Karen Wilson (2)

I was born in 1924 in Boyle Heights, and lived for twenty years in that multi-ethnic immigrant community in East Los Angeles. As a Jew, pluralist, and lifelong Angeleno, I'm delighted with this first-of-its-kind exhibition now in progress at the Autry National Center. Titled "Jews in the Los Angeles Mosaic," it will run until January 5, 2014. For a number of reasons, the show is likely to arouse more attention than most histories of Jewish life in a large American city, and also controversy, given its size and the diversity of the Los Angeles. (For more information about the exhibition, visit http://www.rochlin-roots-west.com/whats-new.)

The show's guest curator, and the editor of this book accompanying the exhibition, is Karen S. Wilson, Kahn Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. Of a number of quotable passages in Wilson's introductory chapter to the book, the following is to me most pertinent: "The presence of Jews, in all their heterogeneity, has enhanced Los Angeles, and Jewish Angelenos have mirrored the challenges and advantages of American society."

In addition to Wilson's introduction and article, "Becoming Angelenos," the book includes four other extraordinary pieces: "Reexamining Los Angeles's 'Lower East Side': Jewish Bakers Union Local 453 and Yiddish Food Culture in 1920s Boyle Heights," by Caroline Luce: "Letting Jews Be Jews: Ethnicity and Hollywood, Its Fall and Rise," by Kenneth Turan; "At the Intersection of Gender, Ethnicity, and the City: Three Jewish Women in Los Angeles Politics," by Amy Hill Shevitz, and "White Christmases and Hanukkah Mambos: Jews and the Making of Popular Music in L.A.," by Josh Kun.… (més)