ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. There were Nazi plots to hang prominent Hollywood figures like Charlie Chaplin, gun down Jews in Boyle Heights, and plans to sabotage local military installations. As law enforcement agencies were busy monitoring the Reds instead of Nazis, an attorney named Leon Lewis and his ring of spies entered the picture. Acclaimed historian and USC Professor Steven J. Ross’ new book, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, tells this little-known story of Lewis, whose covert operation infiltrated every Nazi and fascist group in the area to disrupt their plans. Ross is joined by the Jewish Journal’s former Editor-in-Chief Rob Eshman, for a fascinating look at how a daring group of individuals banded together to confront the rise of hate.

New York Times bestselling author Roz Chast returns to ALOUD with her hilarious new graphic memoir, Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York. Chast is a native Brooklynite and quintessential New Yorker whose street cred is regularly on display in The New Yorker, where she’s published over 1,000 cartoons. But when she moved to the suburbs, navigating life filled with trees instead of garbage was surreal— although her kids would grow up thinking the opposite was true. On the occasion of her daughter leaving the suburbs to attend college in the city, Chast was inspired to create a city guide to her beloved home turf to help ease her daughter’s cultural shock. Filled with laugh-out-loud drawings, stories, maps, and more, Chast will take us on her personal tour of Manhattan. Many of the wonderful cartoons referenced by Chast in this podcast recording can be perused on her website at rozchast.com.

The essence of who we are is wrapped up in our language. What is human knowledge lost when a language goes extinct? Why should we care? Join ALOUD for a freewheeling conversation among language activists working to reclaim indigenous languages in California and Mexico. For the first time together on stage, this unique group of participants includes master linguist and language preservationist Leanne Hinton; Native California language activist Vincent Medina and Virginia Carmelo; Odilia Romero Hernández, Zapotec language rights activist; and poet/activist Bob Holman, co-producer of the PBS documentary, Language Matters. Simultaneous interpretation was provided by Antena Los Ángeles. This program was produced as part of The Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.

“Is there anything Egan can’t do?” asked The New York Times Book Review. In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan masters her first historical novel. Beginning during the middle of the Great Depression, Manhattan Beach follows the story of Anna Kerrigan, a young girl who comes of age with a country at war. Inheriting the role of providing for her mother and sister after her father mysteriously disappears, Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. Sharing from this hauntingly beautiful new work, Egan takes us back to a moment in time when in the lives of women and men, America and the world transformed forever.

There’s one major aspect of the popular Gold Rush lore that few Californians today know about: during that period, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000, much of the decline from state-sponsored slaughter. Addressing the aftermath of colonization and historical trauma, a leading scholar explores the miraculous legacy of California Indians, including their extensive contributions to our culture today. Join us for a conversation with UCLA historian Benjamin Madley, author of the groundbreaking study: An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. This program was produced as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.

Stephen Greenblatt—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World—investigates the life of one of humankind’s greatest stories. His newest book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, explores the enduring narrative of humanity’s first parents. Tracking the tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds and also so very “real” to millions of people even in the present. In a conversation with Jack Miles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography, Greenblatt will demystify how—for better or worse—the biblical origin story permeates our lives today.

In Danielle Allen’s elegiac family memoir, Cuz: On the Life and Times of Michael A., she tries to make sense of a young African American man’s tragic coming-of-age in Los Angeles. Allen, a Harvard professor and author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, became the "cousin-on-duty" when her younger cousin Michael was released from prison. Arrested at fifteen, tried as an adult—three years after his release, Michael was shot and killed. Why? Allen’s deeply personal and poignant story is an unwavering look at a world transformed by the sudden availability of narcotics and the rise of street gangs, drugs, and the failures of mass incarceration. Rallying an urgent call for system-wide reform, Allen discusses her new work with Franklin Leonard, a film executive who founded The Black List, a yearly publication featuring Hollywood’s most popular unproduced screenplays.

With the likes of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Mexico has a long tradition of politically engaged public art, which has often depicted—with varying degrees of accuracy—the country’s indigenous population. Two gifted young artists from the collective Tlacolulokos have been commissioned to create a new artwork in the Central Library’s Rotunda in juxtaposition to the 1933 historic Cornwell murals. They will discuss their new work as well as their street-level actions in their hometown of Tlacolula, Oaxaca, with the godfather of Cholo writing, Chaz Bojórquez, and project curator Amanda De La Garza. What is the role of clandestine art actions as a form of political dissent? How effective is it? What are the parallels and differences between how street art is used in Mexico and the United States? Simultaneous translation was provided by Antena Los Ángeles. This program was produced as part of The Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA

Two generations of African writers—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, an elder statesman from Kenya, and Richard Ali A Mutu, a young novelist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—discuss the politics of writing in African languages, the vibrancy of the continent’s cultural output, and exciting new trends in East, West, and Central African writing. Thiong’o and Mutu will be joined for a rare look at groundbreaking indigenous voices by David Shook, the founding editor of Phoneme Media and publisher of Mutu’s debut novel, Mr. Fix-It, the first novel written in Lingala to be translated into English.

Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum in Washington, D.C., an advocacy organization promoting the value of immigrants and immigration, sheds new light on our nation’s brewing immigration debate in his timely book, There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. Although U.S. politics are more polarizing than ever, Noorani argues that our issues of immigration are more about culture and values than politics and policy. In his book, Noorani follows the personal stories of Americans from across the political spectrum, including conservative faith, business, and law enforcement leaders, who are grappling with the question: "Do we, as Americans, value immigrants and immigration anymore?" Exploring how immigration is affecting the changing nature of American identity, Noorani talks with Pilar Marrero, a journalist and author of Killing the American Dream, a chronicle of U.S. immigration policy mishaps.