10/14/2026
KlezCal is co-presenting 2 upcoming talks with Jewish Community Library, in partnership with the The Workers Circle / Arbeter Ring of Northern California. They are virtual and free to attend.
TONIGHT
Wednesday, October 14, 6:30- 7:30 pm
➡️Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Race, Labor, and Jewish Radicalism in Los Angeles, with Caroline Luce
https://jewishcommunitylibrary.org/events-listing/luce/
Luce’s new book offers an account of Eastern European Jewish immigration and Yiddish public culture in Southern California, focused on Boyle Heights, a neighborhood once home to the highest concentration of Jews west of Chicago as well as to dozens of other diasporic communities.
With new details drawn from previously untranslated Yiddish sources, it examines relationships and tensions that emerged as Jewish radicals worked to forge multiracial coalitions in the workplace and the community, including with their Mexican, Asian, and African-American neighbors
The book decenters traditional narratives of Jewish immigration and acculturation focused on cities of the northeast. It showcases the variety of organizing practices through which Jewish radicals recreated Yiddish public culture in LA, offering a new perspective on the relational dynamics of race and place-making. This book recovers the contributions of Eastern European Jewish radicals and trade unionists, demonstrating the ways in which immigrant workers shaped the city of LA.
➡️Save the Date: Sunday November 15, 3-4pm
Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair, with Alyssa Quint
https://jewishcommunitylibrary.org/events-listing/mississippi/
In their English translation of the Yiddish play Mississippi, Ellen Perecman and Alyssa Quint have undertaken a work of cultural salvage. Penned in 1935 by Polish-Jewish playwright Leib Malach, the play was performed in Warsaw more than a hundred times. Mississippi is a fictionalized retelling of the Scottsboro Affair, which began with the wrongful arrest of nine African American youths in Alabama in 1931. The play demonstrates how important it was to Yiddish writers of the 1920s and 1930s to grapple with the persecution of Black people in America.
