Bonnie Burt has been documenting Jewish life for 20 years. Her videos have been seen at the Museum of Modern Art and at Lincoln Center in New York as well as in film festivals worldwide and on television. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and son. Her personal Web site can be found at www.bonnieburt.com

"I had heard about the left wing Jewish community of Petaluma even before I moved to California from the east coast. I had been interested in documenting Jewish life for many years so when I moved to the Bay Area in 1985, I visited Petaluma.

In 1992, I met Judy Montell at the Madrid Jewish Film Festival where our films were showing and we realized we had many interests in common. Judy then joined me and we have been working together for many years on this project.

We began to realize that this was not just the story of a unique, rural community but rather it is a larger, more universal, immigrant story. We feel the changes that take place in the three generations in the documentary represent some of the challenges and changes we as Jews are facing of how to maintain a Jewish identity in America.