Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Jewish Radicalism, Labor, & Culture in LA

This talk traces the journeys of a cohort of young Jewish radicals as they moved from the borderlands of the Russian empire to the borderlands of the American southwest, offering an account of Eastern European Jewish immigration and Yiddish public culture in Southern California. It especially focuses on Boyle Heights—a residential neighborhood east of the L.A. River that was once home to the highest concentration of Jews west of Chicago as well as dozens of other diasporic communities—showing how the neighborhood’s particular ethno-racial diversity shaped Jewish labor and left-wing activism as well as Yiddish literary culture. Drawing upon previously untranslated Yiddish sources, it exploresthe variety of organizing practices through which Jewish radicals recreated Yiddish public culture in the neighborhood as well as the new affinities and tensions that emerged as they worked to forge coalitions with their multiethnic neighbors. Boyle Heights is both a site of convergence, where dozens of diasporic communities cultivated their own modes of belonging in overlapping ways, as well as of divergence, where residents’ experiences were differentiated by both international and domestic political-economic developments. Jewish radicals’ Jewishness was invoked, disavowed, and debated, both within the Jewish community and without, revealing an oft-overlooked element in the history of antisemitism in Southern California.

Caroline Luce is a historian whose work sits at the intersection of labor history, Jewish studies, and digital humanities. Currently a Project Director with the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, she served for a decade as the Chief Curator of Mapping Jewish LA, a project of the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies. She is also the chair of the Communications Committee of UC-AFT. Her research specialty is immigration, labor and working-class culture in the American west and her forthcoming book, Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Jewish Radicalism, Labor and Culture in Los Angeles, will be released by NYU Press in 2026.

This talk is a part of the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas Lecture Series.

Lunch provided for those who RSVP by Monday, October 20.

Sponsored by: Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, Department of American Studies, Department of History

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