Paul Bernstein

Paul Arthur Bernstein, a longtime resident of the East Bay, died on March 10, 2026, after a nine-month battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 76 years old.

Paul was born on April 9, 1949, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. He attended the University of Maryland for two years before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where he got his first taste of the political revolutionary spirit that would propel him through the rest of his life. He later graduated from the Columbia University School of Nursing in 1984.

After receiving his undergraduate degree in 1971, Paul moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for Vocations for Social Change, an organization that helped local residents find jobs in the fields of social impact and advocacy. Later, he worked for Inkworks Press, a radical, worker-owned printing collective founded in Berkeley in 1974 that printed posters, flyers, and publications for progressive social movements rooted both in the Bay Area and around the world. He met many of his lifelong friends there.

He remained deeply committed and active in the East Bay political scene throughout the 1970s. He notably participated in the 1974 occupation of the Chilean naval ship Esmeralda when it docked in San Francisco, drawing attention to human rights abuses under the Pinochet dictatorship.

Paul’s anti-establishment spirit ran so deep that he was even expelled from a local Marxist-Leninist group for questioning top-down leadership decision-making. Nevertheless, he remained a committed socialist for the entirety of his life.

Inspired by the experience of caring for a sick friend, in 1981 he changed course and moved to New York to attend Columbia University School of Nursing. At Columbia, he met his former wife and fellow nurse Linda (Kornblau) Arrick and had two children, Emma and Remy, whom they first raised in Oakland before relocating back to the East Coast and settling in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Over the course of his three-decade career as a registered nurse, he worked in home health and hospice care for Kaiser Permanente and specialized in infectious disease control at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital and NewYork Presbyterian / Columbia University Hospital. It proved to be the perfect occupation for someone so devoted to caring for others.

After retiring from nursing in 2015, his interests in social justice and “working in the dirt” set him on a new path as a farmer at the Gill Tract Community Farm in Albany, California. It was there that he earned his famous Farm Dad moniker, as he stepped into a father figure role for many young community members while embodying the farm’s foundational spirit of generosity.

Paul’s contributions to the farm’s operations were enormous, as he led projects as wide-ranging as a new timed irrigation system; weekly working sessions for youth with a variety of developmental challenges; and the implementation of a restorative justice methodology for conflict resolution within the organization. Paul was even once referred to as “the most powerful person at the farm” because everyone would tell him their secrets.

Paul had the exceedingly rare quality of living a life utterly aligned with his morals, as every part of his daily routine was marked by his desire to make the world a better place. He doggedly recycled and composted, followed a vegetarian diet, canvassed for politicians and political movements across several states, and engaged in frequent public demonstrations. His son, Remy, remembers spotting him protesting outside the local grocery store from the bus window on his way home from school; at the age of two months, his daughter, Emma, accompanied him on the picket line for SEIU healthcare workers.

He was endlessly curious about other peoples’ experiences, a quality that allowed him to make connections wherever he went—and he went very far, spending significant time abroad in Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Africa by way of medical missions, WWOOFing, train trips, long hikes, and much more. He loved nature and often biked 50 miles in a single day.

Paul is survived by his beloved partner Cathy Mahoney; his two children, Remy Bernstein (Hally) and Emma Ago (Alex); his three grandchildren, Massimo Ago, Amelia Ago, and Sybil Bernstein; his former wife Linda Arrick; lifelong friends Mike Hickey, Flo Hodes, Matthew Guldin, Grant Davis, and Ted Franklin; members of the Gill Tract Farm community; and countless others throughout the Bay Area.