UPDATED Jan. 8, 2024 at 1:02 p.m.
As 2024 comes to a close, it’s time for my annual tradition: diving into website analytics to find out which of our stories were the most popular this year.
These articles are the ones that truly grabbed our readers’ attention during a year when reading, watching and listening to the news, or just checking social media, often felt like an onslaught of misery.
From the Gaza protests to a major shift in Jewish philanthropy to the first woman rabbi from Uganda, here are the Jewish Bay Area stories that drew your interest in 2024.
10. Kehillah high school in Palo Alto drops ‘Jewish’ from its name, sparking backlash from alumni and others
In September, Kehillah Jewish High School announced it was changing its name to, simply, “The Kehillah School.” Many current parents and students as well as alumni were unhappy about it, and they made sure that Kehillah leaders knew how they felt. “I think that it is a mistake that Kehillah is stepping away from its Jewishness in general,” 2013 Kehillah grad Daniel Labunsky told staff writer Maya Mirsky. “I also think that it’s shameful that it’s doing it now,” he said, referring to rising antisemitism and the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
Kehillah leaders disagreed with Labunsky’s characterization and told us in writing, “We stand by our commitment to our longstanding Jewish values, our deep academics in Jewish Studies, celebration of Jewish and Israeli holidays, and creating belonging for all members of our community.” Read more.
9. First woman rabbi from Uganda steps into role at Beth Am in Los Altos Hills
In August, erstwhile culture editor Andrew Esensten interviewed Rabbi Shoshana Nambi, the first ordained woman rabbi from the Abayudaya Jewish community in Uganda, as she stepped into her new job as assistant rabbi at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills. She is just the second Abayudaya rabbi ordained in the U.S. after Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the longtime leader of the community who has spoken to Bay Area audiences several times. Read more here.
Another African Jew, Samson Nderitu, became the rabbinic intern at Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco in August. Nderitu was born in Kenya, but converted to Judaism in Uganda, where he became a member of the Abayudaya community.
8. Anti-Zionist org gets $100K grant as Walter and Elise Haas Fund changes direction
The Walter and Elise Haas Fund has stopped backing Jewish causes — and started supporting at least one avidly anti-Israel group, as staff writer Emma Goss reported earlier this month. The S.F.-based Haas Fund is a family-run foundation with a long history of supporting causes, both Jewish and non-Jewish. It was launched more than 70 years ago with money from relatives of Levi Strauss.
Now the fund, which is still controlled by members of the Haas family, has stopped making grants to Jewish nonprofits. On top of that, it has given a $100,000 grant to the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, whose public activities include protesting against Israel and organizing Gaza cease-fire resolutions in local governments. The move angered leaders in the local Jewish community, including at nonprofits that have lost their Haas grants. Read more.
This story is one of several this year that touched on changes in the Jewish philanthropic landscape of the Bay Area. We also reported on the supposedly temporary closure of the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the demise of the Jewish Coalition for Literacy and the Jewish Youth for Community Action. And as last year came to a close, we wrote about the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund’s new funding model.
7. Man in ‘violent’ Star of David baseball cap asked ‘Are you a Zionist?’ and told to leave Oakland cafe
In this troubling story from Maya, a man wearing a Star of David baseball cap was berated and repeatedly told to leave by the co-founder of an Oakland coffee shop. Jonathan Hirsch, the customer at the Jerusalem Coffee House who was there with his 5-year-old son, argued back.
The two men shouted at each other until police arrived. This same cafe made headlines just weeks earlier over a new menu that included drinks with names that glorified terrorism. Read more.
6. Cease-fire resolution fever
Across Northern California, local politicians and residents derailed the business of city and county governments this year with proposals for resolutions and official statements in favor of a cease-fire in Gaza. Opposing groups of residents, for and against the measures, caused typically sedate meetings to boil over.
