The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, commonly called the Katz Center, is a postdoctoral research center devoted to the study of Jewish history and civilization.
The Western Jewish History Center existed as part of the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California, from 1967 to 2010. It is now the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, administered as part of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Judah Leon Magnes was a prominent Reform rabbi in both the United States and Mandatory Palestine. He is best remembered as a leader in the pacifist movement of the World War I period, his advocacy of a binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine, and as one of the most widely recognized voices of 20th century American Reform Judaism. Magnes served as the first chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1925), and later as its President (1935–1948).
Lucjan Dobroszycki was a Polish scientist and historian specializing in modern Polish and Polish-Jewish history. A survivor of the Łódź Ghetto and Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz, Dobroszycki lived in Poland after World War II where he obtained his education and worked as a historian. His main focus was the Nazi German occupation of Poland.
Moses Rischin (1925-2020) was an American historian, author, lecturer, editor, and emeritus professor of history at San Francisco State University. He coined the phrase new Mormon history in a 1969 article of the same name.
Congregation Beth Israel is a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Berkeley, California, in the United States. Established in 1924 as the Berkeley Hebrew Center, it traces its origins to the First Hebrew Congregation of Berkeley, founded in 1909. It was Berkeley's first synagogue and remains its oldest. Lay-led for four decades, it hired its first rabbi, Saul Berman, in 1963.
Mayer Kirshenblatt (1916–2009) was a Polish-born Canadian self-taught painter and author of Jewish origin.
Seymour Fromer was an American co-founder of the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. Fromer co-founded the museum, which houses 11,000 Jewish artifacts, one of the largest collections in the United States, with his wife, Rebecca Fromer, in a Berkeley mansion in 1962. He remained the director the Judah L. Magnes Museum until his retirement in 1998.
Joseph Asher (1921–1990) was an American rabbi born in Germany, known for his advocacy of reconciliation between the Jews and the Germans in the post-Holocaust era, and for his support for the civil rights movement in the United States. He was senior rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco for 19 years.
Ira Nowinski is a photographer. Nowinski earned a Master of Fine Art's degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973. From the late 1970s through the early 1980s, Nowinski served as the official photographer of the San Francisco Opera. His photographs have been collected extensively by the University of California, Berkeley's Bancroft Library; Stanford University Libraries' Department of Special Collections; Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Museum of Photography, Bradford, England.
Fred Rosenbaum is an American author, historian and adult educator, specializing in the history of the Jewish community of the San Francisco Bay Area. Rosenbaum has been called a "superb storyteller". He is a founder and the director of Lehrhaus Judaica in Berkeley, California, described as "the largest Jewish adult education center in the western United States".
Rebecca Camhi Fromer was an American playwright, historian and poet. Fromer co-founded the Judah L. Magnes Museum of Berkeley, California, in 1961 with her husband, Seymour Fromer. The museum, which is now called the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and became part of the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, houses more than 15,000 Judaica artifacts and manuscripts, the third largest collection of its kind in the United States.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is a scholar of Performance and Jewish Studies and a museum professional. Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, she is best known for her interdisciplinary contributions to Jewish studies and to the theory and history of museums, tourism, and heritage. She is currently the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition and Advisor to the Director at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
The Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards were a Canadian program of literary awards, managed, produced and presented annually by the Koffler Centre of the Arts to works judged to be the year's best works of literature by Jewish Canadian writers or on Jewish cultural and historical topics.
Anna Walinska was an American painter. She is known for her colorful works of the Modernist period, collages done with handmade Burmese Shan paper, and a large body of works in various media on the theme of the Holocaust. Works by Walinska are included in numerous public collections, most notably the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Denver Art Museum, The Jewish Museum in New York, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, and Yad Vashem. Walinska's scrapbooks of the Guild Art Gallery, along with sketchbooks and journals on world travel are included in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.
The Arthur Szyk Society, active from 1991 to 2017, was a nonprofit organization founded to preserve the legacy of the artist Arthur Szyk. Through its newsletters, art history papers, traveling exhibition, and group tours abroad, The Society presented Szyk's works to audiences in the United States and worldwide.
Alfred Henry Jacobs was an American architect. He designed theaters, hotels, residential, and religious buildings, primarily working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Three of the buildings he designed are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He also worked as a watercolorist.
Michal Friedlander is a cultural historian and museum curator. She has been Curator of Judaica and Applied Arts at the Jewish Museum Berlin since 2001, developing the museum collections and curating exhibitions, both as a co-curator and alone.
Jacques Schnier (1898–1988) was a Romanian-born American artist, sculptor, author, educator, and engineer. He was a sculpture professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1936 to 1966.
Alla Efimova is an art historian, curator, and consultant based in Berkeley, CA. She grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia.
