"What's good for Boyle Heights is good for the Jews": Creating multiracialism on the eastside during the 1950s

American Quarterly

Volumn 56, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 633-661

  Sánchez, George J ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247661856     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2004.0042     Document Type: Review

References (87)

1. "Boyle Heights: A Sociological Fishbowl," Fortnight, October 20, 1954, 20-23
2. Ralph Friedman, "U.N. in Microcosm; Boyle Heights: An Example of Democratic Progress," Frontier: The Voice of the New West, March 1955, 12
3. Frontier article, 12
4. quote is from Fortnight article, 21
5. Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 88, 93, 173
6. Scott L. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 14-15
7. Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 68, 78-79, 81
8. Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 100, 116
9. Max Vorspan and Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1970), 117-19
10. David Weissman, "Boyle Heights: A Study in Ghettos," The Reflex 6.2 (July 1935): 30-31
11. David Philip Suldiner, "Of Moses and Marx: Folk Ideology Within the Jewish Labor Movement in the United States" (doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984), 222-32
12. Wendy Elliot-Scheinberg, "Boyle Heights: Jewish Ambiance in a Multicultural Neighborhood" (doctoral dissertation, Claremont Graduate University, 2001), 98-142, 234-48
13. Neil Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown Publishers, 1988)
14. See Gabler, An Empire of Their Own
15. and Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
16. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 14
17. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 91-135, 171-99, and particularly 92
18. See also Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998)
19. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 197
20. Home Owners Loan Corporation City Survey Files, Area D-53, Los Angeles, 1939. National Archives, Washington, D.C., 7
21. Also quoted in George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 137
22. Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 193
23. Lynn C. Kronzek, "Fairfax... A Home, A Community, A Way of Life," in Legacy: Journal of the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California 1.4 (Spring 1990): 15, 23-36
24. Eshref Shevky and Marilyn Williams, The Social Areas of Los Angeles: Analysis and Typology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 157-59
25. Letter from Morris J. Kay, publisher, Valley Jewish News, to John Anson Ford, February 9, 1950, John Anson Ford papers, Box 75, Folder B IV 5i cc(15), Huntington Library
26. Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York: Free Press, 1994), 42-44
27. Jackson Mayers, The San Fernando Valley (Walnut, Calif: John D. McIntyre, 1976), 172
28. James Thomas Keane, Fritz B. Burns and the Development of Los Angeles: The Biography of a Community Developer and Philanthropist (Los Angeles: Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles, 2001), 70-71
29. Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 186-215
30. Memorandum from Milton A. Senn, director, Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, December 31, 1948, "Report on Efforts in the Los Angeles Area to Circumvent the United States Supreme Court Decisions on Restrictive Covenants," 8. John Anson Ford papers, Box 75, Folder B IV 5i cc(13), Huntington Library
31. Moore, To the Golden Cities, 23
32. On the local level, see Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 221-22
33. and Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 182-85
34. On the national level, see Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 26-29
35. Minutes of the Board Meeting of the Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center, May 18, 1949, Box 9, Jewish Centers Association (JCA), Histories file, Archives, Jewish Community Library, Jewish Federation Council of Los Angeles
36. Minutes of the Board Meeting of the Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center, June 13, 1950, and October 10, 1950, Box 9, JCA
37. Biskar, "A History of the Jewish Centers Association," 67-69
38. Minutes of the Board Meeting of the Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center, November 14, 1950, January 9, 1951, and October 30, 1951, Box 9, JCA
39. Minutes of the Board Meeting of the Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center, March 14, 1950, Box 9, JCA
40. Interview with William Phillips, conducted by Tamara Zwick, February 22, 1990
41. Minutes of the Board Meeting of the Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center, April 12, 1950, January 9, 1951, and February 12, 1952, Box 9, JCA
42. Text in museum exhibition, "Boyle Heights: The Power of Place," Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, California, September 2002-February 2003
43. "Bill Phillips Elected to Head Citizens Committee to Re-Elect Roybal," Eastside Sun, February 1, 1951
44. Anthony F. Macias, "From Pachuco Boogie to Latin Jazz: Mexican Americans, Popular Music, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1940-1965 (doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 2001), 127
