Key Word Quiz

Read the following excerpt from the article “In Search of the Last Jews in Boyle Heights” from the Los Angeles Reader, September 1, 1995. Answer the questions at the end of the passage concerning keywords.

...By the late 1920’s, there were more than ten thousand households in Boyle Heights, according to Max Vorspan and Lloyd P. Gartner’s seminal History of the Jews in Los Angeles. Gary Canter, grandson of Ben Canter, who first established the Canter Bros. Delicatessen on Brooklyn Avenue, takes care of the world famous deli, now on Fairfax at it’s third location. “I could tell you many great stories I have heard about those times,” Canter says. “This was depression, but our deli was doing well. Bank of America around the corner used to have to borrow money from us!”

...Producer-director (of a documentary film entitled Meet Me at Brooklyn and Soto: A Celebration of the Jewish Community of East L.A.) Ellie Kahn says that part of what makes Boyle Heights so special is that it was never completely Jewish or Japanese or Mexican. “UCLA professor George Sanchez told me that in 1939 they decided against building federal housing in Boyle Heights,” she says, “the feeling being that the neighborhood was quote hopelessly mixed unquote, and that a mixed neighborhood was a hopeless one. We now know that Boyle Heights had more Japanese people than were previously believed, because new records show that over a third of Roosevelt High was emptied during the World War II internment camps.”

...Why did the Jewish community so totally abandon Boyle Heights? It couldn’t have been a case of “white flight,” since the neighborhood was already so “hopelessly mixed.” Rabbi Harry Silverstein, whose father was the longtime head rabbi of Congregation Talmud Torah, believes that it’s an inevitable pattern with early Jewish communities. “Communities rise, they reach a pinnacle, and they decline, just like civilizations,” he says. “People were willing to leave because they had nothing to protect, no capital investments.”

...“It ended as a result of World War II,” Rabbi Kramer says. “Because women got jobs, and returning soldiers got G.I. loans, and with the added income, young couples started moving out to the Valley, West Covina, the Fairfax area.” Could it also be that Jews, having been freshly stigmatized by Nazism, unconsciously detached from the Southern California’s world community into a community of their own? The Boyle Heights saga is one of many questions and few answers. “Nothing is forvever,” remarks Silverstein.

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