Free program with free garage parking on Pierce Street between Ellis and Eddy.

In the summer of 2019, Dan Schifrin took his family to Spain to complete a year-long quest to obtain Spanish citizenship. A descendant of Sephardic Jews exiled around 1492, Dan wanted to introduce his children to a “homeland” they had never visited. As the trip progressed, the practical questions of Jewish citizenship and belonging became more complicated, overlapping with his lifelong exploration of other kinds of homelands, including family, texts, rituals, and community-based conceptions of time.

In this presentation, Schifrin will share his experience traveling around Jewish Spain, expanding on his recent cover story in J. The Jewish News of Northern California. He will also use the framework of secondary citizenship to explore the complicated feelings about homelands—including America and Israel—embedded in the modern Jewish experience. At a time of escalating anxiety about anti-Semitism and global conflict, Jewish communities seem to be finding comfort in exploring their history of diverse, creative strategies of home-making and home-comings.

A former columnist for New York Jewish Week and J., Dan Schifrin has taught creative writing at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, and served as writer-in-residence at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. He is the author, among other things, of the play Sweet and Sour and a forthcoming memoir about fatherhood and science fiction. As part of a LABA Fellowship at the JCC of the East Bay, Schifrin is writing a play about medieval Jewish Spain and its influence on twenty-first-century America.

Co-presented by the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society.
Program made possible, in part, by Jane and Michael Rice.