My boss always half-jokes that Jews aren't outdoorsy. But that's definitely not true in the Bay Area; a new exhibit at the Jewish Museum Hohenems in Austria demonstrates that was never true for European Jews, either. In fact, European Jews have a rich history in the Swiss and Austrian Alps, which this latest exhibit explores. "Did you see my Alps — A Jewish Love Story" is named for Samson Raphael Hirsch, the father of modern Orthodoxy, who once said: “When I shall stand before G-d,” he wrote in the 1880s, “the Eternal One will ask me: Did you see my Alps?” The museum says that the exhibit "highlights for the first time the significance of Jewish mountaineers and artists, tourism pioneers and intellectuals, researchers and collectors as well as their role in the discovery and development of the Alps as a universal cultural and natural heritage." I found out about the exhibit from Tablet Magazine, a new Web site published by Nextbook. The author of that article writes that "With its wealth of historical detail, telling anecdotes, and gorgeous photographs, the Hohenems exhibit, however, suggests that the Alps themselves were the true Jewish Alps, a landscape that shaped and informed so much of modern Jewish history." It makes me wonder: What's the Jewish history in our own Alps, the Sierra Nevadas? Were there Jewish pioneers who scaled those cliffs, who fought to protect their beauty? And if so, how did that impact California Jewry?
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My boss always half-jokes that Jews aren't outdoorsy. But that's definitely not true in the Bay Area; a new exhibit at the