UCLA EXHIBITION RECALLS JEWISH GLORY DAYS IN BOYLE HEIGHTS
Visitors to UCLA soon will be able to step back in time, to an era when Cesar Chavez Avenue was named Brooklyn Avenue, the delicatessens sold pickles out of barrels and Yiddish was a commonly spoken language.
The UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies is celebrating its formal renaming and dedication with an exhibition devoted to the Jewish community of Boyle Heights from the 1920s to the 1950s.
“From Brooklyn Avenue to Cesar Chavez: Jewish Histories in Multiethnic Boyle Heights” will be open at UCLA’s Royce Hall for a short run from Nov. 6-9. The pop-up exhibition will include a screening of the recent documentary “East LA Interchange” on Nov. 6, followed by a conversation between director Betsy Kalin and former Boyle Heights residents Leo Frumkin and Don Hodes.
YIDDISH BY THE SEA: UCLA RELEASES ANTHOLOGY OF LOCAL YIDDISH POETRY
Shortly after she moved to Los Angeles three years ago, Tamar Schneider Levin, 78, found herself in a lecture at UCLA about Yiddish writers in Venice, Calif., in the early 20th century.
“I thought, ‘There were Yiddish writers in Los Angeles?’ ” the native New Yorker said. “ ‘I’ve never heard of them.’ ”
Schneider Levin had grown up in a house with a large Yiddish library and spoken the language exclusively until kindergarten. So when the speaker that night three years ago, a UCLA researcher named Caroline Luce, mentioned that a small trove of Yiddish poems and stories written in Southern California was sitting in the university’s bowels just waiting to be translated, Levin offered to help.
JEWISH SENIORS SHARE L.A. MEMORIES
In a floral-print jacket and bright-red lipstick, Dorothy Scott smiled as she thumbed through a plastic binder of photographs, letters and newspaper clippings. Among her modeling and acting headshots is one photo showing her flanked by none other than Frank Sinatra, who she opened for while singing on a USO tour. One black-and-white photo showed her with her late husband, Mark Scott, an actor and broadcaster who served as the announcer for the Hollywood Stars baseball team (which predated the Dodgers’ arrival to Los Angeles in 1958).
YIDDISH LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAN WEST
Was there a definable style of Yiddish writing produced in the American West? It is time to look beyond New York and examine the unique experiences of Jews on the Pacific Coast and the literary culture they produced.
HUGO BALLIN: THE JEWISH MURALIST OF LOS ANGELES
If you’ve ever attended services in the historic Wilshire Boulevard Temple, chances are you’ve been awestruck by the elaborate mural that wraps around the Magnin Sanctuary. Beginning with Genesis and ending in 1929, when the mural was commissioned, it tells the epic story of the Jewish people over the course of thousands of years.
JEWS IN THE OTHER PROMISED LAND: A STORY THAT UCLA HELPED THE AUTRY TELL
What does French stoneware from the 19th century have in common with the camera used to make Hollywood’s first feature movie and a miniature etching bearing the well-known slogan, “War is unhealthy for children and other living things”? As random as they seem, all of these items help tell the story of Jewish life in Los Angeles.
The Autry National Center is recounting that tale through these and 150 other artifacts that document local Jewish history, and it is doing so with assistance from UCLA faculty, students, alumni and the university’s extensive library system.