Courtesy of J. Paul Getty Trust

Stahl House (Case Study House #22), Hollywood Hills, Julius Shulman, 1960.

Jewish history in turn-of-the-century America usually conjures up images of deeply religious East Coast garment district workers or greased-back, penny-pinching Old Hollywood studio moguls.

The Autry National Center attempts to break down this second stereotype with its latest exhibit, "Jews in the Los Angeles Mosaic."

"This was not primarily, in certain respects, an immigrant community," says W. Richard West, Jr., president and CEO of the Autry National Center. "It was a settlement community who came from elsewhere ready to roll once they hit the city. And they did. What this exhibit is about is ... an effort to figure out how those who comprise the Jewish community here in Los Angeles touched other communities and touched the great diversity of other communities here in Los Angeles."

The exhibit wouldn't be accurate without the inevitable tributes to Hollywood and includes mementos like Billy Wilder's Oscars and a "Scroll of Fame" with signatures of guests who came to the 1935 grand opening of Max Factor's cosmetic studio (Judy Garland and "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd among them). But it also highlights less-glorified or forgotten Jewish people and families who influenced the city, such as:

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Auschwitz survivors show their tattoos in Numbered

It's been over sixty years since the Holocaust, but time has not faded the memories for those who survived it. And as part of this year's 27th Israel Film Festival, a tribute will be made to the Holocaust survivors and their families with a special screening of the documentary Numbered at the Saban Theater on Sunday, April 28 at noon.

This event will highlight the Second Generation movement, which sheds light on the cross-generational transference of trauma and/or coping skills from Holocaust survivors onto their children -- and even their grandchildren.

Numbered shares the tales of those who survived the worst concentration camp, Auschwitz -- the only camp that tattooed its prisoners with numbers -- showcasing the different ways these survivors have coped with the horrors of their past and others' reactions to them since. But it also shows how the children and grandchildren of survivors are getting tattoos of the same numbers their ancestors got, in the spirit of family solidarity.

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Courtesy the artist

A still from Kelly Sears's film Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise (2011)

This week, haunting films about cold-war America play for 15 hours straight on Alvarado and an artist sells cellphone holders that make your phone as unwieldy as one from landline days.

5. Holes in the walls
Urs Fischer, the Swiss artist who stuck a fake tongue out of a hole in the New Museum's wall five years ago, does iconoclastic things in an almost-too-smooth way. He will cut into the Geffen Contemporary's walls for his new show at MOCA and display rough clay sculptures made onsite with the help of about 1,000 local volunteers. The show's opening day will be a multipart affair. Curator Jessica Morgan will speak about working with Fischer, KCHUNG radio will broadcast live and artist Morrisa Maltz, a kind of smooth iconoclast herself, will invite people to have "Mofone Emotional Moments." She'll let them call family or friends using her "Mofones," smartphone holders that look like old-school rotary phone handsets, seashells or tree trunks. 152 N. Central Ave.; Sunday, April 21, noon-5 p.m. (213) 626-6222, moca.org.

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Photo by Stefanie Keenan

LACMA Director Michael Govan and members of the Collectors Committee look at Mother and Child Figure, a sculpture from Mali that's around 500 years old

See also:
*LACMA Collectors Committee's Battle Royale
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

The Resnick Pavilion, the newest building and the only single-story one on the Los Angeles County Museum's campus, was closed to the public this weekend. But if you looked in the window, you would have seen 30 gray monuments, some thigh-high, some as tall as two people, all roughly obelisk-shaped like the Washington monument. They were arranged in straight lines and striking. People kept trying to go in, even though a sign outside the Resnick told them they couldn't.

Artist Sam Durant made these gray obelisks as part of his 2005 project, Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington D.C., basing his shapes on those of actual monuments scattered across the U.S., marking spots where Native Americans and white settlers died as the result of bloody battles and massacres from the time of colonization onward. Durant proposes moving these to the National Mall, and has built a balsa wood model showing what that might look like.

The reason you couldn't walk in and around Durant's monuments was that LACMA did not own them yet. The Collectors Committee, a group of 77 dues-paying members, had not yet decided whether they would foot the bill.

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Harrison Ford dons a different fedora as Branch Rickey in 42

"Opening Day," says Harrison Ford's Branch Rickey in the Jackie Robinson biopic 42, "is all future. The past is wiped away. It's a clean slate." It's a nice little platitude to mutter in the locker room, but both on the baseball field and in the real world, it's the kind of starry-eyed naive optimism that is likely to blow up in your face if you believe in it too much.

Of course a new season carries with it the promise of unlimited potential, in the same way that each morning grants us a new life, the freedom to do anything we want. But that limitless opportunity is almost immediately checked by the obligations created by our past. Either Rickey is delusional, or, more likely, the screenwriter wanted to try to say something about life, America, and baseball.

