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Cont Jewry (2014) 34:125146
DOI 10.1007/s12397-014-9123-0
Bruce A. Phillips
Received: 18 April 2014 / Accepted: 4 July 2014 / Published online: 5 August 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract Having grown up on the West Coast in a largely unobservant family, I have been interested in some of the more marginal Jewish populations, including Jews in the West. My outlook on Jewish sociology was heavily inuenced by my teacher Marshall Sklare but continues to unfold in new directions, including historical demography and qualitative research.
Keywords Jewish demography Ethnography
My Family
My family narrative is somewhat out of the American ordinary, as neither of my parents ever lived in one of the major Jewish population centers such as New York, Detroit, Cleveland, or Chicago. My mothers father lived briey in New York after arriving from Galicia, but did not like it there, so he moved with his new wife to Texas. My mother was born in Cleburn, Texas. Her birth certicate says Jew in the box for race. My mothers father died when she was only six, and her mother moved to Los Angeles in 1919, settling in Boyle Heights (to the east of downtown, across the LA River). At that time Boyle Heights was beginning a transition from a predominantly white streetcar suburb to a multi-ethnic heavily immigrant community made up of Jews, Mexicans, blacks, Japanese, and Molokans (a spiritual Christian sect that broke off from the Russian Orthodox Church). My mother attended the Yiddish folkschule, an after-school program for learning Yiddish language and culture.
B. A. Phillips (&)
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Skirball Campus, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: bphillips@huc.edu
From the Ends of the West: My Jewish Demographic Narrative
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126 B. A. Phillips
Several of my grandmothers siblings followed her to Texas. My maternal grandfather and his wifes brother (Uncle Willy) started a typical Jewish business: They gathered up old rags and sold them in bulk. One difference between West Texas and the Lower East Side: In Texas, they carried pistols and (according to Uncle Willy) occasionally drew their weapons. My Uncle Willy took over the role of grandparent for us and would visit regularly from Dallas where he had a pawn shop in the Deep Elum (Elm Street...