Like most of the city's population, L.A.'s Jews were caught by surprise by the riots that followed the not-guilty verdict in April's police brutality case. Now, more than six months after the tumult, the question is, what good did years of bridge-building' do L.A. or its Jews, and what will their role be in the city's future?
Under different circumstances, April 29, 1992 might have gone down in the annals of Jewish Los Angeles as Outreach Day. Coalition-making and bridge-building have always been major activities of Jewish organizations, but that day there seemed to be a veritable overflow of good-neighborliness.
On this fateful Wednesday, a group of cheerful Ethiopian teenagers from Israel toured several inner-city high schools. Uptown, the New Leaders Project—a recently assembled group of young Jewish professionals—explored cultural and political affinities over lunch with their Korean-American counterparts. In Santa Monica, members of a World War II African-American tank corps battalion observed Holocaust Memorial Day by reuniting with the survivors of a death camp they had liberated. Elsewhere in the city, the American Jewish Committee played host to a group of still-remorseful visiting Germans called the Konrad Adenauer Group.
And at the First African Methodist Church in South Central Los Angeles, Jewish community representatives turned out in force to express their solidarity with the city's Afro-Americans. The rally was intended as a peaceful protest against that day's acquittal of four Los Angeles policemen, who had beaten a black motorist, Rodney King, senseless under the dispassionate gaze of a coincidental observer's hand-held video camera.
And as the Jewish and black leaders sat by in the church, all hell broke loose.
By nightfall, the city was experiencing the worst civil disturbance in recent U.S. history. In the next two days, 51 people were killed, and hundreds of buildings and businesses looted and razed.
As the mayhem and tumult of those smoke- and siren-filled days began to recede, however, some Jewish residents of Los Angeles began asking themselves what, if anything, their years of bridge-building had achieved. "These outreach programs are our bread and butter," noted Steven Windmueller, executive director of the Jewish Federation Council's Community Relations Committee. "But I remember one of my colleagues asking me that night whether we weren't kidding ourselves that we could make a difference."
More than six months after the riots, many L.A. Jews are still asking themselves this same question. Opinions differ over whether the riots had a permanent effect on Jewish life. One Jewish federation official interviewed contends it was minimal, that painful memories have quickly been tucked away. "Look at the people sitting here," he said over lunch at Nibblers close by the Jewish Federation building where Jewish leaders frequently commingle. "No one is thinking about the fact that the Big Five sporting goods outlet we just walked past was looted."
But others believe the influence of the riots may prove both seminal and lasting. "They had a searing effect on the Jewish community," contends David Lehrer, western regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. Adds Joel Kotkin, a columnist and academic: "They shattered the illusions of Jews that they could hide in their golden ghettos and do their little fund-raisers and not have to pay attention to the broader community."
While many communal leaders responded to the riots by redoubling their efforts at ethnic outreach, their constituencies frequently retreated behind physical and emotional barricades, unwilling to grapple with an urban nightmare.
The story is told, for instance, of a civic-minded local rabbi who wanted some of the older children from his day school to participate in the city-wide cleanup after the disturbances had run their course. "But when some parents heard about this," noted one member of the community, "they went ballistic."
If left to widen, this schism between leaders and their constituencies could have far-reaching consequences for Los Angeles Jewry. There are 600,000 Jews here, the second largest Jewish population in the Diaspora, after New York. But however affluent and influential the community, only a quarter are affiliated with the city's communal or religious organizations.
If greater numbers join the ranks of those disaffected from Jewish life and organizations, disinclined to respond to their leaders' calls, this aging population could find itself becoming politically toothless and socially infirm.
Approximately 65 businesses owned by Jews (most of them Iranians, Russians and Israelis) were burned out or looted during the riots and at least two Jewish men were killed one in Venice and one in South Central. Some Jewish neighborhoods notably the southern reaches of the Beverly-Fairfax area and the heavily Orthodox Pico-Robertson region experienced incursions by roving bands of looters and arsonists, most of whom retreated when neighbors closed ranks and took to the streets. Rabbi Baruch Hecht, associate director of Chabad of California, recounts how scores of hasidic and Orthodox men with garden hoses braved threats from pistol-wielding men in cars to extinguish a fire in a Jewish-owned camera shop.
