Common Ground: An Evening of Pride and Connection at the Skirball

Common Ground: An Evening of Pride and Connection at the Skirball

All Families. Every Day.
At Hillside, we believe that Jewish tradition is not a fixed point in history. It is a living practice, one that has always grown to meet the people it serves. We call this commitment Traditions for a New Generation: the understanding that our sacred values become stronger, not weaker, when they expand to hold more people. And we hold alongside it the principle of Tikkun Olam, the obligation to repair the world through acts of justice, inclusion, and love.

Those values are why, on Tuesday, June 2, Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary was honored to sponsor the Skirball Cultural Center's Common Ground Dinner: Pride. The evening brought together a shared meal, a candid conversation, and a set of jokes that needed telling, all built around the kind of table where strangers end up talking like old friends. Families of every shape and form were in that room, and that is exactly where Hillside belongs.

The Story Behind the Table
The dinner takes its name, and its tableware, from *Common Ground*, an installation by Los Angeles artist Adam Silverman. Silverman gathered clay, water, and wood ash from all fifty states, Washington DC, and the five inhabited US territories, then combined them into 224 ceramic objects: plates, bowls, cups, and ceremonial pots. The piece was built to celebrate American pluralism and bring people into closer contact with each other through shared meals. Eating off that tableware gave the evening a literal foundation, soil from across the country, set at every place, under every plate of food.

Rebeka Small: A Conversation That Mattered

Rebeka Small, a synagogue professional and mother in Los Angeles, hosted a conversation that was vital in this moment. Small has worked in the Jewish community since 2011, focused on creating safe spaces for people exploring Sinai Temple, and she spoke about parenting a transgender child in plain, specific terms: what it actually looks like, day to day, to support your kid exactly as they are. That honesty gave the conversation its weight.

Raye Schiller: The Comedy the Room Needed

Raye Schiller closed out the night, and the room needed the release. Schiller is a queer comedian who grew up Orthodox, has been featured in The New York Times, headlined the NY Comedy Festival, and hosts the comedy podcast *Yenta!* The set was irreverent, illuminating, and totally necessary, the kind of material that gets a room full of strangers laughing at the exact same thing at the exact same moment.

The Meal

Between the conversation and the comedy, the food kept coming: phyllo triangles and mini potato latkes to start, matzo ball soup with greens and sweet potatoes, then a buffet of spiced lentils and rice, roasted seasonal vegetables, baharat marinated chicken thighs, and pomegranate honey roasted salmon. Olive oil cake closed out the meal. It was the kind of spread that asks you to slow down and talk to the person next to you, which is exactly the point of a dinner like this.

Pride Is Not a Month. It Is a Practice.

As June draws to a close, we want to be clear about something: our commitment to LGBTQ+ families does not close with the calendar. Pride is not a month. It is a daily act of recognition, an ongoing choice to see every family, hold space for every story, and build community that leaves no one standing outside of it.

That is what Tikkun Olam asks of us. That is what Traditions for a New Generation looks like in practice. The work of repairing the world is not seasonal work. It happens at shared tables, in candid conversations, in the quiet daily effort to love the people in our lives exactly as they are.

We are grateful to the Skirball Cultural Center and JQ International for creating an evening that embodied all of this. And we are grateful to every family who showed up to that table. You reminded us why this work matters, and why it never stops.