The JCCSF Announces New Arts & Ideas Events For 2020
By: A.A. Cristi Jan. 07, 2020
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The JCCSF welcomes the new year and the next decade with a collection of Arts & Ideas events for 2020, including the Bay area premier of "Love Heals All Wounds" with Jon Boogz and Lil Buck, a special Mother's Day program with Alice Waters and Fanny Singer, and the return of Giants of Jazz on Film series with Mark Cantor.
Additionally, an assortment of acclaimed Jewish scholars and storytellers, as well as experts on some of the most pressing issues of our day. The lineup will continue to expand as additional events are announced.
Tickets are on sale now and may be purchased online at jccsf.org/arts, by phone at 415.292.1233, or in person at 3200 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94118.
Peggy Orenstein's "Boys & Sex" with Chris Colin
Tuesday, January 21, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $20
When New York Times bestselling author Peggy Orenstein released Girls & Sex, it broke ground, shattered taboos and launched conversations about young women's right to sexual pleasure and agency. But Orenstein realized that talking about girls is only half the conversation. In "Boys & Sex," Orenstein reveals how young men understand and negotiate the new rules of physical and emotional intimacy. Drawing on comprehensive interviews with young men as well as experts, she dissects so-called locker room talk; how the word "hilarious" robs boys of empathy; pornography as the new sex education; boys' understanding of hookup culture and consent; and their experience as both victims and perpetrators of sexual violence. The result is a provocative and paradigm-shifting work that offers a much-needed vision of how boys can truly move forward as better men.
Poet Danez Smith: "Homie"
Wednesday, January 29, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $20
Award-winning poet Danez Smith ("Don't Call Us Dead") is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects and performative power. As a poet, performer and multidisciplinary artist, Smith has galvanized diverse communities nationwide with their profound contemplations on race and gender, desire and mortality. Smith will read from their new collection, "Homie," a magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship at a time when our country is overrun by violence, xenophobia and disparity, speaking from within a body defined by race, queerness and diagnosis. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, "Homie" is the exuberant new book written for Danez and Danez's friends, and for you and for yours.
Dani Shapiro & Abraham Verghese: DNA, Secrets & "Inheritance"
Thursday, January 30, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $30 and include a copy of "Inheritance"
In 2016, celebrated writer and memoirist Dani Shapiro took a genetic test on a whim, believing that she knew her history well - the daughter of Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews, raised on her father's stories of their family and ancestors. But her DNA revealed that the man she'd known as her father for her whole life was not biologically related to her. With this news, her history - and the entire life she had lived - suddenly crumbled beneath her. Shapiro's instant New York Times bestselling memoir, "Inheritance," is about secrets - secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. Hear how Dani Shapiro lost and found herself via DNA testing, and how her life has changed since publishing "Inheritance." She is joined by Dr. Abraham Verghese for this fascinating exploration of genealogy, paternity and love.
Saturday, February 1, 2020, 2 - 5 p.m.
Tickets: FREE; advance reservation requested.
With Transgender Law Center
The JCCSF welcomes the Transgender Law Center back in 2020 to help offer guidance and community for those ready to change their name and gender marker on ID documents. As the process can be expensive and difficult to navigate alone, this free clinic offers to make that manageable by offering help filling out legal name and/or gender change court forms, including fee waiver requests, as well as applications to change name and gender markers on Social Security cards, passports, driver's licenses and birth certificates. All are welcome, no matter where they are in the process.
"Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey through the Twentieth Century"
Sarah Abrevaya Stein in conversation with Janine Zacharia
Monday, February 10, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: FREE; advance reservation requested.
The Levy family established itself in Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece) in the 18th century and for two centuries published books and newspapers for the region's Sephardic Jews. With the Ottoman Empire's collapse, the Levys scattered throughout the world but kept in touch through letters. Drawing on this rich correspondence, Stein, the award-winning author of "Extraterritorial Dreams" uses the family's experience to trace the history of Sephardic Jews through the twentieth century, showing how individual lives were affected by world wars, shifting political boundaries and the Holocaust - which wiped out several branches of the Levy family.