"I'll never forget receiving a call asking me to remove our family's sefer Torah from our shul because the rioters had reached La Cienega Boulevard," recounts Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Further east, on the outskirts of Koreatown, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, one of the city's oldest and most prominent congregations, found itself at the center of the growing vortex. Weekend observances were canceled.
The fire this time, though, was not expressly directed at Jews as opposed to 1964, when the Watts riots targeted many Jewish shop and property owners in the inner city ghettos.
Having bettered themselves economically, most no longer live or work near blacks, Latinos or Asians. Few still own property in the ghettos of South Central or East L.A. Their day-to-day encounters with the city, and their awareness of the economic pain and dislocation experienced by so many of its citizens in recent years, had grown increasingly limited as they moved up the social ladder into the middle and upper-middle class.
But as the smoke cleared, some Jews discovered that there was a flip side to their rising fortunes. They were no longer as relevant to the city's power structure as they might have been a generation ago. Their once staunch alliance with Mayor Tom Bradley had long since disintegrated. Jewish politicians like recently defeated Congressman Mel Levine and City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky found their political standing undermined by their harping on Israel, often to the perceived neglect of civic affairs.
Most of the Jewish community's various organizations and institutions have focused more on the plight of Russian Jewry or Ethiopian emigration to Israel than on the social and economic chaos in their own front yards. Symptomatic of declining Jewish influence was the relative dearth of Jewish voices on the prestigious "L.A. 2000" committee, formed in 1987 to explore the city's prospects. There is a similar, and to many shocking, absence of Jews on the more recent "Rebuild L.A." committee an effort to create a joint communal team to repair the riot damage appointed by Bradley and headed by former baseball commissioner and 1984 L.A. Olympics organizer Peter V. Ueberroth. Some members of the community do appear to have plugged themselves back into the urban loop with a vengeance. Retired food and produce distributor Mickey Weiss, for nstance, moved a charitable food distribution program he had initiated in 1987 into overdrive after the riots. Weiss had created a foundation whose task was to take still edible food discarded by the city's markets and distribute it to churches, food kitchens and charitable organizations. Within weeks of the riots, Weiss was reclaiming and redistributing up to 1.5 million pounds of produce a month, as compared with roughly half that before. And numerous Jewish businessmen and professionals have come forth, offering services and advice to minority groups and institutions on an individual, pro-bono basis.
Many Jews, however like many of its other whites do seem to have disengaged. Some have fled the state, or are seeking to do so. Other, affluent Jews are retreating behind gated communities, deeper into the gilded ghettos of Beverly Hills and Brentwood, or the hillside reaches of Sherman Oaks, Encino and Tarzana.
For those who lack the money to pull out, there are other options. Not long after the riots, the local Federation Council's house organ dedicated a cover story to the phenomenon of Jews buying guns, reporting that increasing numbers of Jews were rushing to local weapons emporiums.
The majority, however, have neither bought guns nor erected gates. Instead, they are pulling back behind formidable barricades erected in their own minds. As the economy continues to deteriorate and the tenor of inter-ethnic relations sours, they take the path of least resistance, venturing into the urban sprawl that is Los Angeles as infrequently as possible. Content to make beelines from work to home and back again along the city's isolating freeways, they keep their eyes on the roads, and await the next urban conflagration with the same doomed passivity as most Angelinos reserve for the proverbial seismic "Big One."
This propensity to burrow underground has leaders worried, and not only because they could lose their power base if enough people do it. "Jews have a stake in Los Angeles," says Rabbi Laura Geller, executive director of the West Coast branch of the American Jewish Congress. "The health of the city is directly connected to that of the Jewish community.
"We are primarily an urban people," argues Geller, "and we have been since we got to the U.S. Detroit has already become judenrein (Jew-free). If Jews move out of the city, it will be bad for everyone. But most of all, it will be bad for us."
Columnist Kotkin concurs: "If all the Jews in L.A. move to the distant suburbs or to Utah or Washington state, history shows they will no longer be Jews within a generation."