In Search of Fairfax
“In Search of Fairfax” explores the history of Beverly-Fairfax, a mid-city neighborhood that the Los Angeles Times has described as “the symbolic focus of Jewish life in Los Angeles,” “the city’s cultural ‘Little Israel,’” “the most Jewish stretch of pavement in Los Angeles,” and the “emotional center of Jewish life in Los Angeles.” While consistently boasting the highest concentration of Jewish residents throughout Los Angeles and a plethora of schools, religious institutions, social clubs, and storefronts that chiefly catered to Jews throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, the neighborhood attracted an array of Jewish and non-Jewish micro-communities and subcultures: upwardly mobile Jewish migrants from Chicago and New York City, lower middle class Jews from Boyle Heights, Holocaust survivors, Soviet and Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants, Chabadnics, Vietnamese refugees, middle class African American families, students attending Fairfax High School, as well as counterculture artists and activists.
Through digital mapping and qualitative analysis, “In Search of Fairfax” examines how Jews and non-Jews alike built communities and interacted with one another in the Fairfax neighborhood from the 1930s through the 1990s. Inter- and intra-group negotiations over the role and structure of this neighborhood generated multiple ideas about the neighborhood’s religious, social, and cultural purpose. Specifically, "In Search of Fairfax" focuses on the ways in which an array of neighborhood stakeholders operated in tension and in tandem with each other in their effort to define who and what belonged within the Fairfax “community” and what exactly made the neighborhood “Jewish.”
Of particular scholarly interest, this project will emphasize the ways in which Jewish organizations, residents, and leaders sought to promote the Jewish attachments of the neighborhood in response to and in conversation with threats, both those perceived and real, to the neighborhood's Jewish identity during the final-third of the twentieth century. Broad civic trends such as gentrification, racial integration, and suburbanization, not only transformed the fabric of daily life in the Beverly-Fairfax neighborhood but also framed the ways in which Jewish activists sought to maintain and sustain the perception of Fairfax as a distinct Jewish space.
To a certain extent, the impulse to highlight the Jewish significance of the neighborhood reflected broader national trends. In various cities throughout the country, upwardly mobile American Jews (who now lived far from the neighborhoods of yore) reclaimed first and second settlement areas as objects of cultural authenticity, historical memory, and prime political importance. Chronicling the emergence of New York’s Lower East Side as the “American Jewish Plymouth Rock,” historian Hasia Diner notes that, “at a time when rabbis and Jewish newspapers, organizations and schools express openly their fears of a looming break in the continuity of the Jewish people, they and the masses of Americans Jews have sought out the Lower East Side, a place where they can stake a claim to their peoplehood in America.” Likewise, Lila Corwin Berman reveals that even as Jews left Detroit en masse and moved to the suburbs, they continued express deep concerns for the city’s wellbeing and for the old neighborhood. According to Berman, Jewish Detroiters constructed a Jewish political identity predicated on the idea of “remote urbanism.”
While Beverly-Fairfax existed as a sacred symbol of nostalgia and a political focal point for Jews living outside the “urban core,” the development of Jewish localism in Los Angeles was distinctive from New York’s Lower East Side and Detroit’s Twelfth Street-Linwood-Dexter neighborhood. Although some Jews left Beverly-Fairfax, other Jews continued to live and, in fact, moved into the neighborhood. Not simply a site of historical resonance like its counterparts in other cities, Beverly-Fairfax had a majority Jewish population as well as numerous ethnic storefronts and provided an array of commercial and social services for its residents. Along the socio-economic, religious, and geographic fault lines that structured Jewish life in Los Angeles, Jewish Angelenos understood Beverly-Fairfax as a physical space and conceptual landscape.
A few caveats about the methodology and the terminology employed. Throughout most of the project, I refer to the neighborhood under consideration as "Beverly-Fairfax," not the "Fairfax District." The reasons for this are historical: the sources that I came across from the 1950s through the 1980s typically refer to the area as the "Beverly-Fairfax" neighborhood. This Google N-Gram chart reinforces this point: during the latter half of the twentieth century, "Beverly-Fairfax" was used with more frequency than "Fairfax District."
It was only starting in the 1990s that the term Fairfax District began to appear with more frequency. When appropriate, I refer to the neighborhood as the "Fairfax District." (The name of the neighborhood continues to evolve: the Los Angeles Times' Mapping L.A. project recently split the area under consideration into two -- Fairfax and Beverly Grove.)
Also relevant, distinct maps and descriptions provide different boundaries for the Beverly-Fairfax neighborhood. For the purposes of this study, I will use the boundaries that the Vitalize Fairfax project employed--from Wilshire Boulevard north to Santa Monica Boulevard, from La Brea Boulevard to La Cienega Boulevard.
For those interested in learning about the different ways in which various sources have defined the borders and boundaries for the Fairfax neighborhood, refer to the Fairfax Maps Resource Guide.
Much of the research for this project was conducted in local archives such as the Barbara Myerhoff papers, the Mayor Tom Bradley Administration papers, 1920-1933, and the Western States Jewish History Archive, 1800-2004; the quantitive data for the maps largely comes from the Jewish community studies conducted by Fred Massarik and Bruce Phillips and U.S. census. While thorough in its analysis, it does not claim to be comprehensive in its treatment of the Beverly-Fairfax neighborhood. I would love to hear comments and feedback about the project. I also encourage individuals to submit additional photographs, essays, and stories about the Fairfax neighborhood; my hope is to develop a section of the "In Search of Fairfax" project that features contributions from those who lived and experienced the Beverly-Fairfax neighborhood For submissions, please email cjs@humnet.ucla.edu.
