Who Are They? The California Legislative Jewish Caucus

While University of California students chanted “Divest!” and erected “Free Palestine” encampments, a little-known pro-Israel faction of the California legislature introduced legislation to indoctrinate six million California public school children and stem the rising tide of college resistance to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

What’s in a name?

They call themselves the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and they are Democrats in the state legislature who critics describe as “progressive except for Palestine” or “PEP” lawmakers. Individually, they shepard populist bills to increase fines on white collar criminals, strengthen whistleblower protections, require AI transparency, and expand affordable housing, but collectively they work to erase Palestinians from the political and educational discourse. In the midst of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the Caucus not only refuses to support a ceasefire, but centers the debate on the protesters’ lack of civility, often conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

Who are they?

Co-Chaired by Assembly Member Jesse Gabriel ( San Fernando Valley) and State Senator Scott Weiner (San Francisco), the 19 member Legislative Jewish Caucus includes 12 lawmakers in the 80-member assembly and 7 in the 40-member state senate, comprising 15% of the assembly and 17.5% of the senate, enough to exercise leverage as a block of votes on the floor or for the election of the speaker of the assembly or the president of the senate, both of whom appoint the chairs of committees who decide whether bills ever make it to the floor. Of the 19 members, at least 10 chair standing committees, with co-chair Gabriel chairing the powerful assembly budget committee, co-chair Weiner chairing the senate housing committee and member Newman chairing the senate education committee.

The Legislative Jewish Caucus includes the following assembly members: Dawn Addis (Morro Bay), Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (Orinda), Marc Berman (Menlo Park), Laura Friedman (Burbank), co-chair Jesse Gabriel (Encino), Matt Haney (San Francisco) Jacqui Irwin (Thousand Oaks), Josh Lowenthal (Long Beach), Gail Pellerin (Santa Cruz), Blanca Rubio (Baldwin Park), Chris Ward (San Diego) and Rick Chavez Zbur (Los Angeles), and Sens. Ben Allen (Santa Monica), Josh Becker (Menlo Park), Steve Glazer (Orinda), Josh Newman (Fullerton), Susan Rubio (Baldwin Park), Henry Stern (Calabasas) and co-chair Scott Wiener (San Francisco).

BREAKING: Over 300 Jews and allies are peacefully calling for an immediate and lasting ceasefire, and have shut down all California State legislative proceedings, demanding that CA end its support for Israel's genocide of Palestinians. #CeasefireNOW
📸: @movementphotog pic.twitter.com/OXQclhPrEH

— Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area (@JVPBayArea) January 3, 2024

On January 3, 2024, the first day of the legislative session, hundreds of Jewish Voice for Peace protesters and allies shut down the California state capitol to demand lawmakers support a ceasefire in Gaza. In response, the Legislative Jewish Caucus released a letter portraying themselves and the Jewish community at large as victims.

““The far right and far left in America view each other as existential enemies, yet the one thing they seemingly can agree on is that Jews are a unique problem responsible for various evils in the world,” the letter states. “Our community is trapped between white nationalists who hate us because they believe we are behind a plan to diminish the influence of white people and far-left ideologues who hate us because we are somehow the epitome of white oppressors.”

What do they stand for?

On the Home page of the Caucus website, members thank Governor Newsom on October 9th for illuminating the state capitol in blue and white “as a beautiful symbol of California’s enduring solidarity with the State of Israel.” Expressing sympathy with Israel following Hamas’ October 7th attack was to be expected, but the words “enduring solidarity” lept from sympathy to blanket approval of Israel’s past, current and present crimes against the 4.5 million Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

The Caucus website also displays a photograph of caucus members in 2014 celebrating then-Governor Brown’s signing of a memorandum of understanding with Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu to collaborate on the development of water conservation, cybersecurity, biotechnology, education and other industries. The agreement also encouraged Israeli companies to work closely with California’s Innovation Hubs (iHUB), a network of “16 clusters of research parks, technology incubators, universities and federal laboratories, together with economic development organizations, business groups and venture capital funds.”

