works for PJ Library up in San Francisco Bay Area, she actually runs the region now at PJ Library, Ruben was the camp director of Camp Swig and in Camp Newman he's now the national Vice President for the reform movement. So what we see here is they actually met at camp, they met at camp JCC out in Malibu.
Marc Dollinger:
Malibu, or Barton Flats, I'm not remembering which of the two but, if you're an alumni of one of those two, maybe you can remind me. So this is the campfire at camp and this is the Pacific Coast here. And they actually went to Sedona to get engaged. So, they put that there. And here we have the Hebrew script, and then we have the English transliteration here. And I just think it's a gorgeous artistic representation of California Jewish life. But with all due respect to my beloved friends Ruben and Vivian, this is my second favorite. That's only because he did Mercy And I, Ketubah too. And that of course, has to be my most favorite. This is Sari Scherer and Joel Poremba. And Sari now works at the Orange County JCC, if any of you are in Orange County, you maybe know Sari, and they're Dodger fans, right? And so they made their Ketubah like Dodger Stadium.
Marc Dollinger:
And the fun part of this Ketubah, is that when we got the page proofs back in the final stages of the production of the book, it came to us as a square and we went back and said, "No, you need to turn it 45 degrees to make it a diamond." And they said when you turn it 45 degrees, it screws up the sizing of the page we have to keep it a square." And we said, "No, actually this has got to be a diamond, it's actually integral to the whole point." So they did of course, as you can see, make it a diamond. Here we have... And what they did is they put symbols from each of themselves and together into their ketubah, and they have the cityscape of Jerusalem. Which to me, if you're a baseball fan, it makes the infield fly rule all the more complex, right? I found this fascinating. This is the yellow star from the Holocaust right next to the flag of the State of Israel.
Marc Dollinger:
And only because Sari and I are of similar generation, I'm a little older, we were raised in... I was raised in LA, and with Holocaust consciousness as a big part of our background in our Jewish identity, and of course, Israel as well to put those two. So, if you look up here at the numbers at the score, people have tried to figure out what the score is. And I actually was able to go down to Orange County before COVID and do a lot of teaching. So, I sat with Sari and I said, "Everyone asks us what those numbers mean, what do they mean?" And she said they were just random numbers that they don't actually mean anything. But if you believe in Kabbalah law, Jewish mysticism, you know there's no such thing as randomness, and maybe there is somewhere encoded there. Something really significant. This is Valley Beth Shalom synagogue in Encino in LA.
Marc Dollinger:
And this is here because of the stained glass windows. So, something else that we put in, where a group of color photos of David and Michelle plucked is way back. Defram Willets, far northern California, and basically children of the 60s. And they decided to sort of drop out, she was actually raised in Santa Monica, they kind of dropped out of society, they bought land up in Willets, and they became artists, and literally lived off the land and did their art. They became stained glass artists, and they did a lot of stained glass in Northern California. And then they were hired at Camp Swig, which is now Camp Newman, the Jewish residential summer camp in Northern California. And when they got there, they discovered Jewishness, which is part of a journey for many California Jews who maybe were born with Jewish heritage, but either didn't go to synagogue, or maybe they did, and they just weren't interested, and then at some point in adult life get turned on by it. And they became the premier synagogue stained glass artists really of the country.
Marc Dollinger:
And this is, I think just a magnificent set of windows, they did at VBS. And what I love about their story is they did so well in the synagogue market, that churches saw it. And then churches asked them to do Christian iconography stained glass windows, in their religious settings. So, now we have a California Jewish couple that went from secular to Jewish, to Christian, which to me is really all about the religious diversity, and the openness that we have here in California. So, much of history and historiography is what's called political history. Cynically, that's what we call dead white man's history, because it's bullets, bombs and battles. And in the 1960s, they changed... Historians began to look at ordinary people. So, what we wanted to do in this book, is we wanted to focus on the stories of regular California Jews, as well as those that had more notoriety. And what you see in front of you, is the handwritten diary of my great grandmother, Sara Clara Rice Dollinger who was the one whose image you saw at the very beginning, because she was in San Francisco in April of 1906 when the earthquake hit.
Marc Dollinger:
And she took... So you see the actual written one, what I'm going to do is read to you her depiction of that particular day. And we read it so that we can see how a sort of non-historical character simply by making a journal entry can provide for future generations a perspective and an experience, which is really vital to understanding the past. "On the 17th of April, about four months after we were married, my husband came home from work, and after supper worked on my princess suit, he was making me for picnics this summer. We were up until about 11 when we went to bed. About four o'clock the next morning, I woke up and kissed my husband good morning. Just 16 minutes after five, the house began to shake, and I thought we would soon pass as the others had. We had many amount of them, earthquakes all winter. This one continued however, and got worse each second until the house fairly rocked from side to side. I jumped to the floor, intending to run to the door, but my husband helped me back.
