Mapping Jewish LA
Since 2014, I have served as the Chief Digital Curator of the Mapping Jewish Los Angeles Project (MJLA), an initiative of the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies dedicated to using digital tools and multimedia technologies to facilitate access to the complex histories of the Los Angeles Jewish community.
MJLA includes over a dozen exhibitions on a wide range of topics, from the unlikely role of Jewish grocers in the invention of the modern supermarket to historic Jewish neighborhoods to émigré artists from Vienna and Israel. MJLA offers an expansive approach to “mapping,” our exhibitions locating Jews on physical landscapes of Los Angeles as well as literary, cultural and social ones. Under my leadership, MJLA has also pursued new kinds of community-based approaches to documenting and preserving the experiences of Jews in Los Angeles, including a series of exhibitions developed by UCLA students in the Leve Center’s service-learning program as well as collaborations with cultural and preservation organizations, translators, genealogists and family historians, students, scholars and history buffs. As such, MJLA offers a model for a new, inclusive mode of remembrance, one that nurtures intergenerational and interethnic understanding and opens new spaces for the discussion and discovery of history.