The Israeli flag that once draped the website’s pages has been replaced with a multi-colored Jewish star. The text beneath it is short and inclusive in describing the caucus’ mission as a Jewish “voice for justice, equality and progress” and as a resource to advocate on behalf of the “educational, social, political and cultural concerns of the Jewish community.”

Resistance from the Jewish community

Estee Chandler, Jewish Voice for Peace board member, says the mission statement is not reflected in the organization’s actions. “Whenever I read an article that quotes the Legislative Jewish Caucus, hear them speak on an issue or visit their website, they are commenting on, spinning or legislatively pushing the goals of political Zionism and the Israeli government, not justice, progress, or the professional, social and cultural goals of the Jewish community.”

Seth Morrison, national board member of JVP-Action, a 501 (c) 4 sister to Jewish Voice for Peace, agrees. “Unfortunately, the priority of the Legislative Jewish Caucus seems to be defending Israel and perpetuating the falsehood that US Jews are safer when Israel is allowed to violate international law and the human rights of Palestinians. They are using the Holocaust to somehow justify Israel’s actions and working to censor legitimate criticism of Israel.”

In 2016, when the Legislative Jewish Caucus still posted an Israeli flag on its website, activists in Jewish Voice for Peace and other organizations mobilized to try to defeat AB2844, a caucus bill to punish supporters of the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement against Israel for its occupation of Palestine The legislation, sponsored by then-Assembly Member Richard Bloom of Santa Monica, was to require the California Attorney General to post a statewide enemies list of companies whose refusal to conduct business with Israel would make them ineligible for state contracts worth 10,000 or more As a result of vigorous grassroots opposition, however, the caucus’ anti-BDS bill was stripped of its enemies list to become virtually duplicative of existing laws against discrimination.

That same year, 2016, when Israeli Defense Forces fired on hundreds of unarmed Gazans marching to Israel’s border in the “Great March of Return,” members of the the California Legislative Jewish Caucus won the legislature’s approval of a resolution celebrating Israel’s 70th anniversary.

What is the current agenda?

More recently, during Israel’s slaughter and mass starvation in Gaza, caucus members–who succeeded in scrubbing Palestinians from the state-adopted ethnic studies curriculum– tightened their grip on California’s education system with introduction of assorted bills.

In a press release, the Legislative Jewish Caucus defended their priority bills saying, “These bills seek to protect Jewish students on campus, better educate young people about the Holocaust and modern forms of antisemitism, and address the rise in hate crimes.”

Opponents say the bills promote Palestinian genocide denialism and seek to conflate anti-zionism with anti-Semitism.

Censoring genocide education

Sponsored by State Senator Henry Stern (D-Calabasas), SB 1277 puts the pro-Israel California Teachers Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education in charge of training public school teachers and developing curriculum on genocide education for six million K-12 California public school children. One of the collaborative’s member organizations is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Zionist lobby group Wikipedia editors have voted generally unreliable as a legitimate source on anti-semitism and Israel/Palestine.

Click on a lesson on how to talk about the “Israel-Hamas conflict” and up pops the ADL’s “Stay Informed Page,” which paints anti-Israel protesters as anti-semitic. Drill down further and you’ll learn the ADL is pressuring the IRS to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine.

“This is McCarthyism and it’s being accomplished by ramming through stealth legislation that empowers an unelected outside group hand-picked by Zionists to police what is and is not acceptable to teach or discuss in classrooms,” writes Rick Chertoff, activist with Jewish Voice for Peace in Los Angeles.

In the bill’s description and examples, the authors reference the UN Convention on Genocide’s criteria for genocide, yet never mention Israel’s killing or wounding of over 100,000 Gazans, its destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, refugee centers, or its denial of water, food and medicine to 2.3 million imprisoned and starving Gazans–as meeting the criteria of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The failure of the bill’s sponsors and co-sponsors to mention Palestine–when it mentions other genocides–defies the International Court of Justice, the highest judicial body of the United Nations, which concluded in a preliminary ruling on January 26, 2024, there was a plausible case Israel committeed genocide in Gaza. In short, Israel is on trial for genocide.

When David Mandel of JVP Action tried to testify at the state capitol in opposition to SB 1277, Assembly Appropriations Chair Buffy Wicks (Berkeley) tried to cut him off three times. You can see Wicks’ repeated interruptions of speaker David Mandel at 2:55:24.

