JCCSF’s What We Carry With Us

The Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and Citizen Film present What We Carry With Us, a series of films produced in association with Mapping Diasporas, a research and teaching project supported by Digital Humanities at University of California, Berkeley and led by Prof. Francesco Spagnolo, Curator of UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. UC Berkeley students interviewed refugees about their “memory objects” in Prof. Spagnolo’s course, Mapping Diasporas. The resulting work was then presented by Citizen Film in conjunction with the 2019 exhibition, Memory Objects: Judaica Collections and Global Migrations.

Highlighting how memory objects continue to be relevant to the refugee experience to this day, these short films explore connections between the ancient Jewish people’s escape from Egypt and their journey through the desert, with the experience of modern-day refugees and their descendants. Listen to people tell their story and hear how they preserve memories and traditions of their past while building a future together in California.