What's weird about this sentiment is that it fights, tooth and nail, the main appeal of baseball as an American pastime. Baseball lives for nostalgia, for echoes of past glory, and for an ongoing narrative. Without the past, professional baseball is as meaningless as any pick-up game played in the park on a hot summer day. It lives in both the anecdote, and the historical statistic; fans, players, and reporters alike all fawn over every detail of a player's career, both on the field and off.

Most versions of Robinson's story, including 42, dwell on the 1947 baseball season, in which Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey promoted Jackie Robinson to the starting squad, making him the first black player in major league baseball (at least, the first since the 1880s) and forever shattering the color barrier that divided the National and American leagues from the so-called Negro Leagues. Few deal with his time with the Kansas City Monarchs, an all-black barnstorming team that appears for one scene in the new film, before being relegated to the annals of history for the more palatable story of Robinson's rise to greatness.

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UC Press

Building Home: Howard F. Ahmanson and the Politics of the American Dream

Much as been made of the look and feel of post-War Southern California -- be it the mid-century modern décor, the urban sprawl, the Googie architecture of restaurants and shops or the tailfin cars. But what about the people who helped finance it all?

Howard Ahmanson, Sr. (1906-1968) is remembered more today for his support of the arts or for his son Howard Ahmanson, Jr.'s own philanthropy and support of Proposition 8 during the last election. But historian Eric John Abrahamson offers a more detailed look at the insurance and savings and loan tycoon in his new book, Building Home: Howard F. Ahmanson and the Politics of the American Dream.

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Courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Carol Bove's The Foamy Saliva of a Horse (2011)

See also:
*10 L.A. Art Spaces That Change Our Idea of What an Art Space Is
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament
*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying

This week, a Eurasian collective tells uncanny histories, artists take on maintenance work and a sculptor builds an uncomfortably large minimalist tableau.

5. Keeping the old
When Tom Gilmore moved to L.A. from New York in the late '80s and asked people where to hang out, no one suggested downtown; some didn't even know where downtown was. He ventured downtown anyway, and found architecture that excited him. Gilmore, who now runs the development firm Gilmore & Associates, helped get the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance passed in 1999, allowing builders who wanted to "reuse" historic buildings to bypass certain prohibitive codes. Then he started renovating the Old Bank District. But property costs have risen since then, and building from scratch has again started to seem easier than reviving the old. Gilmore speaks about his work and vision for L.A. at SCI-Arc. 960 E. Third St., dwntwn.; Wed., Feb. 13, 7 p.m. (213) 613-2200, sci-arc.edu.

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Megan Friend

Wertz Brothers Antique Mart on Lincoln Blvd

Imagine a microcosm of western civilization's material culture jumbled together and beautifully stockpiled into a 20,000 square-foot warehouse. Imagine all the stuff you grew up with: all the randomness, all the things you never thought you'd see again, all the memories, all the emotions, all the traditions, all the bizarre trends of your youth, all of the fleeting fixations of your past and all the collectable fascinations of your present. Trinkets, tea sets, toasters, paintings, porcelains, books, nets, vintage textiles and so much more.

This is the experience of visiting the Wertz Brothers Antique Mart in Santa Monica, which will sadly close its doors tomorrow, Feb. 1, to make room for other business developments at the location.

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Courtesy of the artists and Melissa Manning

Richard Hoeck and John Miller's "Something for Everyone" installation at MJ Briggs gallery

See also:
*Our Latest Theater Reviews
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament

This week, there's a symposium on what it's like to live at a time when real life is like sci-fi, a portrait of Jayne Mansfield's car on view and a cutout UPS man behind a window on Fairfax.

5. Superstition and sustenance
Thank You for Coming calls itself an "Experimental Art and Food Space," but it doesn't feel experimental in the way a lot of art + eating ventures do -- there are no performances that interrupt your meal, no tasks for you to perform before or after eating. The space, which opened in Atwater Village at the end of last year, is licensed as a restaurant, but the kitchen is exposed, tables are communal and the menu shifts nearly every week, or at least each time an artist/chef in residence takes over. Jennifer June Strawn, the first resident of 2013, will be at Thank You for Coming through Feb. 3 and all her menus are themed around superstition and sustenance. 3416 Glendale Blvd.; Wed-Sun, lunch 11 a.m. -3 p.m., dinner 6 -10 p.m.; $0-9. (323) 648-2666, thankyouforcoming.la.

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See also:
*More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage

It's possible that the price of fame has never been higher -- and not just in the tried-and-true Hollywood storylines of fame, fortune and the tragic falls from grace. In his new documentary $ellebrity, seasoned celebrity and event photographer Kevin Mazur looks at the money-making machine that is the world of paparazzi photography, tabloid magazines and reality television and how it's changed through the years in Hollywood.

Out January 11, the film interviews rumor mag stables like Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony about their worlds under microscopes -- as well as some people who helped put them there, like former Us Weekly/current HollywoodLife.com editor Bonnie Fuller.

We talked with Mazur about the film, how his own career as a photographer and as the co-founder of red carpet and event photography database WireImage (now part of Getty Images) relates, and what he thinks it will take for the paparazzi to relent.

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