L.A.’s Jewish Community Looks Inward for Answers

When Stanley Treitel was growing up four decades ago, Fairfax Avenue was the center of Los Angeles’ Jewish world. But as he walks down the avenue today, he sees just another urban strip in decay.

“We never had these vacancies, this graffiti, until the last three or four years,” Treitel says. “People are down, people are economically down. They feel if the graffiti is taken off today, it’ll be back tomorrow.”

In general, the graffiti marks the spot of an abandoned or declining business, of which there are many between Beverly and Melrose, the heart of the Fairfax District. Second- and third-generation Jews who own businesses are barely surviving because their clientele is either aging or has moved elsewhere. The children who continue to run family concerns seem to care less and less about keeping the enterprise going. What economic vitality there is on Fairfax is traceable to recent Jewish immigrants, mostly Israeli and Iranian.

Indeed, it may be the immigrant who now represents the most dynamic economic element in the Jewish community. Persian, Israeli and North African Jews have become players in the Downtown garment and jewelry districts, replacing earlier generations of East Europeans. Similarly, in contrast to Fairfax’s decay, there is a plethora of Israeli- and Persian-owned businesses in retail districts along Pico and Ventura boulevards. Russian entrepreneurs are the economic engines along Santa Monica Boulevard.

Still, in many ways, Fairfax’s fate raises the distinct prospect of decline in what is one of Judaism’s wealthiest and most powerful communities. Long a dominant force in entertainment, the garment industry, the artistic and political life of Southern California, the Jewish community faces a difficult period of change in the increasingly multicultural reality that is Los Angeles.

At the core of this change is a weakening embrace of the liberalism at the heart of New Deal coalition politics, which has characterized much of Los Angeles Jewry. It is also a turning inward, toward a deeper spirituality and interest in the social health of the community.

This change, in part, is the product of demographic trends. After rapid growth in the first two decades following World War II, the Jewish population in the county has plateaued at about 500,000, according to studies conducted by the L.A. Jewish Federation. If immigration from overseas had not occurred, it would almost certainly have declined during the past decade. The most severe population losses are in Beverlywood and Fairfax, the traditional centers of the community.

This decline in numbers coincides with the lessening urgency of the three obsessions that have dominated the diaspora for 50 years--the preservation of Israel, the building of Holocaust monuments and the maintenance of the New Deal liberal coalition. At the same time, mainstream Jewish politics seems increasingly unresponsive to the challenges of ethnic survival in Los Angeles.

Neither strong community institutions, an affluent business elite or such powerful Jewish politicians as Rep. Henry A. Waxman and Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, for example, seem willing to tackle the decay of neighborhoods like Fairfax. “No one takes responsibility for the street anymore,” laments Treitel, who headed a briefly successful Fairfax revitalization campaign in the 1980s. “There’s a lack of commitment on the part of the merchants and the politicians.”

The rethinking among Jews in Los Angeles is, in large part, driven by the changing interests of younger, working Jewish families. Much of the Jewish Establishment here traditionally supported the liberal causes of busing and affirmative action. One result of these policies, however, has been “conscious leveling” in public schools, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s David Lehrer. The once highly regarded Fairfax High School, for example, has suffered under a doctrinaire multiculturalism.

More than any one factor, decreasing confidence in public schools is pushing many of the younger Jewish families northward to Calabasas and the Conejo Valley in Ventura County, whose public schools have top-quality reputations. At the same time, Jews who remain here are choosing private non-denominational or “Hebrew day schools” to educate their children. Two decades ago, there were hardly any such Jewish parochial institutions. Today, the Jewish Federation estimates there are more than 30, with a rising student enrollment that tops 8,000, about twice the number of pupils 10 years ago. Even the most powerful mainstream temples are either planning or are already building new and ever more elaborate full-time schools to keep their younger families in their congregations.

