Ava Kahn wrote a history of the Jews of the Bay Area, then another about the Jews of California. Apparently, that wasn’t a big enough canvas for her. Now she’s taken on the Jews of the entire West Coast.
In a new book, “Jews of the Pacific Coast,” Kahn and her two co-authors survey the remarkable saga of Jewish immigration and settlement from Seattle to San Diego.
Basically, it’s a big success story.
Many Jews saw the frontier “as the promised land,” says the Berkeley-based author. “Jews very much became Westerners. This is for many reasons but one is they came as founders. It was a very open place.”
Kahn and co-author Ellen Eisenberg will speak twice next week in Berkeley: Monday, May 17 at Congregation Beth El and Wednesday, May 19 at a California Studies Dinner seminar.
Starting with the Gold Rush of 1849, the book traces the fledgling Jewish communities of Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco (which had the country’s second-largest Jewish population for the latter half of the 19th century).
The Jewish characters who built the region –– including bankers, politicians, inventors and social activists –– populate the book. The story continues nearly to the present day, encompassing bustling new Jewish communities in boom towns such as Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Kahn and her co-authors, Jewish history professors Eisenberg of Willamette University in Salem, Ore., and William Toll of the University of Oregon, make the case that West Coast Jewry has every bit as exciting a story as its vaunted East Coast cousins.
“It’s one thing to look at the Bay Area as a unique story,” Kahn says, “and it’s another to see how it fits into the whole Pacific Coast. Everything in the 19th century started in San Francisco. It was the port where most people arrived. If you wanted a husband or wife in Portland, you came to San Francisco. If you were opening a business, you had to have a representative there.”
The idea for a book was born about six years ago, when the three authors went out for coffee during a historians’ conference. They shared a passion for Jewish American history, but since each had different areas of expertise, they thought the story could best be told by working together.
That day they sketched a basic outline on the back of a napkin, and the rest is, um, history.
Even though she and her colleagues live in different cities, Kahn says they had no problem collaborating. They would take turns writing chapters, then sending them to the other two for scrutiny and rewrites.
To emphasize that “promised land” mentality, Kahn starts the book by describing the stained-glass window created for San Francisco’s Congregation Sherith Israel in 1905. It depicts Moses, Ten Commandments in hand, coming down not from Mount Zion but from El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite.
Unlike the East Coast, where Jewish immigrants battled a measure of anti-Semitism and elitism, Kahn says by the time they made it to the West, the cultural gaps had disappeared.
“They got along with non-Jews and with other Jews,” Kahn says. “They identified more with the West. It was a self-selecting migration.”
A native of Los Angeles, Kahn earned her doctorate in American history from U.C. Santa Barbara. She was a fellow at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, and later taught Jewish studies at U.C. Davis, San Francisco State University and Mills College in Oakland.
She also has worked extensively with museums around the country, including the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles, for which she helped put together a successful exhibition in 2002, “Jewish Life in the American West.”
Kahn moved to the Bay Area about two decades ago at the urging of the late Seymour Fromer, a founder of Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum and the Western Jewish History Center, where she worked.
Much of her subsequent research was done at the WJHC, which along with the Magnes collection will soon be moved to the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley. It will be a sad farewell for Kahn.
“I’m gong to miss the [WJHC],” she says, “and I will always be indebted to Seymour and to Moses Rischin for establishing it, because we could not have written this book without that resource. I loved going there.”
She loved it because she loves her subject, which she sees as living history. After all, one need not go back to ancient times to hit the bedrock of Bay Area Jewish history.
As proof, she cites a famous family that came to San Francisco in the 1850s. The patriarch (Isaac Goldsmith) was the area’s first kosher slaughterer, his granddaughter (Florence Prag Kahn) the first Jewish congresswoman.
But it doesn’t stop there.
“Florence’s great-grandson,” says Kahn, “is now my auto mechanic.”
Ava Kahn and Ellen Eisenberg will speak at 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 17 at Congregation Beth El, 1301 Oxford St., Berkeley. Information: (510) 848-3988. They will also speak at a California Studies Dinner seminar at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 19 at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, 2521 Channing Way, Berkeley. Information: (510) 642-3903.
“Jews of the Pacific Coast” by Ava Kahn, Ellen Eisenberg and William Toll (336 pages, University of Washington Press, $50)