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Many of the founders of the United States believed in a God. But, their beliefs were unconventional––they didn't necessarily belong to a religious community or follow the ideas of traditional theology. Why? What did these people think about God and religion? Why did their beliefs go against the grain? And, do these ideas even matter today? Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Payne are some of the most well-known American founders. Each of these individuals also held very strong religious views––views which intimately impacted their understanding of politics and American independence. This set of lectures will examine each of these individuals in order to unearth their religious views and thus grow closer to an understanding of the founders of this country.

Jason Hensley, PhD (Holocaust and Genocide Studies), Dmin (Biblical Studies), teaches religious studies at a private school in Los Angeles. He is a fellow of the Michael LaPrade Holocaust Education Institute of the Anti-Defamation League, a higher-education ambassador for the Council on Foreign Relations, and the award-winning author of 12 books. His work has been featured in The Huffington Post as well as the BBC, and he has served as the historical advisor for a Holocaust documentary. Connect with him at jasonhensley.net.

The Fifty and Better (FAB) program was designed for people 50 years of age and older, seeking intellectual stimulation through university-level courses — without the pressure of grades — for the sake of learning and social engagement.

This lecture can be attended either virtually on Zoom or in-person at Cal Lutheran's Thousand Oaks campus. It will also be recorded.

Sharon Boorstin traveled to California Gold Country to research an article for the Los Angeles Times. She discovered more fascinating stories than could fit into 1500 words. Join Sharon for a virtual tour of California Highway 49, in the rolling Sierra Nevada foothills east of Sacramento. Stops include Sutter’s Fort, where gold was first discovered in 1848; and a dozen historic Gold Rush towns including Columbia, Angel’s Camp, Grass Valley, and Nevada City. See where prospectors partied when they struck it rich, and drowned their sorrows when they didn’t — and what visitors can enjoy there today.

Sharon Boorstin is a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times, specializing in lifestyle, food and travel. In 2019 she won Visit California’s Eureka Award for Best Newspaper Travel Article. In the 1970s and ‘80s Sharon was the Restaurant Critic of the (late) Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and in the ‘90s she edited the annual Gayot Guidebooks for Los Angeles and other cities. She also wrote for magazines including Bon Appetit, Smithsonian and Town & Country Travel. With her husband Paul, she wrote dozens of screenplays for feature films and television including Angel of Death (ABC) starring Jane Seymour. Her memoir/cookbook, “Let Us Eat Cake: Adventures in Food and Friendship” (Harper-Collins 2002), was a selection of the Pulpwood Queens Book Club. Raised in Seattle, Washington, Sharon moved to Los Angeles in 1966 after earning a California Lifetime Teaching credential at U.C. Berkeley. She taught high-school History, English and Social Studies in L.A. for 11 years.

The Fifty and Better (FAB) program was designed for people 50 years of age and older, seeking intellectual stimulation through university-level courses — without the pressure of grades — for the sake of learning and social engagement.

This lecture can be attended on Zoom and will be recorded.

No other cemetery can match the location, or the natural beauty of the Santa Barbara Cemetery--truly the last best place.

Join David Petry, historian and author of "The Best Last Place: A History of the Santa Barbara Cemetery", for a guided tour of the historic resting place that has evolved dramatically since its origins.

The Santa Barbara Cemetery started out as a small town cemetery of just five acres on the edge of town. Lot-owners did what they pleased with their lots. Then two men, Lafayette Young and Captain Charles P. Low, were elected to the cemetery board, and history changed course.

The Santa Barbara Cemetery is one of the few historic cemeteries that has successfully changed over time by repeatedly transforming grounds, policies, and staff. Today, the Santa Barbara Cemetery is a gem among cemeteries, chosen as a final resting place by many individuals who have never lived in Santa Barbara. No other cemetery can match the location, or the natural beauty of the Santa Barbara Cemetery--truly the last best place. By David Petry. 2006 Olympus Press.

The Woolsey Fire in 2018 remains the largest wildfire in the history of the Santa Monica Mountains by acreage. The National Park Service, the Santa Monica Mountains Fund, partner agencies, and NPS volunteers have collaborated to study and investigate the fire's impacts and long-lasting effects on the ecosystem and its inhabitants. With the use of wildlife camera traps, biologists have gained a better sense of what lives, breathes, and zooms through the Santa Monica Mountains and nearby mountain ranges. The first part of the lecture will highlight the scope of this research, how researchers capture these wildlife images, and get insight on the massive collaborative effort driven by park staff, partner agencies, and volunteers to maintain this project. The second part of the lecture will highlight select images from the research data including images of wildlife behavior rarely seen in-person, photos of collared animals, and site comparisons over the years.

Miroslava Munguia Ramos is the Woolsey Fire Recovery Project lead with the Santa Monica Mountains Fund, the official non-profit partner of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. She has worked under the Interpretation, Education, and Volunteer division of the National Park Service to provide public programming, school field trips, and engaging volunteer experiences for park visitors. She began her Santa Monica Mountains Fund career as a program supervisor for college-aged interns about exploring careers in public land management. Now collaborating with the Wildlife division, she works regularly with volunteers and citizen/community scientists to showcase some of the park's research and help make it more accessible to the public.

Munguia Ramos received her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Davis with a major in Environmental Science and Management and a minor in Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology. She has recruited and led citizen/community scientists for years across California to study the state's biodiversity using molecular-based research including environmental DNA and crowd-sourced platforms like iNaturalist.

The Fifty and Better (FAB) program was designed for people 50 years of age and older, seeking intellectual stimulation through university-level courses — without the pressure of grades — for the sake of learning and social engagement.

