I think there were a lot of Jews in 90035 in the 1950s and then integration happened and blacks moved in and Jews moved out. Then Jews started moving back in in the 1980s and 90035 has become more Jewish every year since.
Here is a typical pattern for Jews expanding into black areas in and around 90035:
* First, unmarried IDF veterans move in. They don’t have possessions. They’re not afraid of blacks. They’re tough.
* Then, after the Israelis move in, other Jews without kids move in.
* Then married Jews move in and start families.
* Jewish families move in.
From the Jewish Journal in 2013:
Pico-Robertson’s Orthodox head east
Three years ago, when Edo Cohen’s observant friend moved several blocks away from the center of Pico-Robertson’s Orthodox community to an area east of La Cienega Boulevard, he remembers thinking, “I can’t believe he moved there.”
Now, Cohen, his wife Merav and their two daughters have joined the increasing number of observant Jews who are heading in the same direction — east, past the far reaches of the area traditionally considered Pico-Robertson to an adjacent, up-and-coming community known as Faircrest Heights that extends beyond the other side of La Cienega Boulevard.
At the time Cohen’s friend moved, the region bordering Pico-Robertson and Faircrest Heights, also known as the Pico-Fairfax corridor, was not known as an ideal location. Commercially, it was — and still is — a mixture of down-market retailers, medical marijuana stores and auto mechanic shops.
Residentially, though, the neighborhood is becoming an attractive spot for middle-class families. There are Spanish Colonials, one-story homes with front and back yards and ample street parking.
“It’s a little bit more quiet,” Cohen said, comparing the area around his residence on Point View Street to his former home in Pico-Robertson. And, Cohen added, “You get more bang for your buck.”
Whereas Pico-Robertson offers a middle-class environment with upper-class property values, homes less than 2 miles to the east offer similar living at a lower cost. This contrast appears to be the primary ingredient drawing observant Jews east.
But how far are observant families willing to move? As one goes east of La Cienega, the number of synagogues within reasonable walking distance, particularly for families with children, dwindles with each block…Walking down Pico, with its medley of kosher grocers, delis, Judaica shops and synagogues, it’s difficult to imagine a time, not so long ago, when a yarmulke sighting would have turned heads. The observant Jewish community of Pico-Robertson has been developing since the 1980s, but not until the 1990s did it become the go-to location for Orthodox Jews in the city.
According to Brander, the area east of Shenandoah Street — just a couple of blocks from the intersection of Pico and Robertson — “could have been Texas” when he moved to the neighborhood in the early ’90s.
Rabbi Aaron Parry grew up in Pico-Robertson in the 1950s, lived there until the 1990s and now lives in the La Brea neighborhood. He said that one “would need a microscope to see a Jew walking on the street” for most of the time that he lived there.“Pico-Robertson has always been the landing strip” for new, particularly young, Jews moving to L.A., said demographer Pini Herman, who also writes a blog for the Journal…
The increasing home prices remind demographer and Herman’s Journal co-blogger Bruce A. Phillips, of what happened to Pico-Robertson decades ago. That’s when rising property values priced out many lower-income renters and persuaded some long-time homeowners to sell and cash out, in effect gentrifying the area.
Alana Samuels writes for The Atlantic:
Has America Given Up on the Dream of Racial Integration?
Across the country, communities are starkly divided, with African Americans living in one section and whites living in another, and a lot of people seem to be okay with that.
The Fair Housing Act became law in 1968, a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Its goal was to prevent landlords and lenders from turning away tenants and homebuyers because of their color, but Senator Edward Brooke, one of the sponsors of the bill (and the first black man elected to the U.S. Senate), had bigger ideas. He wanted to use the law to integrate cities and suburbs, reversing the effects of decades of housing discrimination, discrimination that had often been perpetuated by the federal government…
Affluent neighborhoods throughout the country resist the construction of affordable housing in their backyards. White residents self-segregate, and though poverty might not be limited to urban areas, it is often the most concentrated where minorities live. In places such as Beaumont, federal funding to build homes for black residents in white areas is lost because neither white nor black residents want that to happen.
From Princeton University Press:
In The Shifting Grounds of Race, Scott Kurashige highlights the role African Americans and Japanese Americans played in the social and political struggles that remade twentieth-century Los Angeles.
Linking paradigmatic events like Japanese American internment and the Black civil rights movement, Kurashige transcends the usual “black/white” dichotomy to explore the multiethnic dimensions of segregation and integration. Racism and sprawl shaped the dominant image of Los Angeles as a “white city.” But they simultaneously fostered a shared oppositional consciousness among Black and Japanese Americans living as neighbors within diverse urban communities.
Kurashige demonstrates why African Americans and Japanese Americans joined forces in the battle against discrimination and why the trajectories of the two groups diverged.
You could remove “Japanese” and insert “Jews” and you would have a similar narrative. Sometimes different groups have shared interests and sometimes they have clashing interests. Neither Jews nor Japanese, in general, want to live, work, socialize or worship with blacks, but in politics, they are all important members of the Coalition of the Fringe and thus vote for the Democrats.
