Tragedy struck the Bay Area last week with the Dec. 2 Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland that took the lives of 36 young people, many of them artists and musicians in the prime of their lives.
Among the dead was Jonathan Bernbaum, 34, a talented Berkeley-born filmmaker, video artist and VJ who attended the Ghost Ship party that night and was doing what he loved most: bringing music, dance and art to the people.
Bernbaum was a product of the East Bay Jewish community. His mother, Diane Bernbaum, ran the teen program Berkeley Midrasha for 33 years, and remains one of the community’s most beloved and respected leaders. We grieve with her, her husband, Ed, and their son David.
We grieve for all those who died in the Ghost Ship fire. This is a devastating, personal loss for the entire Bay Area, especially for artists, innovators and dreamers who struggle to live here. It illustrates an inconvenient truth — that gentrification on both sides of the bay has resulted in an affordable housing crisis.
On Dec. 2, that crisis turned deadly.
People like those who lived in the Ghost Ship artists’ collective have resorted to creative housing solutions, often living together in bohemian fashion in unsafe structures —like the Oakland warehouse demolished by the fire.
San Francisco’s once-thriving artist community long ago fled for the East Bay, but there, too, the squeeze is on. According to a report in USA Today, the current average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland is $2,778. No wonder starving artists band together in warehouses.
Fortunately, there are Jews who care enough about this issue to make it their cause. The Jewish social justice nonprofit Bend the Arc has made affordable housing a priority, with an ongoing campaign to promote community investment in affordable homes and apartments.
Rather than ghettoize working artists, society should support and welcome them, offering subsidies to show that their contributions have value. That cannot happen when we push them to the margins of our communities.
The commandment of hiddur mitzvah, or “beautifying the mitzvah,” comes straight from the Torah, establishing the exaltation of the arts as a Jewish imperative. We should live that every day.
We mourn the passing of the 36 beautiful young lives lost in the Oakland fire, and we extend our deepest condolences to the Bernbaum family for the loss of their son Jonathan. Baruch dayan ha-emet.