Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I don't doubt a large share of LA whites are Jewish, but I doubt a majority.
Yeah, there are Jews in basically all the white west side neighborhoods, but not many will have a Jewish majority. Places like Pacific Palisades have Jews, but they aren't particularly Jewish.
And there are still lots of whites in the fringe SFV, in places like Chatsworth. I don't think those places are particularly Jewish.
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I really meant to say more like half, not majority. There’s no way of knowing since LA city isn’t a neatly defined geopolitical entity like NYC. But it figures that if the county is 5.7% Jewish, and most of the very Jewish areas are in LA city, then 13-14% is within the realm of possibility. Jews are also not just limited to the Westside or SFV. One of the densest Jewish concentrations is the area between Koreatown and Beverly Hills, south of WeHo. My office (when I was commuting) is around 3rd and La Brea, and on Rosh Hashanah last year, more than half of the people walking by were dressed in either Orthodox clothing and/or had yarmulkes on. My bosses (who aren’t Jewish) live in that neighborhood as well, and they can confirm that there’s a large Orthodox population and it certainly shows in the voting results of their precinct. As a side note, I once took a Lyft ride to my sister’s BuzzFeed office just up the street; my driver was from Israel (and played Hebrew music during the entire ride) and he shouted something in Hebrew to a bunch of Jewish kids playing outside on the residential streets. You would also think the Hollywood Hills and Los Feliz, where there’s wealth associated with the entertainment and media industries, is quite Jewish.
It’s true that west of the 405 gets more WASPy, although Russian is the most common ancestry in Brentwood and Iran being by far the most common foreign place of birth (Russian and Iranian being proxies for “Jewish”). The Palisades are even more WASPy, but it’s still a very affluent community with many Hollywood types. Chatsworth has its own chabad and synagogue, and it’s adjacent to areas that are known to be rather Jewish—West Hills, Porter Ranch, Granada Hills, and Northridge. The latter three though are more racially diverse, so they’re not “exclusively” Jewish communities.
I also suspect that a good amount of LA Jews claim German ancestry, since we have a comparatively smaller Eastern European population. And since there are 1.5 million (have to double check that) people in Greater NYC who claim “German” ancestry but seemingly very few “regular” German Catholics or Protestants, I think it’s safe to assume that a good amount of LA Jews are identified as “German” in the Census, unless every single Russian, Pole, Hungarian, etc. is Jewish.