As somnambulistic, iPod-wearing college students sauntered past, Alon Shalev cut a unique figure on the San Francisco State campus, waving about fronds of the “four species” — palm, olive, willow and myrtle — and brandishing a canary-yellow etrog.
It was all part of the Monday, Oct. 1 opening festivities for SFSU’s Jewish Culture Week. The big message Shalev, the executive director of San Francisco Hillel, hoped to impart was: “There are Jews on campus” — and, apparently, they’ve got fruit.
On a campus where some Jewish students still feel reticent to openly display their ethnicity, nothing says “I’m a Jew and I’m proud” like a klezmer band (in this case, the Ellis Island Band), a trove of Jewish treasures ranging from a plush fuzzy Torah to the real thing and, of course, homemade kugel.
Gabrielle Yedid spent six hours slaving in the Hillel kitchen and made enough of her Romanian-born grandma’s kugel to feed the entire Golani Brigade; she also appropriated her Israeli father’s charoset recipe. While most college students are conditioned to avoid the folding tables proliferating near the student center of every university in the nation and manned by devotees of Lyndon LaRouche or myriad ethnic folk dance groups, Yedid’s home cookin’ helped attract a steady flow of visitors to the Hillel display.
Incidentally, the Jewish students weren’t the only ones to set up tables. The campus Republicans and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliances representatives sat, coolly, next to one another. The Republicans were the ones tossing around a football.
Also, with the Jewish event at Malcom X Plaza officially commencing at noon, it was all of 12:04 p.m. before the General Union of Palestinian Students unfurled a banner of its own. The sign, though, simply announced the pro-Palestinians’ solidarity with the Black Student Union, which was demonstrating several yards away over the Jena Six. Hillel activists considered this concession on the pro-Palestinians’ part to be something of a classy move.
Hillel’s series of card tables was an amalgamation of chachkas titled “The Five Senses of Judaism.” (We’ve already spilled copious ink describing “taste,” and the Ellis Island Band and perhaps the world’s loudest grogger accounted for “hearing.” The fuzzy Torah qualified for “feel,” while the real thing — carted to campus by Hillel Assistant Director Heather Erez in her son’s car seat — took up “sight.” “Smell” featured an olfactory smorgasbord of the pungent etrog, challah and Manischewitz gefilte fish, wisely left out of the “taste” section.)
The “sixth sense” of the day, a Jewish sense of social justice, was manifested by a give-away of energy-efficient light bulbs.
Later events in Jewish Culture week included a series of lectures and films culminating in a Simchat Torah celebration Friday, Oct. 5 and an opportunity to spend the night in the S.F. Hillel sukkah.
But no one could spend too much time in the sukkah on a day that turned out to be warm, sunny — and delicious.
“I want to go and find out where they got that bread,” said SFSU student Lucy Wilson, who’s evidently ga-ga for challah.