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Contemporary Jewish Museum

Courtesy of Tiffany Shlain

Offline: Stories about Technology and Shabbat

CANCELLED

ADMISSION: $6 Members; $16 general (includes Museum admission).

Imagine a day without a smartphone—when time slows down and miraculous, unexpected moments unfold. Acclaimed filmmaker Tiffany Shlain gathers a group of storytellers for a boisterous night of tales and confessions about wrestling with screen addictions, including some strategies (like no screens for Shabbat) to mindfully co-exist with technology in our 24/7 world. Tiffany Shlain, artist and professor Ken Goldberg, Rabbi Sydney Mintz, Adam Mansbach, Kimberly Ellis, and Dave Pell will share their adventures and mishaps as they try to disconnect for Shabbat.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Named the most powerful, unelected person in California Democratic politics by the Sacramento Bee, Kimberly Ellis is the former Executive Director of Emerge California, the state’s most effective training program for Democratic women who run for office, and is a nationally recognized Progressive leader who has been credited with revolutionizing Democratic politics in California. After running for Chair of the California Democratic Party in 2019 and 2017 where she inspired thousands, last summer Ellis founded and launched Unbought-Unbossed (UnB2), an incubator for the next generation of political disruptors.

Ken Goldberg is an artist, inventor, and professor of engineering at University California, Berkeley, where he and his students persist in trying to make robots less clumsy, despite agonizingly slow progress.

Goldberg co-authored the essay, "Did Einstein predict the secret of the Cherubim?" with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie and "The First Pair of Tongs: A Paradox for Rabbis and Robots" with Rabbi Adam Naftalin-Kelman. His artwork has been exhibited in seventy locations, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Ken co-created “Smashing” and "The Whole Magilla" and co-wrote The Tribe with his favorite collaborator, Tiffany Shlain.

Adam Mansbach is a Berkeley-based novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic, and humorist. He is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep, which has been translated into forty languages, named Time Magazine's 2011 "Thing of the Year," and sold over two million copies worldwide. The 2014 sequel, You Have to Fucking Eat, is also a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author, with Alan Zwiebel and Dave Barry, A Field Guide to the Jewish People: Who They Are, Where They Come From, What to Feed Them…and Much More. Maybe Too Much More (2019) and For This We Left Eygpt?: A Passover Haggadah for Jews and Those Who Love Them (2017). His novel The End of the Jews (2008) won the California Book Award.

Rabbi Sydney Mintz was ordained in 1997 by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. She is the founder of the award winning Late Shabbat Young Adult Program at Congregation Emanu-El where she has served as Rabbi since her ordination in 1997. She became a Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem after completing her fellowship in 2004.

Rabbi Mintz currently serves on the National Board of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice and as a Rabbinic Scholar for American Jewish World Service. She is a graduate of Bend the Arc’s Selah Leadership Program and is a member of the US State Department’s Working Group on Religion and Social Justice. She led Team Emanu-El in the AIDS Lifecycle Ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles and is an avid open ocean swimmer. In 2016, Rabbi Mintz became a Resident in the San Francisco Film Society’s Film House Residency program.

Dave Pell writes for NextDraft, a daily look at the the day’s most fascinating news and a way for him to check in with his Jewish mother to let her know he’s okay. Dave also invests in internet startups so he doesn’t have to tell his Jewish father that he writes a blog as a career.

Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, an author, and the founder of The Webby Awards. Selected by the Albert Einstein Foundation to be part of the initiative Genius: 100 Visions of the Future, Tiffany’s films (including The Tribe and Making of a Mensch) and other work have received over eighty awards and distinctions, and several of her films have premiered at The Sundance Film Festival. Her new book 24/6: The Power of Unplugging one Day a Week (Simon & Schuster, 2019) examines a family’s decade-long ritual of turning off screens one day each week for what they call their “Technology Shabbats.”

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ACCESSIBILITY

The CJM strives for a welcoming environment for all of our visitors. In addition to ample space for wheelchairs and a friendly environment for service animals, sign language interpretation (ASL) can be scheduled for all programs with at least two weeks notice.

FM assistive listening devices (ALDs) for sound enhancement are available for all talks and tours. Please note that we would like to maintain this as a scent-free environment, and encourage visitors to refrain from using scented products out of respect for visitors with allergies or chemical sensitivities. For additional accommodation requests, please contact The CJM’s Access and Community Engagement Manager at access@thecjm.org or 415.655.7856.

Accessibility Info