The Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma: Why Remember?

What happened to the rich community and culture of the Jewish immigrants who founded the Petaluma chicken ranching community in the early 1900s: their idealistic commitment to agrarian life, their intense shtetl-like community, their fervent socialist and nationalist ideologies, and their rich Yiddish and Hebrew cultural life? How does this story of immigration and assimilation reveal our values and tensions about Jewish life in America today? Twenty years after the publication of his unique work of oral history, Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, Kenneth Kann examines what has been lost and what remains of this rich heritage in the generations that followed.