Another powerful force behind changing Jewish attitudes is deepening anxieties about crime. “There’s a greater perception of crime than ever before among Jews,” says Alan Fisher, a political scientist at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Fisher contends that worries over escalating crime are accelerating the community’s gradual drift away from traditional liberalism, particularly among younger Jewish voters. After studying Jewish voting patterns nationwide, he estimates that under-30 Jewish voters are roughly 10% more likely to vote Republican than their predecessors. Other growing blocs of Jewish voters, notably Orthodox and recent immigrants, who make up at least one-fifth of Los Angeles’ Jewry, are also more rightward-looking than their American-born counterparts.

Yet, it would be a mistake to see the altering currents of Jewish opinion as merely a reaction to negative events. The improved peace prospects for Israel, the fading of Holocaust memory and shifting urban realities have all prompted a growing emphasis on building self-sustaining community structures.

“Jewish life has to go beyond politics,” says UCLA Hillel’s rabbi Chaim Seidler Feller. “The structure of the community has been too much on politics. The Jews have become like a political party. The culture of spirit has been lost.”

Perhaps nothing better illustrates this resurgent “culture of spirit” than construction, using donated labor and funding from mostly immigrant-run businesses, of a $2-million temple in West Hollywood for Los Angeles’ approximately 30,000 Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Unions. “It’s the first expression of freedom that they built their own synagogue,” says Chabad rabbi Naftoli Estulin, who for 20 years practiced underground in Russia under communism. “The Russian Jews--they don’t know anything, they’re ignorant, they had no schools or synagogues, but their feeling for God and for Judaism is strong.”

Equally notable has been the growth of the Iranian Jewish community, which numbers about 30,000 in Los Angeles, the largest such concentration in the world, including Tehran. Iranians in the San Fernando Valley have built a large cultural center and plan to build a new day school near the site.

“We follow each other because we came to L.A. and then saw our relatives come after us--that’s why we gather here,” explains Ruben Dokhanian, one of the elders at Eretz Cultural Center. “We like and love to be together, to work together and this building (the center) is a sign of that.”

But this new spirit is not only found among immigrants. The influence of synagogues is spreading to even distant suburbs, where Jewish migration has been growing rapidly. Temples like Etz Chaim, in the Ventura County community of Thousand Oaks, have doubled in size in 10 years. Serving more than 700 families, it supports Israel as both ancestral homeland and source of cultural guidance, but focuses on family, community and related religious issues. Many of its members are converts, usually spouses of Jews.

“This is our identity--the synagogue in the suburbs,” notes Etz Chaim’s rabbi, Shimon Paskow. “You don’t have a Jewish neighborhood. There’s no Fairfax or lower East Side as they had in New York, so this is where you identify as a Jew.”

The growth of grass-roots “edge city” congregations such as Etz Chaim, as well as the spiritual and economic dynamism of recent immigrants, may well represent the best hope of revitalizing the Los Angeles diaspora. In many ways, it expresses among Jews the same search for values and focus on self-help that have propelled the spectacular growth of some Protestant sects and the Mormons.

This revival is critical not only for Jews, but also for cosmopolitan urban regions like Southern California. As a distinct community, Jews have contributed a particular kind of economic innovativeness to the region--from the pioneer merchants of Downtown Los Angeles to the founders of Hollywood, from the garment industry to today’s growing Jewish immigrant businesses.

“Jews come here and they want to start a business that hasn’t been developed,” says Ann Volokh, who came to Los Angeles from Kiev in 1975 and now publishes Movieline, the nation’s second-largest film monthly. “There is this special entrepreneurial vein in Jews that is part of that heritage and part of our history. You have to come to a new place and start new. And we’ve been doing it so long, we started doing it well.”

At a time when middle-class flight should be a concern to business and politicians of all ethnic groups, the preservation of a strong Jewish community could contribute to making Southern California’s transformation into a multicultural metropolis a successful one. This should be a top priority for L.A.’s Jews, for whom this region has long served as a most congenial promised land.