News: Mapping Jewish LA Launches

Todd Presner announced this a few weeks ago, and I’m behind in getting to share about it or test it. Presner explains Mapping Jewish LA:

What if you could “go back in time” and visit Boyle Heights in the 1920s? What if you could hear the music and voices coming out of Zellman’s Men’s Wear or Ginsberg’s Vegetarian Café? What if you could follow the pathways of immigrant families who just landed in LA in 1900 to make a new life for themselves?
Through a partnership with the UCLA Library and Special Collections, the University of Southern California, and more than a dozen community archives, the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies is embarking on an ambitious, five-year initiative to create a multimedia, digital archive of Jewish LA. The archive will be accessed by an innovative web platform called “HyperCities” that will allow users to “drill down” at particular places throughout the city—for example, Pico-Robertson in the 1950s, or Boyle Heights in the 1920s—to uncover the traces and history of Jewish LA. The project will not only preserve the rich history of Jewish LA for generations to come, but will also make it accessible using cutting-edge digital technologies that will stimulate new research, teaching, and community engagement throughout Los Angeles and beyond.
To learn more, please visit: http://mappingjewishla.org

UF’s Rebecca Jefferson, Curator of the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica, recently launched the Jewish Jacksonville Online Exhibit and Jewish Jacksonville Collection. It’s very exciting to see new works like Mapping Jewish LA and Jewish Jacksonville and to think of the possibilities for new combinations and new research with access to these materials in a situated context.