“How have Jews negotiated and navigated both their identities, and relationships, within the ever-changing, ethno-racial geography of the American West?”

JOIN EAST SIDE JEWS AND NEFESH, ALONG WITH DR. CAROLINE LUCE, CHIEF DIGITAL CURATOR OF MAPPING JEWISH L.A., FOR AN IN-PERSON CONVERSATION ON THE INTERSECTING JEWISH MIGRATORY, CULTURAL, AND URBAN HISTORIES THAT HAVE CONVERGED IN LOS ANGELES AND MADE IT WHAT IT IS TODAY!

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Mapping Jewish Histories in Multiracial Los Angeles:

Established over 150 years ago, Los Angeles’ Jewish community is one of the largest and most diverse in the world, a convergence of multiple diasporas from Europe, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and beyond. Each maintained the distinct traditions, institutions, and cultures they brought with them. They worked together to create new forms of Jewish community life suited to the particular landscape of Southern California, and in the process, contributed greatly to L.A.’s development as a global metropolis.

Caroline Luce is a historian whose work sits at the intersection of labor history, Jewish studies, and digital humanities. Her specialty is immigration, labor, and working-class culture in the American West, and she is currently writing a book about the Yiddish-speaking Jewish diaspora in Los Angeles. Caroline is the Research and Digital Projects Manager of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Chief Digital Curator of the Mapping Jewish Los Angeles Project. She received her Ph.D. in American History from UCLA in 2013 for her dissertation exploring the complexities of working-class identity and Yiddish-based labor and community organizing in Boyle Heights. She has also curated several major exhibitions for MJLA, including The White Plague in the City of Angels, Hugo Ballin’s Los Angeles, and Recovering Yiddish Culture in Los Angeles.