From the early 1920s to the 1950s, when the multiracial neighborhood of Boyle Heights included the largest Jewish population “west of the Mississippi,” the Boyle Heights Jewish community centers were popular and vital local institutions. A well-equipped center usually included multi-purpose activity rooms, a community auditorium, a gymnasium, a playground, and even on-site social services. In Boyle Heights, two largely secular community centers operated in the area while a third neighborhood center included Hebrew language classes and religious instruction.
The secular-oriented (non-religious) centers were particularly notable for two specific policies: an open-to-all (non-Jews) policy, and an “open forum” policy regarding public events like guest speakers, instructional presentations, and film screenings. Generally reflecting the sociopolitical ideals of this bustling Jewish enclave, the presenters usually ranged from FDR liberals to ardent socialists. There were also interracial discussion panels, and in the post-war years, an active focus on intercultural programming.
Shortly after the end of WWII, a hostile and recklessly zealous anticommunist movement soon emerged throughout the country, eventually leading to the weaponization of the U.S. government against anyone who lawfully identified or engaged anywhere within the broad ideological spectrum of the American left. Consequently, several Boyle Heights leftists associated with the local community centers found themselves in the crosshairs of several government committee investigations into “un-American activities.”
This is the first of a five-part series, then concluding with a brief postscript, about the founding of the three Boyle Heights Jewish community centers, plus the emergence of a fourth center operated by the founders of a left-leaning Methodist ministry. The posts will look at the subsequent events involving the Un-American Activities Committee hearings and the committee testimony of some of the community center leaders. The series will also look at some of the activities of the community centers, and then the aftermath of these institutions, including the buildings themselves, how they survived, and how one was destroyed by a single act of such government recklessness that it left community members in total shock.
In 1925, the first Jewish community center in Boyle Heights was established under the leadership of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and the Federation of Jewish Charities. Known as the Modern Talmud Torah and Social Center, the new 3-story wood-framed structure, with an adjoining playground added soon after, was located at 2317 Michigan Avenue, near the sloping Soto Street intersection.
In 1939, a much-needed expansion to replace the overcrowded community center started to take place. The 3-story structure was razed and replaced with the George and Ida Lutz Memorial Building, a multi-purpose building that included an assembly hall, classrooms, a meeting room, activity space, and even a photographic room. The following six black-and-white photos below (a seventh is from the L.A. Times) of the Lutz Memorial Building were taken by photographer Julius Shulman and originally appeared in the February 1941 issue of Architectural Forum.
Noted for its modernist, steel-frame architectural features, and highlighting a real coup for community leaders, the Lutz Memorial Building was designed by architect Raphael S. Soriano. A Sephardi Jew originally from Greece, Soriano was part of a small group of regionally significant midcentury modernist architects known for designing several case study homes in the far more affluent areas of West Los Angeles.
Furthermore, helping to move the construction project forward was photographer Julius Shulman, who moved to Boyle Heights with his family at the age of 10 in 1920 and became one of the most acclaimed American architectural photographers of the 20th century. In a 2008 interview with the progressive Jewish newspaper The Forward, Shulman said that as a member of the Jewish center’s fundraising committee, he was instrumental in brokering the deal for the construction project between the committee and his close friend, Raphael Soriano.
In 1940, the new Max Straus Gymnasium (and auditorium space—there was a hall upstairs) was dedicated at the other end of the adjoining playground, facing Soto Street. The newly built community center and gymnasium (the gymnasium address was 213 N. Soto Street) made the venue one of the largest and most modern community centers in Los Angeles. By this time, the entire community center campus was renamed the Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center (Soto-Michigan JCC).
In 1931, due to an internal disagreement over the center’s mission, the responsibility for providing most of the Hebrew learning programs and religious instruction moved to a brand-new Jewish community center called the Menorah Center. Located at the corner of Wabash Avenue and Alma Street in neighboring City Terrace, the new facility also offered a playground, youth activities, a community hall and gym, a popular swimming pool, and several community social services.
More importantly for mainstream liberal Jews who were concerned with local Christian and communist influences, the new center offered programs focusing on traditional Jewish culture and values with a Zionist-oriented approach. This was a welcome alternative to the Soto-Michigan center’s secular orientation, with its more leftist-leaning open forum lecture series, and open-to-all policy. In her 1994 book, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A., Professor Deborah Dash Moore noted this wasn’t unusual: “historically, secular Jewish centers attracted liberal and often radical Jews.” According to a March 13, 1931 article in the weekly Jewish newspaper, the B’nai B’rith Messenger, with the headline, Menorah Center to Fight Anti-Jewish Influences, its mission was described as helping to “prevent young people from being compelled to submit to the attractions offered by the missionaries or the Communists.”
