Boyle Heights

Much of my work for the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies focused on the Jewish histories of Boyle Heights, a residential neighborhood east of the L.A. River that was once home to the highest concentration of Jews west of Chicago. Boyle Heights’ vibrant Jewish community life flourished in a multiethnic context, in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Los Angeles called home by thousands of Mexican, Japanese, Armenian/Turkish, Italian, Russian and African-American families. Boyle Heights thereby offers a vital point of access to the history of Jewish immigration, westward migration, and communal diversity, and testifies to the convergence of transnational cultures in the American west.

I served as Lead Curator and Project Manager for the Leve Center’s exhibition, “From Brooklyn Avenue to César Chávez: Jewish Histories in Multiethnic Boyle Heights,” which premiered in Royce Hall in 2016 and has since been installed at Los Angeles City Hall, the Breed Street Shul, and the Boyle Heights History Studios. With support from the UC Humanities Research Institute, I organized a series of community events related to themes from the exhibition, including “Language, Literature, and Lugar/Palabra, Poesía y Place: Writing Boyle Heights” and “100 Years of Garment Work in L.A.,” a collaboration with the Garment Workers Center. I am also the Chief Curator and Author of “Jewish Histories in Multiethnic Boyle Heights,” a digital exhibit for Mapping Jewish L.A. launched in May 2021.

“Jewish Histories in Multiethnic Boyle Heights” received a wonderful write-up in the Washington Post and was featured on the local Spectrum 1 News. I also participated in a special episode of KCRW’s “Greater L.A.”

I have lectured about my work on Boyle Heights at Cornell (2020), UC Davis (2020), UCLA (2014, 2019), UCSC (2014), the American Jewish Historical Society Biennial (2016, 2018), the Long Beach Jewish Community Center (2019), the Association of Jewish Studies Conference (2013, 2019), and the Society of the Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States (2016). I have also contributed a chapter based on my research about di linke in Boyle Heights called, “Locating Jewish Youth in the L.A. Young Communists League,” to the volume Jews as Whites, Jews as Others: Relational Identities in the American West (Brandeis, 2021).

“From Brooklyn Avenue to César Chávez” was featured in the Jewish Journal and the Boyle Heights Beat as were articles about the related event series, including “100 years of Garment Work in LA” and the installation of the exhibition at the Breed Street Shul.