Marc Dollinger:
We both sat on the bed, terror stricken at the sound of falling plaster, crockery, and the stove and dozens of other things. I thought it was the end of the world. And all I could say was 'My God, my God.' my husband and I will certainly not forget that experience as long as we live. Every minute, I thought we'd be buried under the ruins of our home. One side of the wall in our bedroom was hanging ready to fall, over the mantel, all the plaster was lying in a heap together with pictures in our clock. In the kitchen, the stove and falling had covered everything with soot. As soon as the shock had subsided, we ran for the door, which my husband had to take off its hinges, I came back, got my engagement ring, my gold watch, our marriage license, and bankbook, pulled a skirt and jacket over my night dress, and we hurried across the street. Signed Sarah Clara Rice.
Marc Dollinger:
All right. Now, I'm going to get myself in trouble. In Northern California, there are... Well, I teach that states all started there, but there are two other universities that have a bit of a rivalry between them. That would be my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Leland Stanford Junior University down the Bay. On the third Saturday of every November, they have a football game, and in the football game, the winner of the game receives the Axe Trophy. So this is actually a journal written by my great grandfather, Albert, the husband of the one that I just read. And he gathered with a bunch of other Jewish boys, mostly boys, there was one Jewish girl in the group. And they formed the Equality Club so they could learn how to become good, true Americans. And part of being in the Equality Club was to write a journal. And what you see in front of you, is the handwritten copy of their journal. And by reading a journal like this, you can get a great sense of how they understood what it was to be an American.
Marc Dollinger:
And it turns out, they went to big game in the late 1890s. And this was one of the very first big games between Cal and Stanford. And for people who are familiar with the big game, this is the Axe cheer in the middle. This is Oh Stanford at the bottom. And this is Oski wow-wow cheer at the upper left. So, when we had the 100th anniversary of the big game, I did donate this to one of the two athletic departments so they could display it when they did the history of the big game. And I'll just let you know, it was displayed in Berkeley as it were. And finally, names. Name changing is something that is very common among Jewish immigrants, by the way. I'm just going to throw this out here for you even though you're not going to like me anymore after this. No guard at Ellis Island ever changed the Jewish name, that is the biggest myth in American Jewish history.
Marc Dollinger:
Name changes occurred before Ellis Island, they occurred after Ellis Island, they didn't occur actually there. And Albert, Avraham Yakov, who became Albert Jerome, who became AJ, was figuring out what he wanted to do and what he and the other boys wanted to do about a name change. And this is from also the Equality Journal, and I'll read to you how they looked at this particular moment. "Just about this time, an epidemic of name changing broke out among boys in our neighborhood. One of the boys names was Yankalah, we call him Jake or Jakey, which he didn't mind too much. But his mother would always come out of the house calling at the top of her voice, 'Yankalah,' which seemed to humiliate him very much. Most of us had similar troubles, not only with our parents calling us by our Yiddish names, but others in the neighborhood making fun of us.
Marc Dollinger:
A group of about 10 of us boys got together and agreed that the only solution to the problem was not to fight them as we'd been doing, but to Americanize our names, thereby establishing our American rights. We were sitting on the front steps of Yankalah's house, so it was only natural for us to help him choose another name. One of the boys came up with a bright idea. 'Didn't the Swedes or Norwegians pronounce their Js as Y? Why not change Yankalah to John Keller?' Wait a minute. One of the boys said and taking a piece of paper wrote in large letters John Kelly, how does that look and sound? Poor Yankalah was so overwhelmed, he was almost in tears. He rushed in the house calling for his mother and explained to her that all she had to do when calling his name was to say, John Kelly, she tried to repeat it as he dictated, but after the third or fourth try, a smile broke out on her face and said, "John Kelly, that's a good Yiddish American Irish name. My own Johnicol. And henceforth, he was known as John Kelly.
Marc Dollinger:
Some of the fellows had parental trouble about their new names and had to drop them, I did not have that kind of trouble for the simple reason that I did not tell my parents. I as well as the other kids practice reading our signatures, I had half a dozen that I liked. Here's a few." And it's hard to see here. But if depending on the size of your screen, here he had a lot of very fancy signatures. He said, "We corresponded almost weekly, so as to get used to writing our names at the bottom of the letter, I began receiving all kinds of mail as I'd answered ads and magazines, which is fascinating, because what it shows is that the way you become American, the way that your name is legitimate, is you get a magazine subscription. And as soon as a magazine subscription says AJ Dollinger, or John Kelly, you're an official Californian. You're an official American." And with that, I'll hand it back to you for questions.
Leslie Aronzon:
That was incredible. There's so much history in California with California Jews. Who knew? Right? I do encourage everyone to get the book and read it, if you haven't. I will start asking a few questions. We have a few minutes, we'll probably go a little bit late. So if you have to... People have to get off, then you can always get the recording later. But I'm going ask my question first. Do you think the California Jews have done a better job of integrating or simulating with their racially diverse neighbors, than in the North East or the Chicago Midwest? And if so, was there a cost? And I have two other prompts for you on this? Justice Brandeis said, towards the end of the book I saw, that he questioned the young... This is obviously going back almost a century. Who kind of came away from their Jewish roots, culture, ethnicity.
Leslie Aronzon:
So he questioned that when he wanted them to look to Israel. However, his partner at the Brandeis Bardin Institute, kind of said the opposite. There was a great quote in the very beginning of the book, which came again, was discussed later, where he said, "I saw in the people of Los Angeles..." This was in 1947. "A willingness to pioneer unlike the deeply rooted East Coast Jews."
Marc Dollinger:
That's a great question. It's a deep one. And it's a hard one. All right? I'll give you the easy answer first, and then the harder one. The easier one is, it was probably better in California than it was in the northeast, and certainly better than it was in the deep south, certainly on issues of anti-black racism. That said, my career thesis is that American Jews wherever they are, tend to follow the political culture around them. California Jews were California Jews because they were in California. So, if you want to know what the Jews were doing in the Golden State, you looked at what everybody else was doing. And I'm going to give an example on each in each of the major cities. In San Francisco, the first generation made it big. Adolph Sutro became the mayor, owned one eighth of San Francisco himself, Levi Strauss, of course, the most famous San Francisco Jew. And the story of San Francisco Jewish history is how quickly Jews made it.
Marc Dollinger:
And that's because Jews were there in the 1850s, when the power structures were just forming and the Jews, thanks to business skills, and whiteness, and willingness to go... There was a bunch of reasons, moved up. Not the Chinese. The experience for the Chinese in San Francisco could not have been more opposite than the Jews. So, it's not like California or San Francisco is golden for everybody, because if you're considered unassimilable, and then the Japanese population that came to San Francisco afterwards, also suffered what they called the Yellow Peril. In San Francisco, if you were Chinese, and had the money and the desire to live anywhere in the city you wanted, it was against the city and county of San Francisco's law to move out of Chinatown. That was illegal ghetto, like illegal ghetto Jews had in the medieval period. So, yeah, a lot of it would have been better but a lot of it was because of profound segregation. And then in my most recent book, in the Black Power, Jewish Politics book, I talked about LA in the 70s.
Marc Dollinger:
And what happened in LA Unified when court ordered busing started, and they called it white flight. And because white Jewish parents couldn't afford private schools, they pulled their kids and Jewish day schools formed. And I actually wrote about VBS Day School, where Marcy's dad was the founding board president. So, I think there's a navigation around Jews whiteness and racism that's happening everywhere. Good question. Yeah.
Leslie Aronzon:
So speaking of the Japanese, and racism, there's a quick but difficult question in the chat. Would you call where the Japanese were incarcerated concentration camps?
Marc Dollinger:
Oh, thank you for that question. Okay. So, Roger Daniels, who's at University of Cincinnati, who is one of the preeminent scholars of Japanese American history. And he happens to have an office across the street from the archives, where I did all my research. And he published a book called Concentration Camp USA, referring to the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War Two. And I was so mad that I went to have lunch with him to complain to him that you can't call them concentration camps. And he went off as a scholar would to explain that that came from the Boer War, and made the entire case, right? So, here's a situation where there are scholarly academic understandings of words and there are ways in which they land in the popular imagination. I think when someone says concentration camp, they're referring to what happened to the Jews in Europe. And I think that that's where that goes.
Marc Dollinger:
Even if technically, historically, in the Boer War, and you can draw the line from the Boer War and all of that can go, if I'm writing on it, at least I'll put a footnote in, so you know where I'll be able to explain that. Perhaps what's behind the question is, was what happened to us citizens of Japanese descent in the camps in the US in any way similar to what happened to the Jews of Europe? Absolutely not. Which is ultimately I think, where the upset is in that notion.
