Ask the archive

What is this? An AI-assisted search tool exploring and explaining documents from the Berman Archive's Los Angeles collection: ask a question in plain English and get an answer drawn only from those documents.

What can I ask? How something changed across decades, or what several studies say in common: population, intermarriage, antisemitism are all topics and issues that have interesting responses.

How does it work? The tool searches the full text of every document, pulls the passages that actually address your question, and writes an answer using only those. The passages it used sit beside the answer so you can check them. Additional context from reputable data sources (like Pew) is generated beneath each entry, in a panel that says so.

Is this page live? No. Every answer below is a real, recorded run of the tool — generated once and replayed here so this page can be shared without a live server behind it. It's the same pipeline end to end, just not answering new questions in real time.

Is this credible? Every claim is cited to a specific document and page, shown beside the answer, so you can check it against the original source yourself. Now, the credibility of the source material is a different matter. The reports contained herein aren't all academic, so it's more a snapshot of a community understanding itself rather than the empirical truth.