In the meantime, the non-religious and progressive Soto-Michigan JCC continued to remain popular with its open-door, integrationist policy. As former Boyle Heights resident Judy Hurwitz Chaiken recalls in Boyle Heights: Recollections and Remembrances of the Boyle Heights Jewish Community in Los Angeles, 1920s-1960s, edited by Abraham Hoffman, “Even though the Center was sponsored by Jewish organizations, it was open to everyone in the neighborhood, and we all cherished it as our meeting place.”
With its open forum policy, the Soto-Michigan JCC emerged as a venue for left-leaning, intercultural community engagement focusing on community organizing and education. The center routinely hosted programs featuring groups like the L.A. branches of the socialist-oriented California Labor School (or its affiliate, PEC – Peoples Educational Center), and the Actors Laboratory Theater. While these and other participating organizations were commonly known for their progressive programs and inclusive membership, many were also included in the state Attorney General’s list of subversive (communist) organizations.
Examples of some of the Soto-Michigan JCC events are shown in the newspaper articles below, such as a lecture by socialist author (and future editor of The Nation magazine) Carey McWilliams; a post-Zoot Suit Riots neighborhood council meeting discussing racial unity; several plays sponsored by the communist-affiliated International Workers Order; a rally supporting federal legislation for the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee; a six-week course focusing on civil rights by the California Labor School; and a community theater production of Irwin Shaw’s 1936 anti-war play, Bury the Dead.
But the Soto-Michigan JCC’s programming also made it, like the Cooperative Center before it, another Boyle Heights institution targeted by red-baiting anticommunists. This time, it happened during the “second red scare” that emerged at the end of WWII, routinely referred to as McCarthyism or the McCarthy era. As USC Professor George J. Sanchez explains in his indispensable 2021 book, Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, “in the postwar period, political radicalism increasingly became associated with promoting and defending multiracialism. Invariably, the combination of radicalism and diversity in a relatively small neighborhood like Boyle Heights made the two seem uniquely intertwined in Southern California, and various leftist organizations utilized this to defend their politics in the red-baiting McCarthy period.”
In 1948, the Soto-Michigan Center was the target of an investigation by the California Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, headed by State Senator Jack Tenney. Formerly a liberal, progressive-minded president of a musicians’ union, Tenney became a staunch conservative and anticommunist after several political setbacks. (Political cohort and future L.A. mayor Sam Yorty also followed the same ideological trajectory.) A virulent antisemite, Tenney also authored several published screeds conflating Judaism with communism. A former small-time band leader, his only distinction before politics was writing the Gene Autry hit song, Mexicali Rose. (In the late 1950s, Tenney’s only child would become the first woman mayor of Monterey Park.)
Tenney specifically charged the Soto-Michigan JCC with allowing several “communist front groups” to present “Marxist lectures” while receiving public funds from the Community Chest. While many of the left-of-center topics presented at the center promoted progressive ideals like supporting labor unions and multicultural coalitions, the discourse was hardly steeped in the arcane language of Marxist theory as the senator’s description suggested. Nevertheless, anticommunist crusaders charged these groups as subversive and un-American, and thus beholden to Moscow, while failing to distinguish that these organizations represented a broad range of the political left. On September 7, 1948, the state’s Un-American Activities Committee held a hearing in downtown Los Angeles and requested Joseph Esquith, the director of the Soto-Michigan JCC, to appear before the committee.
Concerning the committee’s accusation that “subversive communist groups” were using the Soto-Michigan JCC, like allowing the People’s Educational Center (PEC) to screen a film during one event, Esquith testified, “that the policy of the Center was to allow its use by all free discussion groups.”
Another brief description of Esquith’s testimony before the committee also appeared in the 9/8/1948 edition of the Chico Record, with a headline featuring Tenney’s charge that Marxist lectures were being presented at the Soto-Michigan Center. The article noted that Esquith had stressed to the committee that “the center was open to all elements of the Jewish community for educational purposes.”
