Updated Oct. 8, 2024
Nearly every day for two years, Dave Shlachter, a 43-year-old Jewish father of three, spent his lunch breaks surfing the waves along the picturesque Bolinas Beach.
Rain or shine, the Mill Valley real estate investor would paddle out from the coastline near his Bolinas property. Surfing calmed him, especially on his darkest days following the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel.
“It was just beyond devastating,” Shlachter said.
Shlachter and his wife have deep ties to Israel. They lived in Tel Aviv from 2010 to 2012 and were already planning to make aliyah with their children, ages 9, 7, and 5, within the coming year.
Paddling back to shore at the end of a surf break in mid-October, he was disturbed to find “LIBERATION” painted in large, capital letters on the concrete seawall in the colors of the Palestinian flag.
“It’s not saying: ‘Peace in the Middle East.’ It’s not saying: ‘Let’s coexist.’ It’s saying: ‘This was an act of liberation of the Palestinian people,’” Shlachter said. “To me, it was a celebration of the Oct. 7 massacre.”
In the months that followed, he saw additional graffiti appear on the seawalls, containing even more explicit and profane anti-Israel messages.
The graffiti included the phrases “Zionism equals terrorism,” “Zionists are kooks,” “Death to Israel,” “Join the global Intifada” and “Glory to the martyrs.” One wall displayed the words “Fuck Zionism,” with an image of a hand giving the middle finger.
Around town, Shlachter also saw plywood signs and posters calling for Israel to “stop occupying stolen land” and demanding Israel “stop the genocide.”
“It felt like every conceivable public-facing surface at some point was covered in what I feel is anti-Israel, anti-Zionist messaging,” Shlachter said. “From there, it followed this almost linear trajectory of getting more and more extreme.”
Over the past year, such intense reactions have torn at the social fabric of Bolinas, according to both Jewish and non-Jewish residents.
‘Landmines everywhere’
Bolinas, an unincorporated township of fewer than 2,000 people nestled on Marin County’s coastline, has no synagogue, no Jewish community center. Shlachter knew of only a few Jewish families, like his, that owned a second home in Bolinas.
Then in March, he was invited to join a private WhatsApp group where he connected with 17 Jewish Bolinas residents, a mix of longtime locals and second-residence homeowners. This group of mostly strangers who had never met in person became a de facto source of Jewish community engagement.
The group provided a safe, supportive space to vent frustrations and express shared pain. There has been plenty of both.
One mother in the group whose children graduated from Bolinas schools told J. that, since Oct. 7, she has often needed to “force” herself to leave the safety of her home.
“There’s a small handful of people that I’m terrified to interact with or see,” she said. “There are landmines everywhere.”
She asked J. not to identify her due to concerns over harassment of her and her family.
The woman said she doesn’t express her views about Israel on social media. She doesn’t even speak about Israel beyond the walls of her home. But in a community smaller than some public high schools, she said, neighbors have a way of knowing each other’s political positions and personal beliefs, whether they’re spoken aloud or not.
“When I was in college, I was the AIPAC liaison. I was a very strong voice,” she said. But in Bolinas, she’d rather stay quiet “because it’s not even worth getting down in the toilet with the people who are so loud.”
When Hamas executed six Israeli hostages in a Gaza tunnel in late August, including 23-year-old East Bay native Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a few neighbors offered her hugs and emotional support. But that same day, a new Palestinian flag, larger than any previously displayed in town, went up outside a highly visible building in the small town.
“There’s not even a moment, a moment, to grieve,” she said.
Bolinas these days feels like a “liberal woke college campus,” she said. But it’s even worse because, unlike a college that you can leave after four years, there’s no end in sight.
Oct. 7 denial
Twenty years ago, Cheryl Ruggiero took a day trip from San Francisco to Bolinas with her husband and fell in love with the coastal landscape.
“It just seemed like the place I had always wanted to be in,” said the 62-year-old lawyer, who is Jewish and originally from Los Angeles.
Within a month, the couple purchased two dilapidated shacks surrounded by trees and went to work fixing them up. When they moved in, Ruggiero placed a mezuzah on every doorpost.
Beyond cherishing the natural beauty and tranquility of Bolinas, Ruggiero was charmed by the township’s progressive liberalism. Signs championing Black Lives Matter proliferated around town in 2020. Residents regularly drop off food, clothing and other goods at the town’s “Free Box,” a tiny building where anyone can pick up the items at no cost.
