Jewish Currents, the premier magazine of the Jewish-American political left, ran an article by reporter Will Alden last month called “Can Socialism Win Without Palestine?” The gist of the story was that Council member Nithya Raman’s campaign for mayor of Los Angeles was basically trying to run a campaign similar to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s, without talking about Palestine, Gaza, or Israel, and whether the Democratic Socialists of America’s L.A. chapter would field volunteer canvassers if she continued to be silent.
Well, at a recent mayoral debate hosted by the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles (JFLA), Raman said she believed Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Her opponent, Mayor Karen Bass, said she does not believe Israel committed genocide.
The debate generated a flurry of news and social media content, but will it actually affect how Angelenos, especially Jewish, Middle Eastern, and North African Angelenos vote?
“Yes, it will sway not only Arab American voters in L.A., but many other voters,” Rashad Al-Dabbagh, the founder and executive director of the Arab American Civic Council, tells L.A. TACO. “Voters in general, not only Arab Americans, they want their elected officials to reject pro-Israel lobbyists. And reject the influence of those lobbyists on politicians. Many voters have been following what's happening in Gaza, and they will align with those who take a stance that is supportive of justice for Palestinians.”
A survey conducted by the Arab American Institute last year backs up Al-Dabbagh's assessment. Almost 50% of people surveyed said they were “more likely” to support a candidate in an election who “spoke out to stop Israel’s war on Gaza,” including 64% of Democrats and 38% of Republicans.
Based out of Anaheim’s Little Arabia neighborhood, the Arab American Civic Council does civic engagement and organizing work in Southern California’s Arab and Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) communities.
Before September 11, 2001, most Arab Americans were Republicans, Al-Dabbagh says. Over the last two and a half decades, the community has shifted towards voting for Democrats. Recently, Arab voters have moved leftward, towards progressive Democrats that speak out against Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
“Gaza has become kind of the compass for many Arab American voters,” Al-Dabbagh says.
Since the U.S. Census doesn’t include “Arab” or “MENA” as an ethnicity, getting an accurate count of how many Arab Americans live in L.A. is difficult, but Al-Dabbagh says that about 50,000 people in L.A. wrote in “Arab” on various documents that ask people to self-identify their ethnic identities. That’s likely a vast undercount, but in what’s very likely to be a close mayoral race next month, that could be a crucial voting bloc that could make either candidate the next mayor.
Since the U.S. Census doesn’t include “Arab” or “MENA” as an ethnicity, getting an accurate count of how many Arab Americans live in L.A. is difficult, but Al-Dabbagh says that about 50,000 people in L.A. wrote in “Arab” on various documents that ask people to self-identify their ethnic identities.
“A lot of voters are paying attention to what politicians' stances are on our tax dollars funding wars and what politicians are saying about Gaza. It's no longer an issue they can ignore. There was a time when this was considered a foreign policy issue, but this election cycle and last election cycle, it made a huge difference in the outcome. Candidates that want to win should pay attention to what people are thinking,” Al-Dabbagh says.
David Alpern, an executive board member of Democrats for Israel-Los Angeles (DFI-LA), disagrees.
“There's so much context that [Raman] doesn't know, and frankly, she doesn't need to know. She's running, as she said, for the mayor of Los Angeles. Her job is to keep all people in Los Angeles safe and prosperous and make this an even better city than it already is,” Alpern tells us, after running through a list of events in Israeli and Palestinian history, with a particular pro-Israel bent. “So when she said she supports BDS or she commits to the word genocide. She's doing the opposite of being the mayor of the city. She's dividing rather than uniting, and she should be trying to unite.”
BDS is an acronym for boycott, divestment, and sanction, a Palestinian-led movement to pressure governments and institutions to boycott Israeli-made goods, divest from Israeli companies, and implement sanctions on Israel until the Israeli government withdraws from the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, grants Arab citizens of Israel equal rights, and allows Palestinian refugees to return to Palestine and Israel.
During the debate at the JFLA, Raman said BDS was a legitimate form of peaceful protest but said it wasn’t a part of her platform for mayor. Bass said she would oppose any BDS measure.
DFI-LA, which is a liberal Zionist organization that supports pro-Israel Democratic candidates, endorsed Bass for mayor. Alpern says the organization has “hundreds” of members.
Back in 2024, though, when Raman was running to get re-elected to her seat on the L.A. City Council, DFI-LA endorsed her, partially for her then opposition to the BDS movement.
That endorsement led DSA-LA to censure her.
Raman was the first member of DSA to get elected to the L.A. City Council in 2020.
“There is concern in the Jewish community, and I can tell you anecdotally I know people that will vote differently than their historical patterns,” Alpern says.
That voting pattern is historically left-leaning. In 2024, 79% of Jews voted for Kamala Harris for president. In L.A., liberal Jewish communities on the Westside were, with Black voters in South L.A., key voting blocs that formed the core constituency that elected L.A.’s first Black mayor, Tom Bradley, in the early 1970s, and continued to elect liberal mayors since.
Some of those formerly stalwart liberal Jewish strongholds voted for Republican Spencer Pratt during the June primary.
Steven Windmueller, a professor emeritus at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who studied Jewish political behavior and communal affairs for decades, says he suspects a portion of the Jewish vote in L.A. going to Pratt boils down to anger at Bass and the city for their response to the Palisades Fire.
Rather than a bloc of roughly 564,000 Jewish adults in L.A. voting as a monolith, the Jewish vote in L.A. is much more divided, Windmueller says, especially when it comes to Israel, Zionism, and the “G” words: genocide and Gaza.
“There are Jews in this society who believe that this was a genocide and young Jews who say that they're disenfranchised with Zionism and Zionist ideology; these issues are very divisive right now internally inside the Jewish world, and therefore it's so difficult for the Jewish community to speak today with any degree of unity or coherence on issues associated with their self-interest,” Windmueller says.
In July, an AP-NORC poll found that one-third of U.S. adults believe Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. About the same amount of American Jews agreed, according to the poll.
“I do think that there are people that just would not be able to bring themselves to vote for somebody who's denying that a holocaust that has been live-streamed for three years is a holocaust," says Estee Chandler, the founding organizer of the L.A. chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian activist group. "I just think that that's a bridge too far for a lot of people who have morals that say that never again is never again and never again, of course, means for everybody, and the fact that people are looking away from this is abhorrent, and for the leader of the second largest city in the country to be a genocide denier is something that many people just cannot accept."
Chandler says she attended JFLA’s debate to try to talk to news media covering the debate and offer a dissenting opinion and a reminder that JFLA doesn’t represent the opinion of all Jewish Angelenos.
“This forum was put on by the most right-wing elements of Jewish Los Angeles,” Chandler says. “It was sponsored by the ADL and the Jewish Federation and the American Jewish Committee, all very right-wing organizations that support Trump and his policies.”
“This forum was put on by the most right-wing elements of Jewish Los Angeles,” Chandler says. “It was sponsored by the ADL and the Jewish Federation and the American Jewish Committee, all very right-wing organizations that support Trump and his policies.”
While the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles are not explicitly pro-Trump, they do often align with his administration’s Israel and suppression of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian speech policies.
Only a third of American Jews self-identify as Zionists, Chandler says, referencing a Jewish Federations of North America survey, which found that while 88% of Jewish Americans believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state, only 37% called themselves Zionists, while 7% called themselves explicitly anti-Zionists.
While JVP-LA only has 200 members and a “base” of about 1,000, which Chandler says refers to people who either consistently attend their rallies or sign their petitions, Chandler says they hope to one day hold a debate themselves.
“That would be more indicative of the 2/3 of Jewish Los Angeles,” she says.