Leslie Aronzon:
Okay. A totally different question also in the chat. We're also examples of the Pacific Ocean as a mikvah?
Marc Dollinger:
Okay.
Leslie Aronzon:
Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah?
Marc Dollinger:
Right. So, we did not cover that in the book. So, I'll give you sort of my from the hip. Part of the anecdotal, non-academic. No. And the first reason it's going to be no, is California did not have an appreciable orthodox community in much of its history, based upon the fact that it's hard to sustain a traditional Jewish life without a kosher butcher, without the ability to walk to synagogue, without... There're certain critical mass needs. And certainly... What's that?
Leslie Aronzon:
In the Venice Beach area, you talk about...
Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, yeah. So I'm doing 1850s in San Francisco and 1920s in LA, just as they were formed. Now, after World War Two, the Jewish population of LA expands. I saw Bruce Phillips was here. I don't know if he's still here, but he's the expert on this. And what happens... And this is actually covered in the Black Power book, is starting in the late 60s and 1970s, American Jews become more Jewish, they become more ritualized, and the mikvah comes back. And the mikvah comes back not just for orthodox Jews, non-orthodox Jews are going to the mikvah, men are going to the mikvah, which is typically women went to the mikvah. And when this happens, now, we do have synagogues across California and my synagogue, two of my synagogues now, Rodef Shalom and the Kitchen in the Bay Area have Men's mikvahs.
Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, 6:00 AM, Sunday morning, after just the Sunday morning before Rosh Hashanah, into the Pacific Ocean, which is very, very cold. So in one way, we could say this is a California thing, because California is on the leading edge of spirituality, let's say or at least less conventional illustrations of where Judaism and religion can go. And I think that's a gift that heads east year after year.
Leslie Aronzon:
So here's a different question from Jonathan Cole. Sorry. "I'm curious as to his thoughts about the Jews for Jesus movement, as it seems to me that no discussion of California Judaism would be complete without at least a mention and whether it's legit or merely an aberration? Many thanks for your consideration here and thanks for the program. Congrats".
Marc Dollinger:
Wow! Another complicated question that goes in a lot of different directions. And I'll just share a personal story that when I was working on the Black Power Jewish Politics book, I wanted a chapter on all the different Jewish revivals that happened in the 70s. And I was going to do Jews for Jesus as one of them, right? And even before I was doing the research, as I was speaking with colleagues, that idea went away instantly. One because Jews for Jesus, and Messianic Jews, which are actually two different organizations, are not considered Jewish at least by mainstream Jewish groups. And I couldn't find a particular California angle to it. So, I ended up not covering it. I think generally, we can look at the notion of California as a place where Jews are going to experiment with religious expression, which would not be accepted in the northeast, so I think there probably would be more openness to things like Jews for Jesus in a place like California. Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, there's lots of different spiritual practice in California that's outside of traditional Judaism.
Leslie Aronzon:
So kinda like that, does the book cover queer Jews?
Marc Dollinger:
Does the book... Not sure if we did. We should have done that. All right, so we're already dated? We absolutely. Yeah, no, because... So here's the thing. This is historiography. This is how each generation of scholars are looking at it. And I think the book's probably 15 years old at this point, and I don't think that the historiography had caught up. But, yeah. All right. That's it. The next California Jews book needs to start with queer in California Jewish history. Actually, let me throw in one thing, I don't think I got this in the book. Congregation Sha'ar Zahav in San Francisco, which has been the historically LGBTQ synagogue, wrote its own siddur, its own prayer book.
Marc Dollinger:
And I thought it was brilliant. And I thought it was great because it was pushing the bounds of normative Jewish expression as typically understood in the east. And I love the fact that this came from California. So one year, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, a reform movement, rabbinic association, they had their annual meeting in San Francisco, and Rabbi Peritul Pruzen invited me to give the keynote, and it was called... The theme of the conference was American Jewish Life on the Edge of the Continent.
Leslie Aronzon:
I like that.
Marc Dollinger:
Yeah. So the idea was, you're going to San Francisco, if there's not an earthquake in the five days of the conference, is American Jewish life going over the edge because of what California Jews are doing? And I basically got up there to try to do all I could to kind of annoy all the rabbis from the east, and to try to center California. And I actually closed the keynote address with Sha'ar Zahav, and the queering of the textbook... Of the siddur, sorry, the prayer book, to say what is it going to be like? So actually, I said, much of Judaism, this is an intergenerational thing, is oral, it goes from generation to generation. And the kid always tells the parent, that they're old school and the kid has the truth. And then they grow up, and their kids tell them that they're old school and they see it. So, I brought out a copy of the siddur from Sha'ar Zahav, and I said, "This is like a radical book." A lot of people are really upset about what this book says.
