JAI Featured Member/February 2026

Shelley Gazin

JAI Featured Member

Shelley Gazin

February 2026

JAI Featured Member

Shelley Gazin

February 2026

Around the turn of the Millennium, I elicited a conversation with Rabbi Laura Geller. We met in a small chapel at Temple Emanual in Beverly Hills. She was seated on a wooden bench and I thought she looked like someone I might have gone to high school with in the ’60s. But she was Senior Rabbi at the biggest congregation West of the Rockies. She addressed me as an Artist. She said, in effect: “Maybe someone put a mezuzah on your door …and you didn’t realize being an artist would open a Jewish door for you.” It was a moment of affirmation, given my decades as a working pro with cameras too heavy for my small frame. a photojournalist, gratified to see my name on the editorial pages at newsstands, dedicated to black and white film and producing social landscape, portraiture, feature news stories; seeing my by-line always produced a hit of dopamine.

But I’d abandoned painting, writing, drawing, sculpting, traveling, my post-grad video thesis; all the practices I loved before I became an adult and needed to make a living. So, after returning from Paris in1979, I took a sample of my L.A.-based images, just published in Paris, to the L.A. Times Picture Editor and my freelance career making pictures had begun. But in the coming years, the question remained: where had the Artist in me gone? Never comfortable introducing myself as a “photographer,” but not yet deserving the moniker of Artist, I was caught in a liminal frame of mind. So, herewith, a belated Thank You to Chabad Rabbi Cunin, for believing that there are places where inclusion doesn’t require a label.

Shelley
shelleygazin.com

Around the turn of the Millennium, I elicited a conversation with Rabbi Laura Geller. We met in a small chapel at Temple Emanual in Beverly Hills. She was seated on a wooden bench and I thought she looked like someone I might have gone to high school with in the ’60s. But she was Senior Rabbi at the biggest congregation West of the Rockies. She addressed me as an Artist. She said, in effect: “Maybe someone put a mezuzah on your door …and you didn’t realize being an artist would open a Jewish door for you.” It was a moment of affirmation, given my decades as a working pro with cameras too heavy for my small frame. a photojournalist, gratified to see my name on the editorial pages at newsstands, dedicated to black and white film and producing social landscape, portraiture, feature news stories; seeing my by-line always produced a hit of dopamine.

But I’d abandoned painting, writing, drawing, sculpting, traveling, my post-grad video thesis; all the practices I loved before I became an adult and needed to make a living. So, after returning from Paris in1979, I took a sample of my L.A.-based images, just published in Paris, to the L.A. Times Picture Editor and my freelance career making pictures had begun. But in the coming years, the question remained: where had the Artist in me gone? Never comfortable introducing myself as a “photographer,” but not yet deserving the moniker of Artist, I was caught in a liminal frame of mind. So, herewith, a belated Thank You to Chabad Rabbi Cunin, for believing that there are places where inclusion doesn’t require a label.

Shelley
shelleygazin.com

Selections from: Paris

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Selections from: Paris

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Paris, 2004
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Praesent luptatum zzril delenit
©2026 Gazin Archive, All Rights Reserved

My 1978-79 photographs of the Rue des Rosiers depict a life retreating into the shadows of buildings that are being transformed by Paris’ younger generations and commercial enterprise. The landmarks remain and overall, the French Jewish demographic is significant in spite of escalating emigration to Israel in recent years; the promotion of that emigration appears throughout the photographic essay in the form of posters or graffiti wherever wall space would allow. So there is the question of what became of those Jewish faces I photographed over a generation ago? The women who came to the old synagogue in their finery; the children who played among the antique stores; the blind woman, the neighborhood gendarme? Jo Goldenberg’s deli is still on its corner. The new Jewish Museum is close by. But the once distinctively insular street life has changed; now threatened by a variety of boutiques beckoning tourists.

My Conversations with the Rabbis – A Study in Pluralism

Excerpted from Looking for a Rabbi ©SGAZIN. All Rights Reserved.

Rabbi Shlomo Cunin
………..

“Here, we have no labels… Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Hasidic, bananas, pears. apples, whatever else it may be… we don’t even ask if you’re Jewish…”

Rabbi David Wolpe
………..

“…I’m trying to investigate what sort of prayer and study, knowledge and faith will help people who are going to live in an unprecedented world… I think that Judaism will have to be, in some sense reinvented.”

Rabbi Judith Halevy
………..

“We use the shofar to end exile and it’s such a primitive sound… it’s a primal scream. The real cry of the shofar is “What do I really long for?’ It’s like a collective howl…”

Rabbi Donald Goor
………..

“How do you choose life out of what is set before you?… You’re an artist. It’s a blessing and a curse.”

Rabbi Jonathon Omer-man
………..

“I’d like to be able to move the mainstream a few inches… to make it a place in which Jews of a contemplative disposition can feel safe…”

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-feller
………..

“l no longer wanted to work with Jews who fit into any one box…”

Rabbi Yitzhak Adlerstein
………..

“…a good rebbe is no yes-man…”

[W.K.] William Kramer
………..

“…I’m no spiritual goody, goody two shoes… personally, I am not in regular contact with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob… but to have a great moment where what you do sets in motion great moments for other lives, and it’s creative, and no longer depends on you after you’ve freed it… that’s somethin’…”

Rabbi Mika M. Weiss [1913~2002]
………..

“…To the next generation I would say ‘Be a mensch; a decent, nice human being don’t leave Judaism… You can never leave it… the Jewish dot will remain in your heart”

Selections from: Celebrities

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Selections from: Celebrities

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Joni Mitchell
Musician, Vocalist, Artist
Photographed for Rainforest Action Network
©2026 Gazin Archive, All Rights Reserved

John Cassavetes
Filmmaker, Director, Actor
Photographed for Calendar, Los Angeles Times
©2026 Gazin Archive, All Rights Reserved

Email  |  Website