Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Race, Labor, and Jewish Radicalism in Los Angeles, with Caroline Luce

Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Online, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm PT

Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine (New York University Press, 2026) offers a novel account of Eastern European Jewish immigration and Yiddish public culture in Southern California. It traces the journeys of a cohort of young Jewish radicals as they moved from the borderlands of the Russian empire to the borderlands of the American southwest, exploring their engagement with well-known labor and left-wing movements in Los Angeles.

Much of the book is focused on Boyle Heights, a residential neighborhood east of the L.A. River once home to the highest concentration of Jews west of Chicago as well as to dozens of other diasporic communities, showing how the neighborhood’s particular ethno-racial diversity shaped Yiddish public culture. Rich with new details drawn from previously untranslated Yiddish sources, it examines new relationships and tensions that emerged as the Jewish radicals worked to forge multiracial coalitions in the workplace and the community, including with their Mexican, Asian, and African-American neighbors. It frames the community as a site of convergence, where multiple marginalized populations cultivated their own modes of belonging in overlapping ways, as well as of divergence, where residents’ experiences were differentiated by international and domestic political-economic developments.