With more than 30 writers, visual artists and educators and nearly 20 panels, talks and workshops, the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life will swing open its doors on May 4 for its first Jewish Arts & Bookfest.
“We want a vibe where people feel the thriving diversity and energy of Jewish culture,” said Dan Alter, the learning and engagement coordinator at the Magnes. “It’s going to be bustling.”
The festival will take place at the Magnes near the UC Berkeley campus, with four to five programs for guests to choose from each hour, including book talks, poetry readings, panel discussions and hands-on workshops where participants can help craft a community hamsa or create short, illustrated stories based on memories. The Jewish Community Library, New Lehrhaus and J. are festival partners.
“We’re really utilizing almost every square inch of our space,” said Alter, who hopes to welcome up to 500 visitors that day to the small museum space. “We have a community arts project happening in our kitchen. We’re using every single room that’s not an office. We literally walked the lobby several times with a tape measure to figure out how many tables we could fit in.”
The event comes at a complicated, fraught time in the Jewish community.
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel — and the surge in anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism that followed — left Israeli-born, New York-raised author Zeeva Bukai so overwhelmed and devastated that she wondered whether she would ever be able to write again.
“It’s hard not to recoil in the face of all of that hatred,” said Bukai, one of the authors speaking at the festival. “In the aftermath, I heard so many stories of Jewish writers whose work was cancelled, banned and ignored in venues and circles where they thought they were welcome.”
Bukai will discuss her first novel, “The Anatomy of Exile,” released in January, which explores Jewish identity, Mizrahi-Ashkenazi marriage and a forbidden Romeo-and-Juliet-style romance between an Israeli and Palestinian. Bukai wove her own family history into the book’s narrative.
The writer told J. that now, more than a year and a half after the Oct. 7 attacks left her questioning her capacity for writing, she has found renewed purpose in her work.
“I think it is more important than ever to tell Jewish stories, especially at this time when Jewish voices are being sidelined and sometimes silenced altogether,” she said. “These days writing Jewish stories is a kind of resistance.”
Addressing the complexity of the moment, speakers on a panel titled “Holding the Widest Tent” will talk about creating and curating cultural events that reflect and accommodate multiple perspectives. Among those panelists are Lexi Leban, executive director of the Jewish Film Institute, which runs the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and Penina Eilberg-Schwartz, the Bay Area-based managing editor of Ayin Press, a New York publishing house that focuses on Jewish authors and topics.
Other presentations at the sweeping function will cover a swath of genres, geographies and generations.
Writer and illustrator Josh Tuininga will discuss his graphic novel “We Are Not Strangers,” which examines what it means to be American through the story of a Jewish Seattle man who helped his incarcerated Japanese neighbors during World War II.
Four Bay Area Jewish writers born in the Soviet Union will discuss how growing up reading Russian literature — like the staples of Soviet education Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Bulgakov — shaped the Jewish stories they wrote after immigrating to the U.S. At another, three writers who have wrestled with the Holocaust’s legacy in their work will address how they approach putting words to such a momentous, devastating history.
And a panel titled “Oracles and Golems: Jewish Futurism and Fantasy” will explore Jewish fiction such as “Altneuland,” a 1902 utopian novel by Theodor Herzl, and “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” an alternative history by Michael Chabon. The panel will feature Adam Mansbach, author of the “Go the F*** to Sleep” series and “The Golem of Brooklyn,” Helene Wecker, who wrote “The Golem and the Jinni” and its sequel, “The Hidden Palace,” and Michael David Lukas, author of “The Last Watchman of Old Cairo.” All three are Bay Area residents and award-winning writers who have woven threads of fantasy into their books.
Lukas, a creative writing professor at San Francisco State University and winner of the 2019 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, told J. that Jewish futurism and fantasy “allow us to transcend the present moment — our contemporary political identities and nation-states that we find ourselves entangled in — using the rich complexity of our tradition to help us in imagining the futures we want to build.”
The festival’s main event will feature Daniel Handler, the San Francisco author otherwise known as Lemony Snicket, in conversation with J. editor-in-chief Chanan Tigay. They will discuss “And Then? And Then? What Else?” in which Handler reflects on growing up in San Francisco and navigating a literary career guided by the literature, music and culture he loves.
“My memoir is about reading and writing through times of trouble and grief, which is, I think, inherently a Jewish story,” he told J. “It is also about how my family’s history fed into my own dark sensibilities.”
What is Handler most looking forward to at the May 4 event? “Talking about books,” he said, “with the people of the book.”