Marc Dollinger:
But here in California, we have a generation of young people who are growing up in family structures that have moms and moms and dads and dads and dads and moms and non binary and all the rest of it. And they're going to be handed this book by their parents, and they're going to roll their eyes and say, "How boring I've got to do my stupid old prayer book from Sha'ar Zahav?" And I said the moment that happens, that's where we see that California Jewish life is reinventing itself one more time.
Leslie Aronzon:
For sure. All right. I'm just going to do a couple more questions, because it's almost 8:15, 11:15 where you are, actually. Was there less anti-Semitism in San Francisco than elsewhere, given the election of Sutro? Or what happened to Abe Ruef more revealing?
Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, not much anti-Semitism at all. And the Jewish community was well integrated, relatively small, quite successful. Anti-Semitism also comes from rooted power systems. And there wasn't a rooted power system and the Jews were able to come in and to be a part of it. There was sporadic anti-Semitism, but not sociologically speaking and not like in the 1920s and 30s, especially on the East Coast, and even in the halls of Congress. It was really awful. So, I think that San Francisco Jews were largely spared from that kind of suffering.
Leslie Aronzon:
Right. And there's other racism unfortunately in the city.
Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, yeah.
Leslie Aronzon:
As a... I got two more, sorry.
Marc Dollinger:
No problem. I'm up to the-
Leslie Aronzon:
I had several more but ... As a historian are the various contemporary California Jewish phenomena aside from the mikvah that you think would surprise the Jews of California in 1800, 1900, 1950, 2000?
Marc Dollinger:
Something today that will surprise historically? Oh, wow! That's a really good question. My first thought is technology generally. Because of Silicon Valley. As California, and I think disproportion of Jewish and disproportion Israeli. In Northern California, most of the Israeli population is in the Silicon Valley area. And in terms of the amount of change that has occurred in California in the last 100 years, if we just look at anything from transportations to the microchip, we'd see it. That's a good question. I'm going to think more about that one.
Leslie Aronzon:
Okay, there we go. See, some new ideas for the next one.
Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, yeah. That's a good premise. I like that.
Leslie Aronzon:
There seems to be a major confluence of immigration, mostly to LA by Israelis, Iranians and Russians at the same time in the 1980s. How would their experience had been different if they went to the northeast or Midwest?
Marc Dollinger:
Oh, wow! Okay.
Leslie Aronzon:
That's a big one.
Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, yeah. So I don't know because I haven't studied that particular group, and that's contemporary Bruce Phillips, may be able to give us some because he's done a lot of sociological, demographic data on that. But I have to think that in a large sense, California is offering a lot of elbow room, a lot of ability to step away from convention. And I'll give you an example. Which region of the country has the highest synagogue affiliation rate?
Leslie Aronzon:
Northeast.
Marc Dollinger:
Probably northeast. I thought northeast. It's actually the south. And it's the south because the south has the highest church affiliation rate. Synagogue affiliation rates tend to follow church. The west has the worst church and the worst synagogue. California on that, Bay Area on that. So, there tends to be... So for immigrants who come to California, they're coming to a place where you don't show up and join the synagogue as the first two things that you do. And a lot of them are just rejectionist. And once that occurs, I think there's a lot of place to maneuver culture and to create subcultures more independent of what the dominant culture would be.
Leslie Aronzon:
But even I think within each of those subgroups have supported each other. So, they may not have necessarily high synagogue rates, but they support each other, which I think is a lovely thing.
Marc Dollinger:
That's right too.
Leslie Aronzon:
I think we need to end, but I just want to first of all, thank everybody for coming tonight. And Marc, especially you. That was incredible. For everybody on the call, there are resources for you in the chat. One is to get the recording, if you would like. Two, Marc's email because I know there's a lot of questions I didn't get to. And again, apologies, apologies. And three, there's a link to get the book with a discount, right? So you can all get that. And we look forward to seeing you in other programs. So, please continue to check your email and social media and alumni website for details about future events because there's lots of these. And in this age of the pandemic, these Zoom events are actually kind of nice, and it's nice to keep Californians all of us together.
Leslie Aronzon:
We're all so spread out, we don't get... Most of us don't get to Brandeis very often. And also one more thing I want to remind all alumni to join the new B Connect platform, it's been redone at Brandeisconnect.com. One word, Brandeisconnect.com, so we can all kind of stay connected. And I hope everybody stay safe and healthy, have a very good evening. Thank you.
Marc Dollinger:
Thank you all, take care.