Song Of The Yiddish Cowboy Bulbes" ["Potatoes on Sunday"]; revolutionary, heroic songs, like the "Partisaner Lid." He doesn't sing them all the time — about half his SUE FISHKOFF repertoire is traditional country-western stuff— but it's The Jerusalem Post still mighty strange to hear such songs come out of an American cowboy's mouth. here aren't too many real cowboys left in Scott Gerber is a Jewish cowboy, not only that, but a California. Wine grapes have squeezed out a dyed-in-the-wool, Yiddish-speaking cowboy, the third lot of the old ranching land, and the open generation of his family to work the land, a self- range has given way to huge corporate cattle farms, described member of the agricultural working class in a with animals in pens rather than running free across country where Jews have no historic ties to farming or the plains. ranching. He's a real anomaly. That makes 45-year-old Scott Gerber part of a dying "There's not a lot of Jewish cowboys that I know of," breed — a real ranch hand who works the land and he said. 'As far as anyone of my generation, I think I'm runs cattle for "the boss man" up in the only one. Petaluma, a rural town barely an Gerber is the subject of Song of the hour's drive north of San Francisco. Jewish Cowboy, an 18-minute docu- Gerber lives in a ramshackle rented mentary by Berkeley filmmaker cabin on his employer's ranch, sleeps Bonnie Burt that debuted in fall 2002 on a mattress on the floor, has a horse, at the San Francisco Jewish Film three dogs and a couple of chickens Festival. out in the yard and works for wages. It has since been traveling the North He wears faded jeans, a work shirt, American Jewish film festival circuit, muddy boots and a white cowboy hat. along with A Home on the Range: The He's got a moustache and speaks in Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma, a the slow, Western drawl of a 1950s full-length documentary by Burt and oaten her partner Judith Montell that tells And — it's almost too good to be the story of a unique, left-wing Jewish true — he sings and plays guitar, farming community that used to sometimes even around a campfire to inhabit this part of northern entertain other cowboys. But — and California. here the stereotype ends — he sings Burt ran into Gerber a couple of those songs in Yiddish: old Labor years ago while she was filming A Scott Gerber: feel really Zionist songs, like "Dona, Dona"; Home on the Range. She included him proud that In2 working the songs from the shtetl, like "Zuntig in that movie, but found his personal land as a Jew. story so fascinating that she decided to make a com- panion piece just about Gerber. Making a historical documentary is one thing, but it's not often you run into a living, breathing, 45-year- old Yiddish-speaking Jewish cowboy," said Burt. "I kept wanting to include more and more of him in the first film. Gerber was born in Petaluma in 1958, at the tail end of a short-lived chicken-farming experiment in cooper- ative agricultural living. While their brothers and sisters were draining the swamps of the Galilee, several hun- dred ideologically motivated East European Jews left the sweatshops of New York and Chicago in the early years of the last century to "return to the land." They moved west to Petaluma, a chicken-ranching town already known as "the egg basket of the world," and went into the same business, maintaining their own Jewish, politically left-wing community side-by- side (though not always compatibly) with the non- Jewish, much more conservative, small-town native farmers and ranchers. In the 1930s, Gerber's Ukrainia4i-born great- uncles Sol and Al came to Petaluma from Chicago to start up their own chicken ranches. "Even in the Old Country, Sol raised calves and chickens and ducks," said Gerber. "He was a little guy who used to drive a horse and wagon. He loved agri- culture. He inspired me a lot." Gerber's parents also dabbled in the chicken business, but gave it up when he was a baby, moving about nine miles away to raise geese instead. But Sol and Al's chicken ranches lasted until Gerber was in his teens, and he learned from them a love of the land and a commitment to working with animals. He also learned their political line — a strictly left- wing one. "On my dad's side, they were all good union men, but my mother's YIDDISH COWBOY on page 42 of the classroom. "The classroom process of learning about religion was interesting, but it wasn't really what I was excited about," he recalled. "I [wanted to] learn how people practice and why people practice." Now 29, Levinson — a second- year law student at the University of Chicago — has a new book out, All Buddhists, Muslims, neo-pagans, witches, Native Americans and practitioners of voodoo and Transcendental Meditation. The road-trip concept was central to his plan because of the economy of driving as well as the fanciful, Jack Kerouac- esque notion of travel- ing the open road. "There was a roman- tic idea of the road trip," said Levinson. "In Author Tom Levinson America, we love the idea of getting up and going, getting up and driving — Lech rcha (go). " Some of Levinson's interviews were planned; others were spontaneous. The first stop along his journey was a halal .(set of dietary restrictions for Muslims) market in Dayton, Ohio. He hadn't sought the market out, but had simply spotted the Arabic writing on the storefront. The discovery seemed almost providential to Levinson. There, he met an Iraqi named Hayder Almosawi, who ARE You THERE on page 42 Cattle and mameloshen in California. T " " Are You There, God? Author searches for the Almighty in America. CINDY SHER JUF News G rowing up on the East Side of Manhattan, Tom Levinson knew the guy who ran his neighborhood deli better than he knew his own rabbi. Sure, Levinson celebrated his bar mitzvah because it was the thing to do, but he knew very little about Judaism. A history of religion class during his senior year in high school, though, piqued his curiosity and altered the course of his future. The class interested him so much that he became a religion major during college. Though Levinson was fascinated by all religions, including Islam, Christianity and Buddhism, he found he wanted to delve deeper into Judaism. So much so that this "doubting Thomas," as he labeled his childhood self, even considered becoming a rabbi. Instead, he opted to attend Harvard Divinity School to learn more about other faiths as well as his own. But Levinson yearned to take his learning outside That's Holy: A Young Guy, An Old Cai; and the Search for God in America (Jossey-Bass; $23.95). It's the story of Levinson's three-month road trip, when he drove his beat-up old Nissan around the country looking for conversations with people about faith. On his journey — to Levinson's surprise — he discovered his own. His trip took place in the summer and fall of 1999. The world picture was rosier then: The economy was still robust; it was pre-9/11; carnage in Israel and the "new anti-Semitism" had yet to poison the atmos- phere; and the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church hadn't yet been revealed. Age 25 and living in Boston at the time, Levinson traveled the country, going from mosque to chapel to synagogue, conversing with the faithful, seeking to understand their beliefs. Along the way — in big cities and small towns — he met Christians, Jews, Am 1/2 2004 41