“It just seemed like it was so comfortable here, so accepting,” said Ruggiero, who with her husband runs a local nonprofit that helps cover vet bills for dogs.
Since the 1970s, Bolinas has been lauded as a utopian enclave of progressive, liberal and social justice fervor. In 1971, two Standard Oil tankers collided near the Golden Gate Bridge, spilling more than 800,000 gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay, the largest such disaster in Northern California history. To help clean up the beaches and treat the vast number of sick and injured seabirds, several hundred “hippies” journeyed to Bolinas. Many never left.
To this day, Bolinas maintains a free-spirited, independent vibe. The hardware store’s welcome sign states, “Come in, we’re high.” The community is also notoriously unwelcoming to new development and government intervention. The town has reached near-mythical status as insular because locals tend to remove any road signs leading to town.
Bolinas residents made headlines in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic by posting signs that warned nonresidents to stay away and by setting up their own testing sites instead of relying on the county or state.
“In many ways, it has never stopped being 1971 in Bolinas,” the New Yorker observed in 2020. “The residents — commuters, surfers, literal and spiritual campers — unify their consciousness with brightly painted wooden signs slung around town, setting the tenor of the place,” such as “gratitude” and “Feel the Bern,” in support of then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
But after Oct. 7, the “town just changed overnight,” Ruggiero said.
Shortly after the massacre spurred the Israel-Hamas war, “stop the genocide” posters began to proliferate around downtown Bolinas, including some with the faces of injured Palestinian children, Ruggiero said. In response, Ruggiero and her husband printed out 8-by-11-inch posters about the hostages and began posting them around downtown too.
“It just was a Star of David with a broken heart in the middle, and it said, ‘Free the hostages,’” Ruggiero said. “And they were taken down every time or vandalized or torn.” For months, her husband would go out and put fresh posters up “because it was meaningful.”
In early November, Ruggiero wrote an opinion piece in the Hearsay News, a volunteer-run community newsletter fashioned like a zine, with snippets of handwritten, typed and illustrated entries from locals. The Hearsay, which comes out as an emailed PDF document and in print form three times a week, has been a fixture of Bolinas since 1974, with the mantra that “everyone is a reporter.”
In the first weeks after Oct. 7, Ruggerio said, the Hearsay published several anti-Israel opinion pieces with factually incorrect statements that she considered offensive to Israel and the victims of the massacre.
“The denial, I think, was even more upsetting to me than anything because it’s like, really? Do we have to go to that level? Are we going to be that ignorant? Are we going to live in a fiction? I mean, let’s just be real here and find out what really happened. If you want to discuss politics, that’s fine. But this was so barbaric, so insane. I can’t believe any human being would easily, easily justify it,” Ruggiero told J.
Her submission to the Hearsay drew scathing critiques from readers, who wrote their own responses in defense of their beliefs about Israel and Hamas, Ruggiero said. For months, she wrote responses to almost every anti-Zionist viewpoint she encountered in the Hearsay.
Ruggiero said she didn’t naively assume that she would change anyone’s mind.
“That was never the goal. It was just to make sure there was some other side, that we weren’t just going to be silent while people were being extremely antisemitic and also not truthful, in my opinion,” she said.
At the end of May, Adam Werbach, a Jewish environmental activist and former national president of the Sierra Club who owns a second home in Bolinas, wrote a piece in the Hearsay explaining the historical context around the word “intifada,” which is tied to periods of extreme violence against Israelis.
Werbach, 51, explained why signs telling people in town to “join the global intifada” are a call for violence against Jews. Werbach, a member of the Bolinas Jewish WhatsApp group, had also taken it upon himself to paint over anti-Zionist graffiti on the seawall from time to time.
Multiple Bolinas residents wrote in the next edition of the Hearsay rejecting Werbach’s characterization of “intifada.”
“‘Join the global intifada’ is most certainly a call for peace,” one woman wrote.
“The fact that people are still blacking out Stop Genocide in this town is insane to me. So would you rather I be in support of a genocide?” another woman wrote. “I guess either way people will view me as anti-semitic, which I am not in any way. If you know me at all, that is pretty clear. I am in complete support of a FREE PALESTINE. … I also support Jewish people as well. I DO NOT support Zionists, bigots or racists.”
