Visions of a Jewish Future: Jewish Bakers, Community Organizing and Yiddish Culture in East Los Angeles

Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship

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Caroline Luce, UCLA

This lecture presents a portrait of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants who settled in Boyle Heights in the early 20th century, a neighborhood referred to by generations of historians as “Los Angeles’ Lower East Side.” These men and women had been involved in revolutionary movements in Eastern Europe and worked to create an all encompassing secular Jewish culture based in Yiddish in their new home. But the realities they confronted in Los Angeles – its pattern of settlement, its racial hierarchy and its political economy – complicated their efforts, causing factionalism and rivalries that have obscured their community’s history.