Since it’s establishment in 2011, the Mapping Jewish Los Angeles Project (MJLA) has been dedicated to bringing digital tools and multimedia technologies to facilitate access to the complex histories of the Los Angeles Jewish community. The project emerged from the dialogue between its two founders – Dr. Karen S. Wilson, who was then serving as lead curator for the exhibition, “Jews in the Los Angeles Mosaic” (Autry National Museum, 2013), and Dr. Todd Presner, then the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies, who had previously launched a collaborative mapping platform called “Hypercities” (now available as a digital book). Dr. Presner, who is also the Chair of the UCLA Digital Humanities Program, was eager to find ways to incorporate digital mapping into the work of the Leve Center, and Dr. Wilson, was eager to expand the public’s access to historical materials and scholarship related to Los Angeles’ Jewish history. Together, they conceived of MJLA as a five-year initiative to create a multimedia, digital archive of Jewish LA through the Hypercities platform that would enable users to “drill down” at locations throughout the city and uncover the many, overlapping layers of the past. MJLA, they hoped, would not only document and preserve the city’s Jewish histories; it would also serve as a bridge between archives and institutions throughout the city, between university specialists, students and citizen experts, and between generations. They hoped MJLA could become a model for collaborative digital publishing that could be replicated with other cities and communities across the country.

These preliminary goals aligned with those of the UCLA Library, which had recently launched their own “Collecting Los Angeles” initiative to gather, preserve, and make accessible materials reflecting the hidden histories of Los Angeles. Drs. Wilson and Presner forged a formal partnership with the Library Special Collections to survey its holdings, identify collections of interest, and create a research guide of relevant materials housed at the UCLA Library for students and researchers. Several other community partners lent their support to the project as well, including the team at the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (AVNC), the creators of Scalar, a free, open source platform for long-form, digital publishing. These partnerships resulted in MJLA’s first two digital exhibitions – “From the Bowl to the Boulevard” and “Hollywood’s Architect,” both created using Scalar and items housed at UCLA Library Special Collections.

Since then, MJLA has expanded to include a dozen exhibitions on a wide range of topics, from the unlikely role of Jewish grocers in the invention of the modern supermarket to historic Jewish neighborhoods to émigré artists from Vienna and Israel. Under the leadership of Dr. Caroline Luce, MJLA has adopted an ever-more expansive approach to “mapping,” our exhibitions locating Jews on physical landscapes as well as literary, cultural and social ones. MJLA has also pursued new kinds of community-based approaches to documenting and preserving the experiences of Jews in Los Angeles, including a series of exhibitions developed by UCLA students in the Leve Center’s service-learning program, sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. In the process, MJLA has grown to become a collaborative community that includes cultural and preservation organizations, librarians and archivists, translators, genealogists and family historians, students, scholars and history buffs.

In 2016, MJLA opened its first non-digital exhibition, “From Brooklyn Avenue to Cesar Chavez: Jewish Histories in Multiethnic Boyle Heights,” at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Centered on Brooklyn Avenue – Boyle Heights’ main commercial thoroughfare (known as Cesar Chavez Avenue since 1994) — the exhibition highlighted both the diversity of Jewish experiences in the neighborhood and the ways those experiences coincided with, and diverged from, those of the other diasporic communities that settled there. It emphasized five themes — Language and Literature, Religion and Community, Music and Arts, Education and Youth, and Labor and Activism— using digital technologies and archival materials to show how Jews and other residents participated in civic life, cultivated community, and in overlapping ways, created new American identities. With support from the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute, MJLA also hosted a series of community based on themes from the exhibition, culminating in a celebration of the installation of the exhibition at the Breed Street Shul, the largest (and only remaining) synagogue in the neighborhood. Production is currently underway on an online version of the exhibition featuring archival photos, documents and objects from the Hinda and Jacob Schonfeld Boyle Heights Collection. As MJLA’s 10th anniversary approaches, we invite you to help us continue to grow. We welcome new projects related to Los Angeles’ Jewish past, present and future. If you are interested in contributing your work to MJLA, or have access to historical materials that can deepen our understanding of the Jewish experience in Los Angeles that you would be willing to share with us, please email collectingjewishla@gmail.org or call (310) 825-5387.