South Dakota doesn’t have much of a reputation as a breeding ground for either observant Jews or culture mavens.
So it may seem a tad strange that the new executive director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is a 49-year-old South Dakota native.
First of all, Don Adams, who assumes the leading role of the 22-year-old festival in January, was born Protestant. He converted to Judaism three years ago after discovering that growing up he was “a Jewish kid who didn’t know he was Jewish yet.”
“It took me a long time to figure out I was Jewish and converted,” said Adams, who regularly attends morning minyan at a Conservative synagogue in Seattle and recently served as treasurer of a Jewish renewal congregation there.
A Seattle resident for the last five years, Adams and his wife have for 24 years run a consulting firm for independent media groups and other nonprofit agencies.
As for his cultural activism, Adams traces that passion directly to his youth in the tiny college town of Vermillion, S.D., where in the late 1960s he led moratoriums and teach-ins protesting the Vietnam War.
“When you live in a small town, it rapidly becomes clear if you want to have an interesting cultural life, you need to start organizing it,” explains Adams, who did just that starting as a high school student.
Convinced that he needed to “take responsibility” for the cultural offerings in the community of 10,000, Adams began staging concerts, dance shows and film series.
Those efforts planted the seeds for his philosophy that cultural events serve as not only a forum for entertainment, but also a vehicle for community education and change.
“I see the arts as a place where beautiful and moving expressions of deep feeling and big ideas can be made in a way that really move a person,” said Adams in a phone interview.
Adams, who has lived previously in San Francisco, describes his new job as “a perfect confluence of things I love.”
The festival, he says, uses film to tell “passionate” stories and to serve as “a vehicle of Jewish culture.”
Living in San Francisco in the mid-1980s and then when he moved for 12 years to Ukiah, Adams was among the throngs who lined up for festival screenings at the Castro Theatre.
“The community that’s grown around the festival is quite extraordinary,” he said, pointing to both the size and diversity of the event’s audience. This year’s festival drew 34,000 patrons to more than 50 films.
“It’s been very brave in its presentation of material that’s really very controversial,” he added, mentioning its screening of films about women’s roles in the Jewish community, gay and lesbian issues, Israeli policies and Palestinians.
Adams will replace Janis Plotkin, who served as the festival’s executive director for eight years and was affiliated with the event for more than two decades.
She believes Adams’ background in arts management will be helpful in guiding the festival through a period of growth and potential financial challenges.
“Although we’re not in trouble in any way, the organization needs someone with strong organizational and managerial experience,” said Plotkin, who had not met Adams before.
Working with his wife and partner, Arlene Goldbard, Adams has served as a consultant to independent filmmakers, theater companies and other groups seeking help in organization and planning.
Dan Wohlfeiler, president of the festival’s board of directors, said: “He brings us a ton of experience in both fund-raising and nonprofit management. We conducted a nationwide search and are really thrilled we found someone like Don who shares our commitment to cutting-edge programming, to social change.”
“Don’s a real mensch,” observed Marlene Booth, a Cambridge, Mass.-based filmmaker. Her work, which includes “Yidl in the Middle: Growing Up Jewish in Iowa” and “When I was 14: A Survivor Remembers,” has been screened at the San Francisco festival.
“He has the power to listen and bring about coalitions in a way that I’ve scarcely seen in anyone else,” said Booth, noting that Adams was a longtime consultant to New Day Films, an independent film cooperative she joined a decade ago.
She described Adams as a “worldwide media activist” who believes in using art as “a democratizing force.”
In the recent interview, Adams talked of the intersection between film with social and political action.
“Right now, I’m very concerned about the state of politics in this country,” he said. “In many ways, we’re being encouraged to go to sleep in our responsibilities as citizens.”
The mass media, he said, has contributed to that dangerous trend of “passive consumption.”
A priority for Adams is screening films at the festival that serve as “a way to wake people up, a way of building cross-cultural understanding.
“I think these films have a potential to open people up and what can come of that is a great deal of discussion and then action that can carry us to hopefully a better future.”