film: The Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma

you'll laugh, you'll cry , you'll give a little sigh...

A Home on the Range - Jewish Chicken Ranchers in Petaluma. Little-known story of Jews who fled pogroms of Eastern Europe and traveled to California to become chicken ranchers. Meet an intrepid group of Jewish pioneers as they confront obstacles of language and culture on their journey to become Americans. Jack London, California vigilantes, McCarthyism, the Cold War and agribusiness all figure into this saga.

"A Home on the Range: The Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma"

It reads almost like an epic myth: Where they came from, they were shopkeepers or professionals, forbidden from entering trade guilds or owning land. In Russia, in Poland, all over Europe, Jews found themselves the victims of persecution. Many who could afford it fled to America, where they took up the occupations they had held at home, the trades they already knew.
But anti-Semitism in America, although certainly present, was not as institutionalized: Jews could hold any type of job, Jews could own land, Jews could farm. And so, even as far as New York City, news spread of a little town not too far from San Francisco called Petaluma, a little town of chicken farmers -- Jewish chicken farmers.

Bonnie Burt and Judith Montell's documentary, "A Home on the Range: The Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma," tells the story of Petaluma's Jews, from their first settlements around the turn of the century to their ultimate assimilation into American culture. The film details a century of struggle, as the community strove to establish itself in a new land, lived in fear of neighbors with German sympathies during World War II, found itself beset by the McCarthyism that followed, and, above all, tried to keep the chickens healthy.

Burt and Montell interview a cross-section of the populace, from young to old, offering different political and religious perspectives and painting a complex picture of a vibrant community. "At Home on the Range" provides an interesting historical look at a the lives of Jewish immigrants in America.

When left-wingers and chicken wings populated Petaluma
SUE FISHKOFF
Jerusalem Post Service

PETALUMA -- A giant painted chicken once stood at the entrance to Petaluma.
George Nitzberg, 76, remembers it from his childhood.
That was back in the 1930s, when Petaluma wore the proud title of "Egg Basket of the World" -- back when hundreds of long, low wooden chicken sheds dotted the fertile valley, producing millions of eggs a year that were transported throughout the country.

Among the thousands of chicken farmers who worked that land were several hundred Jewish families -- idealists, socialists, Jews from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and the sweatshops of New York's Lower East Side, young men and women who dreamed of escaping urban poverty and mixing their labor with
the soil of the earth.

"The word went out there was a chicken community here in Petaluma,where Jews could make a living," says Nitzberg, who moved there from Los Angeles with his mother in 1925. "So we all got together."