This lecture can be attended on Zoom and will be recorded.

“Brilliant performances!” The Tolucan Times. “Brilliant portrayals…you will be just as captivated as I was!” broadwayworld.com. “Just plain brilliant!” playwright/performer Wendy Michaels.

This joyous and poignant musical, back for a limited engagement after a three-year sell-out run, follows the life of the beloved Yiddish story-teller as he spins tales of his loves and losses, his fame and failures, his travels, travails and the tremendous optimism that kept him going against all odds. Based on his letters and tales, the controversy surrounding his stories and plays, and his passionate quest to honor the universality of the human spirit and celebrate our common humanity, he reminds us always that we have more in common than in conflict.

“I will never forget my evening with Sholom Aleichem and I thank you for bringing my cousin so beautifully back 'To Life'.” Lillian Aderman Moller

Playing to sold-out houses until the day before the lockdown, the delightful musical, back by audience request for a limited run, is written by the internationally acclaimed team of Chris DeCarlo and Evelyn Rudie, with lilting songs by Emery Bernauer, E. Rudie and Sholom Aleichem himself. Audiences are treated to an in-depth look at the joyous and poignant events that inspired the foolish philosophers, philosophical fools, comical shtetl folk and not-so-comical scoundrels that populated Sholom Aleichem's world.

“Chris DeCarlo has become the reincarnation of Sholom Aleichem” LASplash

The musical stars veteran performer Chris DeCarlo, who again assays the role of the beloved author, a characterization which has been enjoyed by more than a quarter of a million audience members, and Evelyn Rudie, who has created and portrayed more than three dozen Sholom Aleichem characters in over 2,000 performances to date.

“Evelyn Rudie is an all-around theatrical wizard!” Casting Call

Aleichem Sholom is presented by the Santa Monica Playhouse Jewish Heritage Project, supporting productions that keep the unique richness of Jewish theatre alive, honor the historical and cultural importance of Jewish heritage, and insure that new generations of theatre-goers appreciate and celebrate the life experience of Jewish ancestry, literature and tradition.

“ ‘Sholom Aleichem’ means ‘Hello, peace be with you.’ For Santa Monica Playhouse it means ‘richness in Jewish theatre for the community to enjoy.’ ” The Messenger

Santa Monica Playhouse is supported in part by grants from the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, We Are Santa Monica, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Rotary Club Foundation and Playhouse PALS.

Camerata Pacifica, the international chamber music collective renowned for its musical versatility and bold programming, traverses a range of groundbreaking music from the 20th century and the dawn of the era, including three works for solo instrument, October 25-30, 2024, at four Southern California venues.

The performances are Friday, October 25, 7:00 pm, at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West; Sunday, October 27, 3:00 pm, at Thousand Oaks’ Janet and Ray Scherr Forum; Tuesday, October 29, 7:30 pm, at The Huntington’s Rothenberg Hall in San Marino; and Thursday, October 30, 8:00 pm, at Zipper Hall in Downtown Los Angeles.

The program opens with Sooyun Kim, “a rare virtuoso of the flute” (Libération) performing Kazuo Fukushima’s mysterious Mei for Solo Flute written in 1962 by the self-taught Japanese composer.

Shifting back in time to 1896, Rachmaninoff’s Moments musicaux, Op. 16, a set of deeply expressive solo piano pieces, showcases celebrated Principal Piano Irina Zahharenkova, heralded for her “impressive…musical colour” (Bachtrack).

The final solo work, Stravinsky’s 1918 jazz- and ragtime-inspired tour-de-force Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet, is interpreted by Camerata Pacifica Principal Clarinet Jose Franch-Ballester, a captivating performer of “poetic eloquence” (The New York Sun).

Schoenberg’s 1906 landmark Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9, arranged by his student Anton Webern between 1922 and 1923, caps the program with the three solo artists joined by Alena Hove, a rising violinist applauded for her “rich, smooth tone” (CityArts), and Principal Cellist Ani Aznavoorian, whose “scorchingly committed performances…wring every last drop of emotion out of the music” (The Strad).

For tickets ($75 at The Huntington, Music Academy of the West, and Zipper Hall; $91 at Janet and Ray Scherr Forum) and information, visit www.cameratapacifica.org.

UC Santa Barbara Library invites you to the opening reception of Readymade Emanations: Trianon Press and the Art of Tearing Apart, an exhibition examining the legacy of Trianon Press, a 20th century fine art publisher based in Paris founded by visionary Arnold Fawcus.

Working with talented artisans, Trianon Press perfected a painstaking technique of reproducing original artwork by building many hand-stenciled layers upon a photographic collotype. Among the most notable achievements of Trianon Press were the publication, in partnership with the William Blake Trust, of a series of facsimiles of the works of William Blake, as well as renewal of interest in the work of Marcel Duchamp via the grand-deluxe edition of his catalogue raisonné, "Eau et gaz à tous les étages." This exhibition invites viewers to consider the relationship between reproduction and illumination.

The Trianon Press Collection, generously donated by Dean & Kim Pananides, is one of the newest additions to the UC Santa Barbara Library’s Special Research Collections.

Delve into the raw and humorous exploration of mental health with “The Funny Thing About A Panic Attack,” a solo show by the award-winning writer Ben Kassoy.

“The Funny Thing About A Panic Attack” brings to life poems from Ben Kassoy’s critically acclaimed book, using physical theater, dance, and traditional poetry readings to explore the intricate connections between mental health, art, and personal experiences. The show is a genre-defying blend of humor, heart, and defiant wonder in the face of anxiety, making it a compelling and relatable experience for audiences.

Reserve your limited free Regular Admission now or $25 at the door.