Fine was one of nine students taking part in a project of the university?s Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship program. Their mission: Explore the lives of 70 professors, most of them Jewish, who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe in the ?30s and later joined the U.C. Berkeley faculty. Their findings will be part of a 2014 exhibit at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley.

'It was fascinating to learn about these people,' Fine said. 'I knew about the Jewish intellectual diaspora after the war, but I had no idea so many amazing people came to U.C. Berkeley or that Cal accepted so many persecuted Jews.'

The documents had been stored at the university's Bancroft Library, which houses a portion of the Magnes' archives." - Dan Pine, jweekly.com

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April 26 - July 26, 2013
The Bancroft Library Gallery
Open 10am - 4pm, Monday through Friday

The Colors of California Agriculture highlight the recently donated Goin and Starrs Archive of California Agriculture, containing photographs and panoramas by Peter Goin and field research notes by Paul F. Starrs. These materials were compiled during the five years in which they co-authored the UC Press publication, Field Guide to California Agriculture, the first major survey of agriculture in California in 30 years. The Goin and Starr Archive is featured in the context of documents, photographs, and prints from The Bancroft Library's historical holdings on this subject.

In the corridor exhibition cases adjacent to the Gallery, select produce labels from the Schmidt Lithograph Collection are on display. At its peak from 1910-1929, the Schmidt Lithograph Company was the largest label producing company in California. The company's growth paralleled that of California's agricultural production. The 47 Schmidt scrapbooks are a visual cornucopia advertising California's bounty of dried, canned, crated fruits and vegetables.

11:00 am-12:00 pm
Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley

Led by Jack von Euw, Curator, Pictorial Collection

From its beginnings, The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection served primarily to illustrate text. However the purchase of the Robert B. Honeyman Jr. Collection of Early Californian and Western American Pictorial Material in 1963 took it beyond the illustrative. This lecture is an overview of the collection from its beginnings to its present stature with approximately eight million items.

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TOUR:  The Magnes Collection

11:00 am-4:00 pm
2121 Allston Way, Berkeley

Led by Director Alla Efimova and Curator Francesco Spagnolo

Special tours will be offered every hour on the hour from 11 to 3. The collection is free and open to the public from 11 to 4. The two current exhibits are Through the Eyes of Rachel Marker: A Literary Installation by Moira Roth, and Sound Objects: Case Study No. 3.

Led by Eli Rosenblatt, Ph.D. candidate in the UC Berkeley Jewish Studies Program and Curatorial Intern at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life

The final Bancroft Round Table of the 2013 Spring Semester will take place on April 18 at noon in the traditional Lewis-Latimer room of the Faculty Club.  This talk explores the collection of Yiddish-language printed materials published in California housed at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. The collection includes a wide variety of novels, poetry collections, pamphlets, literary journals and rabbinic commentaries published by Eastern European Jews who settled on the California coast between 1881 and 1924. The modernist literature contained in the collection, and the Californian Yiddish literary circles it represents, helps us grasp the global dimensions of Yiddish literary movements. It offers a unique vantage point from which to discuss the circulation of Ashkenazi Jewish culture between its heartland in Slavic Europe and the Americas, Southern Africa, the Middle East and Western Europe.

The community is invited to join us to learn more about this little known aspect of Jewish and California history.  Bancroft Round Tables aim to highlight the myriad collections of our Library and showcase the ways in which they enrich our historical experience.

Number 141, Fall 2012

Highlights

Fiat Lux Redux: Ansel Adams and Clark Kerr

Mark Twain's Autobiography, Volume 2

"A Perfection of Art"

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