"Something of his Own Soil": Jewish History, Mural Painting, and Bernard Zakheim in San Francisco

Abstract

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to support artists struggling to make a living during the Great Depression, arts administrators in San Francisco received funding for a major mural project in which Jewish artist Bernard Zakheim (1896-1985) would participate. Zakheim was one of approximately twenty-five artists commissioned to paint the interior of Coit Tower, the large monument constructed atop Telegraph Hill in 1932.-33 with funds bequeathed to the city by Lillie Hitchcock Coit. These murals have traditionally been viewed in the context of San Francisco labor relations during the early 1930s. All during the spring of 1934, while the muralists were painting, unemployed longshoremen and their union were threatening to strike, and by early summer they had brought waterfront commerce to a grinding halt. Several of the murals in Coit Tower contain references to labor, the union, and far-left political ideals, and San Francisco newspaper writers and later scholars have carefully focused on these details in their discussions of the works. What has not been previously recognized is the ethnic content, specifically the Jewish content, that is also apparent in the mural cycle because of Zakheim's participation.2 Zakheim's contribution to the Coit Tower project (figure 1), a representation of the main reading room in a public library, played a key role in the controversy over political imagery, especially after the editors of the San Francisco Examiner took the hammer and sickle—the symbol of the Communist Party—from another artist's mural in the tower and placed it above a reproduction of Zakheim's painting. The doctored