During one exchange, Esquith was asked about a frequent guest speaker named Averill Berman. The exchange led Esquith to explain to Senator Tenney that the open forum policy of the Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center was simply “part of the democratic process,” after Tenney suggested the committee was not against open public discussion, if it was the correct kind. Below is the transcript of the exchange between Tenney and Esquith (pages 47-48) from the California State Archives.
Although he was only mentioned by the committee once, another radical player who obviously caught the committee’s attention was popular radio commentator Averill Berman. An outspoken leftist who supported an array of progressive and civil rights causes, Berman was a sought-after public speaker throughout the Eastside, especially at the Soto-Michigan JCC. (In 1950, he co-led a tenant’s rights motorcade with councilman Ed Roybal through the streets of Boyle Heights.) A professor of history at Los Angeles City College, Berman remained an outspoken leftist until his tragic death in 1971 at age 51, when he was shot to death by local TV sportscaster Stan Duke at the Wilshire area home of Duke’s estranged wife.
At the conclusion of Joseph Esquith’s testimony before the committee, Chairman Tenney engaged in a combative exchange with Esquith when he refused to give an unequivocal yes or no answer when Tenney asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Esquith replied he would answer by reading from a prepared statement, which Senator Tenney insisted was unacceptable and was simply an evasion of the question.
Like many “uncooperative” witnesses who appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee, these witnesses declared the committee didn’t have the right to force individuals to answer questions on matters of conscience or political beliefs because it violated their First Amendment freedoms as well as the protection provided by the Fifth Amendment. Below is the transcript (pages 57-59) of Soto-Michigan JCC Director Joseph Esquith’s concluding testimony regarding the committee chair attempting to compel Esquith to answer a question about his political affiliation to the committee’s own satisfaction, disregarding any notions of constitutional rights and protection.
On 10/14/1948, the local Los Angeles newspaper, the California Eagle, reported that a few days after the hearing, a turn-away crowd of over 600 attended a meeting in support of the Soto-Michigan JCC, with supporters and a series of speakers demanding that the Tenney Committee be abolished. One of those who spoke in defense of the Soto-Michigan JCC was Charlotta Bass, the trailblazing Black publisher and editor of the California Eagle, the largest and most successful Black-owned newspaper on the West Coast. In 1952, Bass became the first African American woman to be on the ballot as a candidate for Vice President of the United States (68 years before Kamala Harris) when she ran on the Progressive Party ticket.
As part of their coverage of the Eastside protest against the Tenney hearings, the 10/21/48 edition of the California Eagle, with the headline, Soto Center Facts, published the entire speech delivered at the protest rally by Charles Barsh of the Union of Carpenters, AFL Local 1976.
Despite media coverage and demands by Soto-Michigan JCC supporters, the Tenney Committee was never abolished, and according to Deborah Dash Moore, “no vigorous statement was made by the Jewish Community Council” regarding Tenney’s attack on the Soto-Michigan JCC. In an effort to address the committee’s charges, a Soto-Michigan JCC committee undertook a survey of its community users from 1947 to 1948. This also allowed them to display some transparency to nervous organization funders like the Jewish Community Council and the nonsectarian Los Angeles Welfare Federation, who were worried about being accused, if not an outright communist, at the very least, a fellow traveler.
Their findings disputed Tenney’s charge that the center routinely hosted “Marxist lectures” by communist front groups. The center’s own policy denied overt political organizations the use of its facility but also prohibited the center from asking individuals about their political affiliation. In an excerpt from his 1951 book, The Tenney Committee, which analyzed the workings and impact of the Tenney Committee, UC Berkeley constitutional law professor Edward L. Barrett described how, in late October of 1948, Paul Yost, president of the Welfare Federation, was provided with the center’s survey findings by the Jewish Centers Association:
Despite Barrett’s conclusion that “after this exchange of letters the matter was dropped,” it was actually far from over. In a climate of red-baiting paranoia and public demands for loyalty oaths, funding organizations dispersing public money were fearful of subsidizing, even indirectly, an organization the state charged to be a communist front group, regardless of how specious the charge. These kinds of charges and accusations were especially threatening to the city’s Jewish community, usually seen as liberal stalwarts, who were experiencing growing mainstream acceptance into the broader postwar Los Angeles community. In the growing Cold War atmosphere, progressivism was increasingly a pejorative term, viewed as simply another word for communism.
Part 2 of this blog series will look at the City Terrace Cultural Center and its founders, the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO), its affiliation with the International Workers Order (IWO), and the political ramifications of its association with the Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center.