In San Francisco, contentious meetings led to a compromise resolution that satisfied a majority of the Board of Supervisors. But it left Mayor London Breed in the no-win situation of deciding whether to issue a veto. Her quandary led to the single most-read article in all of our coverage of cease-fire resolutions from news editor Gabe Stutman: “S.F. Mayor London Breed denounces supervisors’ cease-fire measure after anguished letter from Haifa counterpart.” (Breed, by the way, eventually decided against a veto.)
For a more comprehensive look at our coverage, check out Maya’s interactive map of cease-fire resolutions.
5. When Elie Wiesel was assaulted in S.F. in 2007, Kamala Harris charged his attacker with a hate crime
Maya continues to plumb the depths of our 129-year archive for relevant historical tidbits in her “From the Archives” column. Her most popular column this year came at the height of the presidential campaign, when she found this 2007 story of then-S.F. District Attorney Kamala Harris prosecuting the man who assaulted famed author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Wiesel was in his hotel in San Francisco when Eric Hunt, an antisemite and Holocaust denier, attacked him. Hunt wrote online that he had stalked Wiesel for weeks and planned to force him to “admit” that the Holocaust was a lie. Harris’ office charged him with kidnapping, stalking, elder abuse and a hate crime. Read more.
4. Pro-Palestinian activism puts Jewish UCSF patients and doctors on edge
Should patients have to face political messages that may offend or frighten them while seeking treatment? And what is the role of political activism in a school of medicine? These are some of the questions raised by Gabe’s coverage of a series of incidents at UCSF, which is both a medical school and a working hospital.
The incidents ranged from nurses wearing pro-Palestinian pins to anti-Zionist and antisemitic social media posts from a professor who has since been suspended. Read more.
3. Campus clashes
Two stories about UC Berkeley were more or less tied for the third spot on this list. The first was Emma’s “‘Shiva-worthy’: Berkeley prof starts sit-in to force action against antisemitism,” the story of Professor Ron Hassner’s sit-and-sleep-in. He sought to pressure university administrators to take action on the situation at Cal, where many Jewish students and faculty said that pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests had created a difficult environment for them on campus. (Our article about the end of his two-week protest also drew significant traffic.)
The second story that tied for third place on this list was one of the incidents that inspired Hassner’s sit-in: “‘I’m screaming for help’: Jewish students face violence at UC Berkeley Israel talk.” (This story, incidentally, also won an award from the SF Press Club.) Gabe, Maya and Emma all worked on this story about a protest that turned into a riot outside an event featuring a right-wing Israeli speaker. Multiple Jewish students suffered minor injuries, and a glass door and window at the entrance of Zellerbach Playhouse were shattered.
Of course, UC Berkeley wasn’t the only campus with anti-Israel protests this year. Here are a few more standouts from our coverage:
- Some Jewish students at Stanford are learning to hide their identities
- The morning after: What did campus Gaza protests accomplish?
- S.F. State president negotiates with tent camp leaders over Israel investments
2. Marco Troper, math whiz and Hausner alum, dies at 19
The death of a young member of our local Jewish community is always shocking. In February, we lost Marco Troper to an accidental drug overdose. The 19-year-old alumnus of Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto was the middle son among five children of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and longtime Google executive Dennis Troper. Several people in the obituary told Emma about his passion for math, his major at UC Berkeley. “Math brings me peace; it’s the only thing in my life that has pure, unbiased certainty,” he once wrote. “Math also quenches my desire to understand ‘why.’” Read more.
In a story of compounding tragedy, Wojcicki died just months after her son. She passed away in August at age 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.
1. Citing safety, dozens of Jewish families are leaving Oakland public schools
This wasn’t just our highest traffic story of the year — it also made headlines in the mainstream press. All the way back in January, Emma broke the news that dozens of Jewish families were planning to pull their children from Oakland public schools over their sense of growing antisemitism in schools, which they said was coming from both students and teachers. Some parents moved their kids to the nearby Piedmont school district, others to private schools. Read more.
Since then, Emma has covered similar incidents and trends in local public schools, including lawsuits against a charter school in San Jose and a school district in San Mateo County.
In May, she received the results of her public records requests seeking information about the families leaving Oakland schools. Check out what she learned here.