Author talk featuring Josh Tuininga, author and illustrator of the award-winning graphic novel, We Are Not Strangers.

Featured Presentation

Jewish Arts and Bookfest
Sunday, May 4, 2025

at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley,  CA

Author Josh Tuininga traces his family’s Sephardic roots as they flee their home in Turkey, discover opportunities in America, and forge a new community in the multicultural neighborhood of the Seattle Central District. Through a visually rich presentation, Tuininga will share his creative process and research, weaving together narratives of Jewish and Japanese communities united by resilience and allyship during the turbulence of wartime.

This program is presented in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month and Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Tuininga will also be joined by guest speaker Shizue Seigel.

About We Are Not Strangers

Inspired by a True Story (Abrams ComicArts 2023)

When Marco Calvo arrives at the Jewish Synagogue to attend his grandfather’s funeral, he is caught off guard by something very unexpected. Among his close family and friends there are some people he doesn’t recognize at all. Several Japanese American families have arrived and no one is quite sure why they are here. Who are these strangers that knew his grandfather so well?

What Marco discovers leads him on a journey to explore the powerful true story of his Jewish grandfather who sided with Japanese families during the incarceration camps of WW2. Set in the multicultural Seattle Central District of the 1940s, ‘We Are Not Strangers’ explores the unique situation of Japanese and Jewish Americans living side by side in a country at war. These perspectives converge in a portrait of a community’s struggle with race, responsibility and what it truly means to be an American.

We Are Not Strangers has been the recipient of several awards including the 2024 National Excellence in Graphic Literature Award for Best Non-Fiction, and was a Finalist for both the 2024 National Jewish Book Award, and the Washington State Book award.

About the Author

Josh Tuininga is an author, artist, and graphic designer based in North Bend, WA. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tuininga’s artistic career has explored a variety of mediums including sequential art, animation, painting and design. In 2003, he founded an Art + Design Agency, The Medium where he continues to work as Creative Director.

Josh is the author of ‘We Are Not Strangers’ (Abrams ComicArts 2023), and two children’s books, Why Blue? & Dream On. He also makes music with his wife as To the River. You can find information about his events and classes here.

About the Guest Speaker

Shizue Seigel is a third-generation Japanese American writer, visual artist and community activist who explores complex intersections of history, culture and spirituality through prose, poetry and visual art.

Her work is informed by seven decades of experiential explorations across age, class, continents and cultures. She was born in 1946, just after her family’s release from World War II incarceration. She grew up as an Army brat in segregated Baltimore, Occupied Japan, California farm labor camps and skid-row Stockton, before finding home in San Francisco. She’s a college dropout who learned by doing—from the Haight-Ashbury to Indian ashrams, from corporate advertising to HIV prevention to San Francisco’s vibrant activist arts community.     

She is the founder/director of Write Now! SF Bay, which supports San Francisco Bay Area writers and artists of color through workshops, events and anthologies.