Event Date
Luce will focus her presentation on a cohort of young Jewish activists raised in the Yiddish-speaking immigrant milieu of Los Angeles who came of age in the Young Communist League in the 1920s and 1930s, including Dorothy Ray Healey (née Dorothy Rosenblum), Ben Dobbs (née Ben Isgur), and others who became prominent leaders of the California Communist Party by the 1940s. Placing emphasis on their earliest years in the YCL as teenagers, she will explore how they negotiated the place of Jews and Jewishness within the radical movement and without as a means of revealing a long and oft-overlooked history of Jewish racialization and resistance in interwar California.
Caroline Luce is the Associate Director of the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Chief Curator of the Leve Center’s Mapping Jewish Los Angeles Project. She received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 2013 with a focus on immigration, labor and working-class culture in the American west and is working on a book manuscript entitled, Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Jewish Radicalism, Labor and Culture in Los Angeles, 1900-1950.
Part of the New Directions in Jewish Studies 2021 Lecture Series, presented by the UC Davis Jewish Studies Program
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