The Autry National Center and the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies are working on an exhibition which incorporates themes and issues that are significant in American Jewish history, the history of the American West, and the history of Los Angeles.
The exhibition working title is
Jews and the Making of LA/LA and the Making of Jews
Jews and the Making of LA/LA and the Making of Jews explores the history of the migrations, settlements, and transformations of Jews in Los Angeles. The exhibition examines internal and external perceptions of being Jewish and being Angeleno and how living in the American West has shaped those identities. It provokes reconsideration of the place of a particular minority in the cultural mosaic of Los Angeles and of encounters with diversity by individuals and institutions.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Jews have resided in Los Angeles, and, in recent decades, the city has emerged as the second largest Jewish community in the United States. For more than 150 years, then, Jews have played pivotal roles in the shaping of Los Angeles, and, in turn, Jewish identities, communities, and visions have been reshaped by the opportunities and challenges afforded by Los Angeles and by the intensity of interactions with "others" in this cosmopolitan setting.
Part of what made the Jewish experience in Los Angeles so distinctive was the broader cultural landscape of the West in general, and of Southern California in particular. Jews who arrived in Los Angeles from the mid-nineteenth century did not encounter the usual mix of European immigrant groups whom they might have in New York or Philadelphia. Uninhibited by traditional European-style anti-Semitism, the first Jewish settlers made significant inroads into the social, economic, and political life of mid and late-19th-century Los Angeles. Far from insular in their ambitions, these first settlers established institutions like the Hebrew Benevolent Society (1854) that were to serve particular Jewish ritual interests, as well as larger communal needs. Indeed, the story of Los Angeles Jewry combines both intense Jewish cultural and institutional development and broad integration into the social fabric of Los Angeles.
The first Jewish Angelenos, largely of Central European extraction, have been followed by hundreds of thousands of others -- Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe, Sephardim from Turkey, Rhodes, Greece, and North Africa, and more recently, Iranians, Russians, and Israelis. They have followed their own westward trajectory, moving from Boyle Heights and Ladera Heights to Fairfax, to Pico-Robertson, to the “Westside,†and into the Valley. In the process, they have created dense and diverse pockets of Jewish culture -- not at a remove, but rather right in the middle of a wider non-Jewish social universe.