Two Powers Passing in the Night

In the neighborhoods and marketplaces that comprise 21st-century Los Angeles, two ethnic groups predominate: Jews and Latinos. Although others, including Asians, Africian Americans and Anglo Gentiles, play important roles, these two groups shape the social, economic and cultural contours of the city. Yet, to date, the two communities--one long established, the other ascendant--have had remarkably little to do with each other politically. Can they combine to create a post-ethnic politics in the city?

Jews reign over many of the most dynamic parts of the city’s economy, from Hollywood to real estate, from cyberspace to the garment business. They are well-represented at both the elite and grass-roots levels of L.A. business. Jews, whether from Eastern Europe or the Middle East, boast among the highest entrepreneurship rates of any group in the city’s ethnic mosaic, according to Cal State Northridge demographer James Allen; nearly half the Los Angeles Business Journal’s list of richest Angelenos are Jews.

Latinos represent the city’s grass-roots future, from its aspiring working class to a rapidly growing middle class. They are the city’s emerging majority; their ownership of small businesses has exploded, increasing nearly fivefold since the 1980s. They constitute the majority of new home buyers in many Southland communities. Few can deny that, ultimately, Latinos--their music, their cultural values and po-litical sensibilities--will reshape the essence of Los Angeles in the new century.

Unlike Jews and Gentiles, or African Americans, Jews and Latinos share little history or mythology. For the most part, their contacts have been opportunistic. Jews have employed Latinos in garment factories, as maids and gardeners and serviced them as customers in a host of enterprises from Whittier Boulevard to Santee Alley and Pico-Union.

The rise of a significant Latino middle class has broadened the groups’ peer-level contacts; intermarriage is more frequent. But these two communities still live largely in separate worlds. Jewish-Latino relations are characterized not so much by an ethnic “schism” as by something between indifference and incomprehension.

“Most Latinos in the general community don’t know anything much about Jews,” says Jose de Jesus Legaspi, a Mexico-born developer who works mostly in heavily immigrant neighborhoods. “There’s not much of an effort to learn about each other.”

This lack of contact is reflected in politics. Despite often forced attempts to develop a “dialogue” between the two groups’ political and economic elites, there is little to suggest a crossing over of one group to another. Prospects of creating anything like the black-Jewish alliance of the Tom Bradley years seem dim.

One reason lies in the Jewish community and its changing political orientation. Given their economic hegemony, this should be a time for Jews to assume unprecedented political power, but, if anything, notes veteran political analyst Arnold Steinberg, Jewish influence is waning, and the community’s political voice is increasingly divided.

Some of this is the result of demography and migration. Outmigration to the urban periphery--particularly to Westlake, Agoura and Calabassas--has diminished the number of Jewish voters. Once as high as 20% of the city’s electorate (1993), Jews may account for as little as 14% this year, estimates Steinberg.

It’s not just a matter of numbers, however. Jews have lost their historical ideological orientation. For much of the 20th century, the L.A. Jewish community struggled for and ultimately helped engineer, financially and intellectually, the liberal Democratic takeover of what had long been a basically conservative Protestant town. Today, there is no strong Jewish political leadership, like the old Waxman-Berman machine, to spearhead a Latino-Jew alliance. Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky is the only bona fide regional Jewish politician. “You have movement of Jews economically and socially,” says Fernando Guerra, director of Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles, “but not politically. There are really no new significant Jewish leaders.”

In part, this is because much of the growth of the Jewish population stems from arriving Russians, Iranians and other Middle Easterners. They do not share the social democratic traditions common among decendants of turn-of-the-century immigrants. Many of these newcomers are, if anything, more conservative, as are significant numbers of second- and third-generation Jews. Assimilation among native-born Jews has made them less receptive to traditional social democratic values. “There aren’t many Jews left who remember working in sweat shops,” says Steinberg.

Such factors have widened the gap between the Jewish community’s institutional and political leadership, which still tends to be liberal, and the rank and file. On the grass-roots level, particularly in the San Fernando Valley, Jews are less reliably liberal. When Richard Riordan, a conservative Republican Roman Catholic, ran for mayor in 1993, he received 49% of the Jewish vote citywide. Four years later, he got 71%.

“The closer they are to their homes and business interests,” says Robert Eshman, editor of the Jewish Journal, “the more they vote their pocketbook, not their ideology.”

In moving to the right in municipal politics, L.A. Jews are in step with their counterparts in other big cities. Although still staunchly Democratic in national elections, Jews in New York, Philadephia and Chicago are opting for more conservative candidates in municipal elections. New York’s Republican Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and conservative Democratic Mayor Richard M. Daley in Chicago both owe their electoral success to Jewish votes. Last year, Jewish voters solidly backed Republican Sam Katz in Philadelphia, who lost narrowly to a black Democrat.

“Jews have become a centrist bloc in most cities,” believes Fred Siegel, an urban historian at Cooper Union College who has studied politics in several of these cities, including Los Angeles, “because of their concerns about things like crime, public employee unions and racial politics.”

For these and other reasons, L.A.’s Jews and Latinos, whose share of the electorate has doubled to roughly 20% in the past decade, are unlikely to be drawn into alliance by a shared liberal politics. Mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa, the favorite of old-line Jewish liberals like Rep. Henry A. Waxman and former Councilman Marvin Braude, has amassed a powerful liberal coalition of unionists, environmentalists and feminists. Twenty years ago, the former Assembly speaker would have been a hands-down favorite to win many Jewish votes and to be the presumptive leader of Latino politics. But if current polls are remotely on target, that is definitively not the case this year. Among most Jews, at least, Villaraigosa is no Bradley. According to a recent Times poll, Jewish support is divided between conservative Jewish candidates Joel Wachs and Steve Soboroff.

Nor, for that matter, do Wachs and Soboroff enjoy much crossover appeal among Latino voters. In the Times poll, each netted only 2% support.

Further impeding a Latino-Jew alliance is the fact that Latinos are not uniformly “progressive” or as ethnically loyal as African Americans. In the Times poll, Villaraigosa’s support among Latinos was on par with that for front-runner James K. Hahn. Xavier Becerra, the other major Latino candidate in the race, attracted far more Latino support than Villaraigosa but barely any among whites and blacks. (Recall that Riordan won 43% of the Latino vote in 1993 and 60% in 1997.)

Villaraigosa’s liberal politics and union ties may also cut into his support among Latinos. Labor is not necessarily the natural leader of working-class Latinos, who, on the whole, are less likely to be union members than the general population. The Latino middle class, like its Jewish counterpart, may be inclined to vote its pocketbook. Finally, many Latinos tend to be conservative on social issues, as was evident in their strong support for Proposition 22, which forbids gay and lesbian marriage.

So where can Jews and Latinos find common ground? The best chance lies in the emergence of a new kind of middle class, cross-ethnic politics, with Latinos leading the way. Potential shapers of this politics may be post-Chicano politicians like L.A. City Councilman Nick Pacheco, who overcame labor opposition to win his seat, or his Valley colleague, Alex Padilla, a card-carrying member of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

This is true, fundamentally, because in a global, digital economy, cities can only thrive, as Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown has observed, if they are run in a way that nurtures middle-class residents and enterprises. To operate a city, with its relatively meager financial resources, as a mechanism to redistribute income or address global environmental problems is to assure its decline against other more opportunistic civil entities.

What Los Angeles and its varied ethnic groups need is not a new ideological jihad but a practical approach that makes the city worth living and investing in for its established middle class and a suitable stage for upward mobility for its emerging majority. In this way, Los Angeles can become in its politics as dynamic and adaptable as it is every day in its marketplaces.