Volume #30, Issue #3, April, 1998
NORTON B. STERN:
PIONEER WESTERN JEWISH
HISTORIAN AND
FOUNDING EDITOR OF THE FIRST WESTERN
JEWISH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
by Harriet Rochlin
Editor's Note: With the
change in editorship it is only proper that a few words be said about the
founder of
WSJH.
—G. S.
Dr, Norton Stern, the founding editor of
the quarterly
Western States Jewish History,
and an eminent authority on Los Angeles
and California Jewish history was
an innovative lone rider who on a
shoestring did the work of a four-person staff. He started the
publication in 1968 with $500 and the
sponsorship of the Southern California Jewish Historical
Society. (The quarterly's first editorial
committee included pioneer Los Angeles Jewish historians William Blumenthal,
Justin Turner, and Dr. Max Vorspan.) Dr.
Stern edited some ninety issues, the last
one Volume 24, Number 1 —while he
was seriously ill.
The subscription list
includes institutions and individuals in
every state in the union, also in Israel, England, France, Sweden,
and Japan. Many major American
university libraries and Jewish libraries subscribe, as do
institutions as diverse as the Library of Congress, the Royal Library of Sweden, and the University of Alaska
library. Now in its [thirtieth] year it is still the only periodical of its
kind.
"Until Norton, records
of Jewish life in the early West were scattered, and largely commemorative,"
noted Dr. Will Kramer, Dr. Stern's associate editor, frequent collaborator,
research trip companion, and friend of thirty years.
A native of St. Paul,
Minnesota, who grew up in Los Angeles,
Dr. Stern caught his first glimpses of California's submerged Jewish past
while browsing in local rare book shops in the early
1960s. He read through the slim body of
Jewish materials avail-able, and searched for Jewish references in general
works of Californiana in libraries and archives statewide. The first of his
numerous research trips was to gold rush towns in Northern California to log
the gravestones in abandoned Jewish cemeteries. His first lectures on
California's Jewish pioneers were to the religious school classes he taught,
and to the Western Association of Temple Educators. His first scholarly work
was a bibliography of California Jewish resources for the association.
He
completed his first book in 1967, California Jewish History: a descriptive bibliography,
others ensued: Mannie 's Crowd:
Emanuel Lowenstein, A Colorful Los Angeles Character,
and
Baja California: Jewish Refuge and Homeland.
Others he coauthored with Dr. William M. Kramer:
California Family Newmark: An Intimate History,
and
Morris L. Goodman: The First American
Councilman of the City of Los Angeles.
According to the twelve-year index of the quarterly (in itself an
invaluable research tool), Dr. Stern also
wrote fifty articles, alone and in collaboration with Kramer, between 1968 and 1980. A perusal of
the remaining, un-indexed issues confirms that the editor and his sometime collaborator were no less prolific in the next twelve years.
Some of his articles animate and document diverse aspects of early western
Jewish life: "The Sinsheimers of San Luis Obispo"; "Some Further Notes on Michel
Goldwater"; "A `Murder' to be
Forgotten." Others are seminal essays that challenge received assumptions:
"The Major Role of Polish Jews in the Pioneer West"; "Anti-Semitism and the
Jewish Image in the Early West"; "An Issue of Jewish Marriage and Divorce in
Early San Francisco."
After Dr.
Stern died in 1992, Dr. Kramer agreed to become the editor and publisher of
Western States Jewish History.
Harriet Rochlin is writer of
both fiction and non-fiction. Her best known work is
Pioneer Jews of the West.
Future writing has been promised for WSJH.