In early June, Ruggiero wrote in support of Werbach’s submission.
“Advocating for Palestinian rights and criticizing Israeli policies is valid, but why not, at the same time, critique Hamas’ policies and how Palestinians have been treated and manipulated by that brutal regime?” she wrote. “Criticism is valid on both sides, and both peoples have a right to a homeland and to peace. But using inflammatory language that historically signifies violence and bloodshed does little to foster understanding or peace, perpetuating cycles of hostility.”
In August, Ruggiero’s public feud with anti-Zionist readers of the Hearsay became personal when one of the most prolific among them wrote multiple pages attacking Ruggiero by name. The writer, who apparently no longer lives in Bolinas, said Ruggiero was as “mentally ill” as Hitler and accused her of “justifying war crimes.”
“You are a danger to the community of Bolinas,” he wrote.
Ruggerio was shattered and broke down in tears numerous times in the days that followed, she said.
“I wish it didn’t hurt so much,” she said. “I don’t mind criticism. I don’t mind people having a different opinion. … The fact that they have to stoop to the lowest level of communication is not only harmful, but it actually shows that that’s all they have.”
An Aug. 9 editor’s note in the Hearsay from volunteer editor Will Bartlett acknowledged that discourse in the community’s primary publication had turned toxic.
“There are plenty of past conflicts the paper has dealt with, however I really think the current conflict is probably the worst it’s ever been,” Bartlett wrote.
A few days later, on Aug. 14, Annie O’Connor, executive director of a nonprofit focused on affordable housing in Bolinas, talked about the issue at a public meeting. She described the “deepening divisions” over Israel as a “source of concern and sadness.”
Taking down the signs
Ruggiero knows nearly everyone in town — from the workers at the co-op where she’d routinely get her morning coffee and groceries to the owner of the restaurant where she and her husband ate for years.
Now, she rarely sees any of them. She tries her best to avoid grocery shopping in town, though she ventures in now and then. For a while Ruggiero would drive to Novato twice a week to shop at Costco. These days her husband does most of the grocery shopping without her. They dine at home, never downtown.
“We changed our lives,” Ruggiero said because they feel judged, misunderstood and ostracized.
Shlachter and Werbach understood from their chats on the WhatsApp group that most of the Jews who are full-time Bolinas residents don’t want to end up attacked or ostracized like Ruggiero.
“Those of us who aren’t full time feel very empowered to say something about it because we’re not at risk,” Werbach said.
Shlachter made aliyah with his family to Tel Aviv in August but still owns his Bolinas home. Several months before moving, fed up with the anti-Zionist signs hanging from a tree near his home, Shlachter contacted Marin County’s public works department and said he got approval over the phone to remove the signs.
“Like clockwork,” he said, freshly painted pro-Palestinian signs would reappear days after he removed them, and he’d make another trip to dispose of them.
This summer, he took down a sign painted with a Palestinian flag and then noticed an Apple AirTag taped to the back. The person who made the sign wanted to track where Shlachter was taking it.
“They somehow identified me,” Shlachter said. Suddenly, his public Instagram account received several “incredibly vitriolic” comments on an old post he’d written shortly after Oct. 7. One called him “ghoulish” for removing the signs and added that “your actions are actively telling the Palestinian community members their existence isn’t safe and protected here. You don’t get to do that. We see you.”
The week before moving to Israel, Shlachter brought household items to leave at the “Free Box.” One young woman gave him a “dagger stare” when he walked by, he said. “And when I went into this little room to start sorting the donations, one of them just started yelling, ‘Free Palestine! Free Palestine!’ and so I left.”
O’Connor noted that in the past month, she has noticed that neighbors have started to “approach each other with more compassion and curiosity.” She hopes that relations are beginning to show signs of improvement.
“Residents of this community are basically in long-term, life-long relationships with each other, so it’s pretty hard to avoid anyone for very long,” O’Connor wrote. “Sometimes that dynamic acts as a pressure cooker that exacerbates tensions, but I think it can also be a force that encourages us to find ways to live alongside each other.”
Werbach noted that finding common ground on an issue this polarizing is possible, but not necessarily in Bolinas.
“In the end it’s all the same people here. You don’t want to defeat or embarrass people,” he said. “It’s a very small community.”
When asked how to do so, he responded: “That’s the hardest question for us.”