"Honoring Our Queer Elders" Exhibit from the University of San Francisco’s Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice
SAN FRANCISCO (October 1, 2025) – Timed with the first day of LGBTQIA+ History Month, on October 1, the University of San Francisco’s Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice is officially launching “Honoring Our Queer Elders”, the newest online digital exhibit of their Jewish history resource website Mapping Jewish San Francisco.
“Honoring Our Queer Elders” is a curated exhibition of legacy videos comprised of oral histories from a diverse group of LGBTQIA+ elders living in the Bay Area. Each video, distilled from about 12 hours of total footage, consists of in-depth interviews conducted by USF undergraduate students who were enrolled in a groundbreaking community engaged learning Jewish studies course taught by the first Rabbi-in-Residence in school history, Camille Shira Angel.
These autobiographical, narrative-based interviews are a reservoir of information, wisdom, and encouragement for students and leaders, historians and activists. As these elders have been in San Francisco for decades, they are living sources of invaluable history. They contain irreplaceable insight into many of the profound experiences that shaped the queer nexus that San Francisco has become over the last half century.
About Mapping Jewish SF
Mapping Jewish San Francisco is a digital humanities project of USF’s Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice. The project takes a collaborative approach to examining the complex history and unique religious, cultural, and political identity of Jewish San Francisco. Top scholars and experts—including university faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and community leaders—are contributing exhibitions to tell stories of the Jewish individuals and institutions that have shaped and are shaping the San Francisco Bay Area. Along with our partners, including other academic institutions, libraries, archives, and leading Jewish organizations, Mapping Jewish San Francisco aims to bring the past to life, making it possible to travel back in time to visually explore the rich Jewish history of the Bay Area.
Previous Mapping Jewish SF exhibitions include: "Out of Egypt: The Karaite Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area,” by Aaron J. Hahn Tapper, explores the history of Karaite Jews in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is both a classic American tale of refugees fleeing persecution and the story of a unique contemporary Jewish American community. This exhibition tells the extraordinary story of how, first arriving in the 1950s, this minority within a minority has survived against great odds, re-establishing a robust religious, spiritual, and cultural life in the Bay Area, including the only Karaite synagogue in the Western Hemisphere.
“The House of Love and Prayer: A Radical Jewish Experiment in San Francisco,” by Oren Kroll-Zeldin, documents the radical experiment of a synagogue and religious commune during the counter-cultural revolution in 1960s San Francisco. An historical ethnography of The House of Love and Prayer, this digital humanities project inquires into the new Jewish identities and rituals that emerged from the intersection of traditional Hasidic Judaism and the “free spirit” of the Hippie subculture.
Upcoming exhibition:
“From Shanghai to San Francisco: The Shoah, China, and Jewish Refugees,” by Alexis Herr.
About the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice
In 1977, USF established the first endowed Jewish Studies program at a Catholic school worldwide. In 2008, the program broke ground once again, becoming the world’s first academic program to formally link Jewish Studies with Social Justice. Including a minor in this leading edge field, in the classroom the program offers over 50 significant Jewish studies courses not found in other educational settings, as well the country’s longest lasting annual intensive Hebrew summer language program. “Beyond the classroom,” the program offers up to ten extraordinary events annually that are free and open to the public.
About the University of San Francisco
The University of San Francisco is a private, Jesuit Catholic university that reflects the diversity, optimism, and opportunities of the city that surrounds it. USF offers more than 230 undergraduate, graduate, professional, and certificate programs in the arts and sciences, business, law, education, and nursing and health professions. At USF, each course is an intimate learning community in which top professors encourage students to turn learning into positive action, so the students graduate equipped to do well in the world — and inspired to change it for the better. For more information, visit usfca.edu.
