How different became America

The two young men whose portrait adorns the cover of “Jewish Life in the American West” are brothers, although they could hardly be more distinct in appearance. One is a dapper urbanite in coat, collar and tie. The other is wearing the iconic apparel of the American cowboy: a set of chaps on his legs, a holstered six-gun on his hip, a bandana around his throat, a Stetson on his head and a lariat in his hand.

The arresting image reminds us that the Jewish immigrant experience in America did not always begin (or end) at Ellis Island and the Lower East Side of New York. These two young men are the brothers Frankel. They arrived from Hungary at the port of Galveston, Texas, and their photograph was snapped on the streets of Cushing, Okla., around 1920. And, as we are shown in “Jewish Life,” they were among tens of thousands of Jewish men, women and children who participated in settling the American West.

“Surprisingly, American Jewish historians have largely ignored the West except in terms of local or state history,” writes Ava F. Kahn, editor of “Jewish Life,” a collection of vintage photographs, historical documents and scholarly essays that has been published in conjunction with an exhibition closing Monday at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage. “[They] have been fixated on the New York paradigm.”

Some Jews came West in search of gold, some came as merchants, some pioneered the land as farmers and ranchers. All of them were attracted by the promise that the frontier has always offered, then and now: a degree of freedom and opportunity that could not be found in the crowded cities of the Atlantic seaboard, much less in the shtetls and ghettos of Europe. But the Jewish pioneers were so moved by what they experienced that they expressed their patriotism for their new homeland in biblical terms.

“The United States is my Zion,” declared a congressman named Julius Kahn in 1919, “and San Francisco is my Jerusalem.”

Indeed, as we learn in “Jewish Life,” the American West was always seen by some Jews as an alternative to Palestine as the site of Jewish settlement. A utopian movement known as Am Olam, based in Odessa, started sending Russian Jews to agricultural colonies in the West in 1881, including one in South Dakota that dubbed itself “Bethlehem Judea” and operated like a kibbutz on the Great Plains: “The colony Bethlehem Judea is founded ... to help the Jewish people in its emancipation from slavery,” declared the pioneering Jews. “The colony shall demonstrate to the enemies of our people the world over that Jews are capable of farming.”

A certain whimsy and lively good humor can be found in the images that are collected in “Jewish Life.” A map of the country from “Guide to the United States for the Jewish Immigrant,” for example, is fully bilingual in English and Yiddish, which allows us to see how “Kentucky” and “Oklahoma” and “California” are spelled in Hebrew characters. And a handbill for the Jewish Theatrical Company of Denver announces a performance of “Delightful Jewish Vaudeville” and offers free admission for ladies to performances of Yiddish melodramas titled “The Blind Love” and “A Sister’s Sacrifice.”

The Jewish experience in the West is not quite so obscure as Kahn’s introductory essay may suggest. The subject has been the focus of long and distinguished work by Rabbi William M. Kramer and Harriet and Fred Rochlin, among many others, and their writings are cited and occasionally celebrated in the essays that appear in “Jewish Life.” Still, Kahn and her fellow contributors succeed in giving us an intriguing and illuminating glimpse of an overlooked chapter in the history of the American frontier. The role of Jewish movie moguls in the making of Hollywood and its version of the Wild West, for example, is deeply familiar, but the real-life saga of Jewish cowboys and collective farmers is considerably fresher.

New and sometimes surprising ways of looking at life in Southern California can be found in “Changing Faces, Changing Places,” a collection of maps that translates the raw data of the 2000 census into vivid and lucid displays.

“Any person who lived in Southern California before 1960 but moved away for forty years might have difficulty in recognizing parts of it today,” write demographers and geographers James P. Allen and Eugene Turner, whose impressive cartographical handiwork is showcased here. “The population that was once overwhelmingly white, with roots in the Mediterranean and Eastern United States, now ... captures the diversity of peoples on this planet.”

The maps depict in cartographical terms exactly what we see when we arrive in Los Angeles on a night flight: a vast and unbroken stretch of urban development that begins at Temecula and San Clemente and continues to Oxnard and Ventura. And we are reminded that there is no “there” there. On a map that measures population density, the only splotches of red, which denote census tracts with a population density of more than 25,000 people per square mile, are seen in Santa Ana, Long Beach, a few spots in the Los Angeles Basin and a few more in the San Fernando Valley.

Changes in ethnicity are similarly dramatic. The lines that chart the change in “white” population -- a term that the authors prefer to “Caucasian” -- slant downward at the same angle at which the lines that chart the change in Latino population slant upward. Another map shows exactly where the “white” population has gone, that is, out of the Basin and into the outlying communities of Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley, Santa Clarita and Corona, Laguna Hills and Mission Viejo, Murrieta and Temecula.

The change in black population is similarly centrifugal. Over the last decade of the 20th century, according to one map, the black population of South-Central Los Angeles has sharply declined, and the black population of such far-flung communities as Lancaster and Palmdale, Moreno Valley and Perris, Fontana and Rialto, has increased. “Latinos,” the authors report, “have replaced much of the black population in South Central.”

Above all, “Changing Faces, Changing Places” shows what “ethnic diversity” really looks like in cartographical terms. “[T]he ethnic character of Southern California is impossible to understand without examining it geographically,” the authors insist. And, although they concede that “ethnic enclaves” remain strong and distinct, they discern a hopeful trend in where and how people of different cultures and colors coexist.

“Increased settlements of all groups in outer suburbs and better neighborhoods, increased homeownership among blacks and Latinos, and reduced residential separation of whites, blacks and Central Americans are all encouraging,” they conclude. “[R]esidential mobility has, on the average, led to improved status and satisfaction for Southern Californians, regardless of their ethnic group.”