Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine

My book in progress, Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Jewish Radicalism, Labor, and Culture in Los Angeles, offers a first-of-its-kind portrait of Jewish migration, labor, and working-class culture in Southern California. It traces the experiences a group of young Jewish radicals as they moved from the borderlands of the Russian empire to the borderlands of the American southwest, confronting, and transgressing, borders of nation, race, and empire in the process.

For many years, American Jewish historians advanced narratives of western exceptionalism, arguing that, whereas in the industrial cities of the East, Jewish immigrants were regarded as threatening, subversive, and racialized others, the American West was a site of Jewish belonging, the uniquely “fluid” and multicultural racial landscape affording Jews “high levels of inclusion and civic prominence.” These, often triumphalist, accounts largely focused on individual success stories of Jewish “pioneers” and their outsized contributions to the communities in which they settled, while failing to critically examine their participation in the systems of subjugation, displacement, and dispossession that afforded them access to that inclusion. More recently, however, scholars have started to reckon with the legacies of conquest and Jewish involvement in settler colonial expansion and the particular forms of racial capitalism it engendered in the American West.  My book contributes to this growing body of scholarship by examining not only how Jews benefitted from and participated in these nation-building processes and gained access to inclusion as white “settlers,” but also how the same structures of discipline and dominance excluded Jews, and the carceral and cultural practices that rendered them transgressive, racialized “subjects.” Combining traditional social history methods, digital mapping, and critical analysis of previously untranslated Yiddish sources, I recover the history of Yiddish-based labor, cultural, and left-wing organizing in 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—illuminating the variety of discursive and organizing practices through which Jewish radicals and writers rendered a Jewish working-class. By tracing the intersecting processes of class formation and racialization among Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Southern California, Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine encourages us to consider the regional and relational dimensions of race-making and place-making and how both Jewish inclusion and Jewish otherness were intimately bound to the ideological and racial projects of American settler colonialism.