"The City Without Jews" Cine-Concert
Silent film with live original music by Alicia Svigals & Donald Sosin
Wednesday, February 19, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $20
Based on the bestselling dystopian novel by Hugo Bettauer, H.K. Breslauer's 1924 silent masterpiece "The City Without Jews" ("Die Stadt ohne Juden") was produced shortly before the satirical events depicted in the fictional story transformed into all-too-horrific reality. Set in the fictional Austrian city of Utopia, the story follows the consequences of an anti-Semitic law that forces all Jews to leave the country. Though darkly comedic in tone and stylistically influenced by German Expressionism, the film contains eerily realistic sequences, such as shots of freight trains transporting Jews out of the city. The film's stinging critique of Nazism is part of the reason it was banned. All complete prints were thought to be destroyed but in 2015, a nitrate print was discovered in a Parisian flea market and this "lost" film can once again be appreciated in its unfortunately ever-relevant entirety. Featuring an original live score by violinist Alicia Svigals and pianist Donald Sosin, including Svigals performing on one of the instruments from the Violins of Hope collection. This event is part of Violins of Hope San Francisco Bay Area, presented in association with Music at Kohl Mansion, Burlingame, CA.
Featuring a performance by Marcus Shelby Quartet
Tuesday, February 25, 2020 at 6:30 p.m.
Tickets: $20
Celebrate the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance with Mark Cantor as he showcases rare musical, dance and comedy performances of some of the legendary artists who made Harlem the cultural epicenter of the country. Featuring the sights and sounds of Bert Williams, Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Willie "The Lion" Smith, the Nicholas Brothers and many more. With a vast archive of more than 12,000 films and clips, Los Angeles music maven Mark Cantor's spectacular collection of jazz and blues performances is widely considered one of the world's premier collections of American popular music on film. Prior to the film presentation, SFJAZZ Resident Artist Director Marcus Shelby brings his quartet for a special performance.
Marcia Chatelain in conversation with Allyson Hobbs
Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $20
Hear the untold history of how fast food became one of the greatest generators of black wealth in America.
Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald's have long symbolized capitalism's villainous effects on our nation's most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate black neighborhoods in the first place? In her new book, "Franchise," acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists and civil rights leaders, who - in the troubled years after King's assassination - believed they had found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality.
Sunday, March 8, 2020, 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Tickets: FREE; advance reservation requested.
hrow on your favorite costume and party with the whole family at the JCCSF's annual Purim festival. Guests will enjoy hamantaschen cookies, create Purim-themed crafts like crowns and groggers (a traditional noisemaker), play at the tot-spot or outdoor playground, and make hygiene kits supporting people experiencing homelessness to be distributed by Lava Mae or food baskets (mishloach manot) for older adults in the community. The JCCSF will also welcome the Octopretzel Variety Show for a special performance featuring their 7-piece band and puppet show!
Colum McCann & Isabel Allende
Wednesday, March 11, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $30
Irish-born international bestselling author Colum McCann ("Let the Great World Spin") is among the world's foremost storytellers, moving seamlessly from the Troubles in Ireland to the Romani camps of Eastern Europe to the dizzying heights of the World Trade Center. His latest book, "Apeirogon," tells the story of two fathers - one Palestinian and one Israeli - who learn of each other's grief and reach across borders to work towards peace. McCann is joined in conversation with bestselling author Isabel Allende.
Who Owns Kafka? with Benjamin Balint
Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: FREE; advance reservation requested.
In Benjamin Balint's acclaimed book, "Kafka's Last Trial," he writes about Kafka's last instruction to his closest friend, Max Brod: to destroy all of his remaining papers upon his death. When the moment arrived in 1924, Brod instead devoted his life to championing Kafka's writing, rescuing his legacy from obscurity and physical destruction. The story of Kafka's posthumous life is itself Kafkaesque. By the time of Brod's own death in Tel Aviv in 1968, Kafka's major works had been published, transforming the once little-known writer into a pillar of literary modernism. Yet Brod left a wealth of still-unpublished papers to his secretary, who sold some, held on to the rest and then passed the bulk of them on to her daughters, who in turn refused to release them. An international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership of Kafka's work: Israel, where Kafka dreamed of living but never entered, or Germany, where Kafka's three sisters perished in the Holocaust. Balint speaks on Kafka's remarkable legacy and questions whether that legacy belongs by right to the country of his language, that of his birth or that of his cultural affinities - and also whether any nation-state can lay claim to ownership of a writer's work at all.
Saturday, April 4, 2020, 11 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Tickets: FREE; advance reservation requested.
