THE JEWISH ROLE IN AMERICAN LIFE: An Annual Review // Volume 7
It can be ordered through most booksellers and is usually in stock at the USC Trojan Bookstore. To order directly from Purdue, please visit www.thepress.purdue.edu or call 1-800-247-6553.
ISBN 978-1-55753-564-1
ISSN 1934-7529
Beginning with our previous volume of the Casden Annual Review (Volume 6), the annual publication of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, the editors decided to focus on a single topic and to present articles that largely consider aspects of that topic alone. That volume, subtitled, The Impact of the Holocaust in America, was very well received and gave us the opportunity to explore an area of Shoah-studies that had not been well emphasized previously. With this volume (Volume 7), we continue this policy of focusing on a single topic, but in this case the topic we have turned to is, quite literally, closer to home: the Jewish role in California life.
There are two aspects of this volume that merit special notice. First, the aim of the collection of essays and studies in this volume is intended to stress the cultural aspects of the Jewish experience of coming up to and living in the Golden State. We cannot hope to present in this limited venue a comprehensive and detailed history of how Jews came to live in California, per se. Rather, it is our more limited goal to consider a number of insightful perspectives on how the Jews, who settled in California, helped shape the Golden State's culture and were, in turn, themselves molded by cultural influences that were uniquely Californian. Second, while this volume looks at the Jewish experience in California in general - nonetheless, particular emphasis is placed on Southern California. Both these concerns, of course, are natural ones for the Casden Institute to consider. First of all, the focus on California simply follows - although in more geographical detail - the overall mandate of the Casden Institute, to consider the special part that Jews have played in the culture of their adopted homeland. Moreover it seems entirely appropriate that an institute that resides at the University of Southern California should look out at the Jewish role in this special state as seen from the perspective of this even more special, local neighborhood. After all, Jews played (and continue to play) a notable role in building and defining what Southern California is and, beyond this, what we imagine it to be. We firmly believe that there is something special about the Jewish role in California and even more in Southern California - that here on the lower left-coast Jews have had an Americanization experience that is significantly different from that which Jews have experienced elsewhere in the USA. Conversely, Southern California would be quite a different place without the Jews who made it their home.
We begin our cultural history at a crucial moment in California history, the mid-nineteenth century in the after-glow of the California Gold Rush, where we encounter a European Jewish emigrant, fresh off the boat, who could (and did) get a chance to make a fortune in the pueblo of Los Angeles and, in doing so, helped define what California is. We conclude it with a personal mediation from one of the latest group of refugees to come to the west, the Iranian Jews who were forced out of their ancient homeland some thirty years ago and who found in Southern California a particularly hospitable (yet no less difficult) place to transplant their cultural roots. In between, we are treated to a few snapshots of how life developed and changed for Jews in California as California itself evolved and grew. But if this volume proves one thing for sure, it is this: that we have only just begun to scratch the surface of a rich but largely unknown cultural resource. At best, this volume can only give us a hint of what we have yet to learn.
Contents
FORWARD
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Frances Dinkelspiel
Isaias Hellman and the Creation of California
Karen S. Wilson
A Twice-Told Journey: Sarah Newmark in the Russian Polish Shtetl - How a Jewish California Matron Confronted Her European Heritage
Gladys Sturman and David Epstein
Postscript: The Western States Jewish History Archives
Shana Bernstein
From Civic Defense to Civil Rights: The Growth of Jewish American Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Los Angeles
Gina Nahai
The Third Temple: Iranian Jews and the Blessings of Exile - A personal Memoir
Marsha Kinder
Jewish Homegrown History: In the Golden State and Beyond
About the Contributors
Lisa Ansell is Associate Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life at the University of Southern California. She received her BA in French and Near East Studies from UCLA and her MA in Middle East Studies from Harvard University. She was the Chair of the World Language Department of New Community Jewish High School for five years before coming to USC in August, 2007.
Shana Bernstein is Assistan Professor of History at Southwestern University. She received her PhD in US History at Stanford University, and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University before she joined the faculty at Southwestern. Her manuscript, Forgotten Coalition: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in World War II and Cold War Los Angeles, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
William Deverell is Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and Professor of History, the University of Southern California.
Frances Dinkelspiel is a fifth-generation Californian who grew up in San Francisco. A graduate of Stanford University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Frances spent more than twenty years working as a newspaper reporter. Her freelance work has appeared in the New York Time, Los Angeles Times, People Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has also taught at the Berkely Graduate School of Journalism. Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and notable book of 2008.
David Epstein, co-editor of the Western States Jewish History Journal, is a graduate of Wesleyan University. He majored in economics and history. He has lectured throughout the country on the history of Jews of the West. He is also the publisher of The American Rabbi journal and website.
Marsha Kinder is University Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and Executive Producer and Project Leader of the Labyrinth Project.
Gina Nahai is a best-selling author, and a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her novels have been translated into eighteen languages, and have been selected as "One of the Best Books of the Year" by the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.
Glasys Sturman, co-editor of the Western States Jewish History Journal, is a graduate of the University of Judaism (now the American Jewish University), majoring in History. She has been a Jewish community activist in the Los Angeles area for fifty years. She lectures and teaches extensively throughout the area on Jewish topics.
Karen S. Wilson in a doctoral candidate in US History at the University of California, Los Angeles, expecting to obtain her degree in 2010. Her dissertation project, entitled "On the Cosmopolitan Frontier: Jews in Nineteenth-Century Los Angeles," examines ways in which social networks shaped the incorporation and distinctiveness of Jewish settlers in post-Gold Rush society. Her research interests center on immigrants to the American West and urbanization in nineteenth-century frontiers and borderlands. She also is serving as curator for an exhibition on the history of Jews in Los Angeles to be mounted at the Autry National Center.
Bruce Zuckerman is the Myron and Marian Casden Director of the Casden Institute and a Professor of Religion at USC, where he teaches courses in the Hebrew Bible, the Bible in western literature, the ancient Near East, and archaeology. A specialist in photographing and reconstructing ancient texts, he is involved in numerous projects related to the Dead Sea Scrolls. On ancient topics, his major publications are Job the Silent: A Study in Biblical Counterpoint and The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition, for which he and his brother Kenneth did the principal photography. Zuckerman also has a continuing interest in modern Jewish thought, often looking at modern issues ?from an ancient perspective. He most recently co-authored Double Takes: Thinking and ?Rethinking Issues of Modern Judaism in Ancient Contexts with Zev Garber and contributed a chapter to Garber's book, Mel Gibson's Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications.