Adventurous Jews fleeing prejudice and pogroms, the idealistic group who settled rural Northern California to start chicken ranches had hopes of creating a utopian socialist society. A Home on the Range: The Jewish Chicken Farmers of Petaluma tells the unique story of people who started a new kibbutz-like lifestyle for themselves in America, splitting their time between hard outdoor labor and a vibrant social and intellectual life in the Community Hall.

“Who said Jews couldn’t be farmers? Spittin’ as I, who would harm us?” drawls Scott Gerber, a former resident of Petaluma, belting out the lyrics while strumming his guitar. Today, the chicken ranchers have gone, but Gerber hasn’t abandoned his Jewish culture, or the land, and works as a cowboy, singing Yiddish folk songs.

United by their culture, the Jews of Petaluma cared for one another as extended family and survived both the anti-Semitism of pre-WWII America, and its later anti-Communist sentiments in the McCarthy era. A Home on the Range combines old photographs with incredibly-rare archival color footage of Petaluma that brings the charming town to life. These visuals, along with interviews of former residents, reconstruct an idealistic society that put in a hard day’s work collecting and cleaning eggs, then spent its evenings enjoying lectures given by top-notch Jewish poets and philosophers at the Community Hall. But with time and assimilation the quirky community dwindled, and today, their chicken ranches have been replaced by telecommunication companies and scattered dairy farms and vineyards.

For many of the Jews in Petaluma, Judaism was more of a culture than a religion. It meant they spoke Yiddish, ate matzah, and wanted to form a kibbutz, but it had nothing to do with God or faith. In fact, when they were building their meeting hall it was almost unanimously decided to not build a synagogue — until they learned it could be a tax write-off.

But most of all, their Jewish heritage meant they were outsiders to American society. Second-class citizens, they were harassed and kept from much of white America’s exclusive environs.

They had fled pogroms in Russia and anti-Semitism in urban America in order to live in a rural Jewish community, but still they faced anti-Semitism from their surrounding neighbors. “They used to call us dirty Jew,” recalls one woman in the film. Repeated episodes of anti-Semitic violence kept the Jewish community in fear, and one particularly brutal night that saw beatings of many of the Jewish men in Petaluma calls to mind the very pogroms that they thought they had left behind.

Strangely, it wasn’t prejudice that destroyed the Petaluma Jewish community, but acceptance. Once Jewish Americans were no longer as discriminated against, they assimilated into American society and the vibrant community of chicken ranchers in Petaluma dwindled. One former resident who grew up on a ranch and raised her children on a ranch expresses her mixed feelings about assimilation. She pines that she lost “the core” sense of attachment but, in exchange, “we were accepted in as Americans.”