This event is off-site on the meadow southeast of the Conservatory of Flowers, 100 John F Kennedy Dr., SF.
The JCCSF joins the Golden Gate Park 150th Anniversary celebration with a special Shabbat Lounge pop-up, featuring Morning Altars artist, Day Schilkret. The JCCSF invites the community to witness the creation of an earth art mandala, made from foraged materials from the park. The Shabbat Lounge will be a mindful respite with meaningful activities, Shabbat crafts and music.
Thursday, April 2 & Friday, April 3 at 7:00 pm
Tickets: $35 - $45
On a daily basis, we are bombarded by brutal 24-hour news cycles that reveal the inhumane realities of this world, the relentless social media updates and a slew of misguided micro-aggressions that project a fabricated value on our lives. Love Heals All Wounds goes beyond headlines to explore the heartstrings of our shared consciousness in relation to police brutality, mass incarceration and how the cycle of trauma on life needs to end. Conceived and choreographed by Jon Boogz and Lil Buck and presented by MAI (Movement Art Is), this full length performance features jookin', krumping, and breaking, mixed with ballet, house and African dance, and weaved together with spoken word, original music and projections to chart a movement towards reflection, growth and healing through sharing the dreams and visions of a world we create together.
Thursday, April 16, 2020 at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: $30
Share the shame at the JCCSF's second annual Mortified Live Show! Revel in tales of awkward holiday celebrations and embarrassing family gatherings while we break bread with pizza and beer (Passover is officially over tonight!). Just seder word and we'll arrange gluten-free options just for you! Mortified Live!, now in its fourteenth year, is the funniest and most outlandish storytelling experience in the Bay Area. As featured on Netflix's new hit series The Mortified Guide and heard on the Mortified podcast, Mortified is a cultural phenomenon in which adults relive their awkward adolescence by reading their hilarious, embarrassing teen diaries, poems, letters and more in front of total strangers. Part comedy, part theater, part therapy, participants range from professional performers (comics, celebrities, singers) to amateurs (architects, ad execs, salesmen), all in the noble pursuit of self-degradation.
Saturday, April 25, 2020 at 6:30 p.m.
Tickets: $20
San Francisco's history is rich with jazz, and the history of jazz is rich with the influence of the Bay Area. From legendary venues to celebrated musicians, the Bay Area has contributed unique and swinging sounds that have inspired jazz from its inception. Discover how the Fillmore became known as "Harlem of the West" in the 1950s and 1960s and how jazz became the soul of San Francisco's music scene. Enjoy the stylings of our most celebrated local musicians and revisit the legendary late-night jazz clubs that made this city a vibrant jazz town. Featuring performances by Turk Murphy, Bob Scobey, Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, Shelley Manne, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and many more. With a vast archive of more than 12,000 films and clips, Los Angeles music maven Mark Cantor's spectacular collection of jazz and blues performances is widely considered one of the world's premier collections of American popular music on film.
Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $30
In 2017, former United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy embarked on a listening tour to determine what was ailing Americans. As he traveled the country, he found "people in pain across America" - not just physical pain, but deep emotional pain that is a manifestation of chronic stress. Poverty, discrimination and violence are negatively impacting people's health, Dr. Murthy said. But so, too, are social isolation and loneliness. Despite living in the "most technologically connected age in human development," people in this country are isolated and alone. The percentage of Americans who report being lonely - 40 percent - has doubled in a generation. Dr. Murthy discusses his groundbreaking new book "Together," which argues that underlying many of the most critical public health issues facing America today is an epidemic of loneliness. He offers viable and actionable solutions to this crisis.
Mother's Day with Fanny Singer & Alice Waters
Sunday, May 10, 2020 at 4 p.m
Tickets: $35 - $50
The JCCSF hosts a special Mother's Day celebration with an afternoon tea and conversation with Fanny Singer and her mom, chef Alice Waters. The two will discuss food and identity, the bond between a daughter and mother, and Singer's new memoir, "Always Home: A Daughter's Recipes and Stories."
Monday, May 18, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $20
Internationally-acclaimed Israeli writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret returns to the JCCSF to discuss "Fly Already," his Sapir Prize-winning collection of quirky short stories, and the French television mini-series "The Real Estate Agent," created with his wife, Shira Geffen.
Experience the JCCSF at 3200 California Street or online at www.jccsf.org.
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