In the 1930s, Boyle Heights—with its main throughway, Brooklyn Avenue—was home to some 10,000 Jewish households, about a third of the Los Angeles Jewish population and the highest concentration of Jews west of the Mississippi. Jewish community life flourished with dozens of synagogues, charitable institutions, cultural organizations, schools, and community centers, not to mention Jewish-owned bakeries, kosher butcheries, delis, restaurants, and movie theaters. This vibrant Jewish community emerged in a multiethnic context, in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Los Angeles called home by thousands of Mexican, Japanese, Armenian/Turkish, Italian, Russian, and African American families. Using archival materials shared by a variety of museums, libraries, and community partners, this digital exhibition aims to locate Boyle Heights’ Jewish histories within this multiethnic context, revealing both the diversity of Jewish experiences in Boyle Heights and the ways those experiences coincided with, and diverged from, those of the other diasporic communities that settled there.
In the years after World War II, as construction began on a series of freeways and public housing projects in and around the neighborhood, Jewish residents began leaving Boyle Heights en masse. By the 1960s, the neighborhood was home to a Mexican American majority, whose experiences with social and economic marginalization, police violence, and urban renewal were different than those of residents before them. And yet, many patterns of resistance, cultural expression and community organizing endured, taking new and dynamic forms. To celebrate this efflorescence of Chicano/a cultural and political activity, Brooklyn Avenue was renamed Avenida César Chávez (César E. Chávez Avenue) in 1994 and a portion of the street designated as the Brooklyn Avenue Historic Neighborhood Corridor. By bringing the many, overlapping layers of the neighborhood’s past into focus, “Jewish Histories in Multiethnic Boyle Heights” invites users to think critically about how an array of stakeholders—both within the neighborhood and without—have generated and enacted ideas about its religious, social, and cultural identity and how the Jewish community’s relationship to the neighborhood has changed over time.
“100 Years of Sephardic LA” – a collaboration between MJLA and the UCLA Sephardic Archive Initiative.
Originally founded by Jews from Turkey, Greece, Ottoman Palestine, and the Island Rhodes at the turn of the 20th century, L.A.’s Sephardic community today includes native-born Angelenos and immigrants from Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, each with their own traditions, institutions and cultural forms. Los Angeles thereby holds the key to a complex story of Jewish migration and urban diversity, one in which multiple Jewish diasporas met, collided, merged, built communities, and maintained their cultural distinction while nonetheless becoming threads of a larger California fabric. And yet the story of migration, settlement, and civil and cultural life of the diverse community of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jews to and in the City of Angels has yet to be systematically taught, written, or told.
Aiming to reverse these trends, “100 Years of Sephardic Los Angeles” offers a collection of 25 rich, multimedia essays that document the diverse journeys Sephardim embarked upon en route to southern California, and explore the lives, families, institutions and cultures these Jews built within the urban fabric of Los Angeles. By doing so, it offers new insight into how L.A.’s Sephardic community worked and relaxed, socialized and served their city, prayed and performed, and came to understand themselves as Jews and as Angelenos.
In the years after World War II, as construction began on a series of freeways and public housing projects in and around the neighborhood, Jewish residents began leaving Boyle Heights en masse. By the 1960s, the neighborhood was home to a Mexican American majority, whose experiences with social and economic marginalization, police violence, and urban renewal were different than those of residents before them. And yet, many patterns of resistance, cultural expression and community organizing endured, taking new and dynamic forms. To celebrate this efflorescence of Chicano/a cultural and political activity, Brooklyn Avenue was renamed Avenida César Chávez (César E. Chávez Avenue) in 1994 and a portion of the street designated as the Brooklyn Avenue Historic Neighborhood Corridor. By bringing the many, overlapping layers of the neighborhood’s past into focus, “Jewish Histories in Multiethnic Boyle Heights” invites users to think critically about how an array of stakeholders—both within the neighborhood and without—have generated and enacted ideas about its religious, social, and cultural identity and how the Jewish community’s relationship to the neighborhood has changed over time.
“100 Years of Sephardic LA” – a collaboration between MJLA and the UCLA Sephardic Archive Initiative.
Originally founded by Jews from Turkey, Greece, Ottoman Palestine, and the Island Rhodes at the turn of the 20th century, L.A.’s Sephardic community today includes native-born Angelenos and immigrants from Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, each with their own traditions, institutions and cultural forms. Los Angeles thereby holds the key to a complex story of Jewish migration and urban diversity, one in which multiple Jewish diasporas met, collided, merged, built communities, and maintained their cultural distinction while nonetheless becoming threads of a larger California fabric. And yet the story of migration, settlement, and civil and cultural life of the diverse community of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jews to and in the City of Angels has yet to be systematically taught, written, or told.
Aiming to reverse these trends, “100 Years of Sephardic Los Angeles” offers a collection of 25 rich, multimedia essays that document the diverse journeys Sephardim embarked upon en route to southern California, and explore the lives, families, institutions and cultures these Jews built within the urban fabric of Los Angeles. By doing so, it offers new insight into how L.A.’s Sephardic community worked and relaxed, socialized and served their city, prayed and performed, and came to understand themselves as Jews and as Angelenos.
EXHIBITIONS BEST VIEWED WITH:
MAPPING JEWISH LOS ANGELES
Developed in collaboration with the UCLA Library and dozens of community archives, the Mapping Jewish Los Angeles project uses digital tools and multimedia technologies to enable a broad audience to discover the complex histories of the Los Angeles Jewish community. We recover and preserve hidden archives and facilitate access to them through multimodal digital exhibitions curated by leading scholars in the field, stimulating new research, teaching, and community engagement. Through the lens of space, we locate Jews on the natural and constructed landscapes of Los Angeles relative to other Angelenos and to trajectories of change, linking culture to urban spaces over time to reveal intersecting obstacles and experiences. By doing so, we put Jews in and on the maps of Los Angeles as a way of viewing their “place” in the past and the “presence” in events that altered the region, its residents, and its future.
MJLA is a collaborative forum for digital publishing open to scholars, students, and community members alike. We welcome new projects related to Los Angeles’ Jewish past, present, and future. If you are interested in contributing your work to MJLA, or have access to historical materials that can deepen our understanding of Los Angeles’ Jewish past that you would be willing to share with us, contact collectingjewishla@gmail.org.