45. Interview with William Phillips; JANM exhibition
46. Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 39
47. Rozina Lozano, "The Struggle for Inclusion: A Study of the Community Services Organization in East Los Angeles, 1947-1951" (senior thesis, Stanford University, 2000), 19
48. Kim Chemin, In My Mothers House (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1983), 161-62, 177-78
49. Healey and Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers, 135
50. Interview with Ida B. Fiering, conducted by Leslye Sneider, February 23,1990
51. Edward L. Barrett Jr., The Tenney Committee: Legislative Investigation of Subversive Activities in California (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1951), 37-39
52. Transcript, vol. 48, 55, quoted in Barrett, The Tenney Committee, 38
53. Minutes of Board Meeting of Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center, September 14, 1948, Box 9, JCA
54. Barrett, The Tenney Committee, 38
55. Minutes of the Board Meeting of Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center, December 14, 1948, Box 9, JCA
56. Minutes of the Board Meeting of the Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center, December 14, 1948, Box 9, JCA
57. See Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), particularly chapters 10 and 11, for one of the best accounts emphasizing the cultural tension between Southern California "folks" like Tenney and Sam Yorty, who led the anticommunist crusade, and elite liberals and leftists in Hollywood and on campuses
58. The one book dedicated to the AFCPFB, which directly calls the organization "a tool of American communism" (1) is John W. Sherman, A Communist Front at Mid-Century: The American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born, 1933-1959 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 2001)
59. See Sherman, Communist Front
60. 1965 program for Fifteenth Annual Conference, Folder 20, Box 1, Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (LACPFB) papers, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles, California
61. For a fuller account of the relationship between the LACPFB and the Mexican American left, see Jeffrey M. Garcilazo, "McCarthyism, Mexican Americans, and the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of the Foreign-Born, 1950-1954," Western Historical Quarterly (autumn 2001): 273-95
62. "A Call to the People of Los Angeles!!" LACPFB: Correspondence and Publicity, 1954 folder, Box 14, ACPFB, Labadie Collection, Department of Special Collections, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
63. Ibid
64. See also Chernin, My Mothers House, 243-44
65. and Garcilazo, "McCarthyism," 283-84
66. Flyer for Edo Mita Victory Celebration, Folder 22, Box 1, LACPFB papers, Southern California Library
67. One of the best studies of this kind for Southern California is Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 29-53, which focuses on Orange County, California
68. Hershel Gluck, "City Council Honors Marion and Paul Miller: Jewish Couple 'Led 6 Lives' for Their Country," B'nai B'rith Messenger, February 7, 1958, 4
69. See Neil J. Sullivan, The Dodgers Move West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 103-5, 145-46, 154-55
70. and Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), Chapter 5
71. Charlotta A. Bass to the Honorable City Council, Att. Mrs. Rosalind Wyman, undated, Folder 25, Box 1, LACPFB papers, Southern California Library
72. Rose Chernin to Los Angeles City Council, February 11, 1958, Folder 25, Box 1, LACPFB papers, Southern California Library
73. Garcilazo, "McCarthyism," 294
74. Facts about the Eastside Jewish Community Center of the Jewish Centers Association, prepared for Budget Subcommittee #10, Community Chest-Welfare Federation of Los Angeles, February 1954, Jewish Centers Association files; Minutes of the Eastside Jewish Community Center, 1954 to 1958, Jewish Centers Association, Box 9
75. Interview with Leo Frumkin, 35-36
76. Interview with Richard Duran, conducted by Stephanie Duran, February 18, 1990
77. Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 297
78. Elliot-Schienberg, "Boyle Heights," 11
79. Interview with Ida B. Fiering, conducted by Leslye Sneider, February 23, 1990
80. Quote is from Fortnight article, 21
81. Abraham Hoffman, "My Boyle Heights Childhood, Los Angeles, 1940-50s," Western States Jewish History 35.1 (fall 2002): 81
82. Kronzek, "Fairfax," 36-37; interview with William Phillips, conducted by Tamara Zwick, March 5, 1990; Leilah Bernstein, "The Changing Flavors of Jewish Cooking in Southern California," Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1999, Metro, B1
83. Matea Gold, "Era Ends as 78-Year-Old Men's Store Calls It Quits," Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1999, Metro, B1
84. Joseph Trevino and Caitlin Liu, "First Lady Visits Historic Synagogue, Movie House," Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1998, Metro, B1
85. See Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London: Verso, 1997) for a longer exploration of this subject
86. Leland T. Saito, Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 133-35
87. Saito, Race and Politics, 64