Blocking Palestine from Ethnic Studies

Another bill AB2918, co-sponsored by Jewish Caucus assembly members Rick Chavez Zbur (Los Angeles/Santa Monica) and Dawn Addis (Morro Bay/San Luis Obispo), proposes an additional layer of unprecedented expensive state oversight to locally adopted ethnic studies courses. The bill, which has been amended four times, would require a school district to seek agreement from teachers, public school staff, parents and community organizations before adopting an additional unit of study. “I believe the caucus simply wants to silence any inclusion of Palestine or teaching Ethnic Studies using an anti-colonial lens. Let’s be clear this is not a curricular issue, this is censorship and monitoring of teacher lesson plans,“ says Theresa Montaño, a former social studies teacher, now a CSU Chicana/o Studies professor.

Enforcing college codes of conduct

Still another bill, SB 1287, sponsored by Senator Glazer (Orinda) and amended five times, seeks to censor pro-Palestine university voices by requiring as a condition of admission and ongoing enrollment that Cal State and community colleges students agree to comply with a vague code of conduct requiring mutual respect for a diversity of viewpoints. The bill’s prohibition against “discriminatory conduct that creates a hostile environment on campus,” sounds reasonable until one considers the bill’s potential to chill speech.

Zionists who support Israel’s annexation of land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea have ironically complained when pro-Palestinian students chant, “From the river to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” charging the chant is anti-semitic and discriminatory. Would this bill be used to silence speech protected by the First Amendment?

Revising discrimination training

Jewish Voice for Peace activists also oppose AB 2925 (Friendman, Lowenthal) , a bill requiring Cal State universities and community colleges to revise their trainings on discrimination to focus on the five most targeted groups in the state based on law enforcement reports of “hateful incidents,” that include name-calling and insults. While Muslims may be reluctant to report incidents to law enforcement for fear of surveillance, Zionists are encouraged to do so by groups like the Anti-Defamation League, which in its audit of discriminatory incidents, writes, “Public statements of opposition to Zionism, which are often antisemitic, are included in the Audit when it can be determined that they had a negative impact on one or more Jewish individuals or identifiable, localized groups of Jews.”

What is to be done?

#1) For starters, anti-Zionist organizations, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, need allies in the legislature to cast No votes, demand amendments or block bills altogether. Those allies might be found in two caucuses of color: the 15-member African American Legislative Caucus and the 12-member Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Caucus. Since neither have members that also belong to the Legislative Jewish Caucus, they would be more likely to form a coalition to defeat or dramatically amend pro-Israel bills.

In contrast, ten Legislative Jewish Caucus members, including co-chairs Weiner and Gabriel, are listed in the 62-member Native American Caucus and three Legislative Jewish Caucus members are among the the 34-member Latino Caucus.

San Gabriel Valley representatives Senator Susan Rubio and Assembly member Blanca Rubio are sisters who practice Catholicism. They say they joined the Jewish Caucus after discovering they had Jewish relatives on their mother’s side who came from Spain, a country that has recognized Palestinian statehood and has announced it will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Of course, caucuses of color openly opposed to pro-Israel legislation would have to insulate themselves from spurious charges of anti-semitism. It would help if those fighting for an end to ethnic cleansing could elect a non-Zionist Jew to the state legislature to form a new California Legislative Olive Branch Caucus with bylaws in support of equal rights for all in a shared Palestine.

#2) To curb the power and influence of the Legislative Jewish Caucus, progressive organizations such as JVP Action and Progressive Democrats of America’s California chapter could–if they raised the money – hire a lobbyist in Sacramento to track legislation designed to silence critical debate on Israel/Palestine. A full-time lobbyist in Sacramento could work with the existing coalition that includes CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations), JVP-Action, AROC (Arab Resources Organizing Center) and the Coalition for Ethnic Studies to mobilize grassroots activists to testify at committee hearings to gut or amend bad bills before they hit the floor.

#3) Activists must strategically organize in local teacher union chapters that make up the powerful 300,000-member California Teachers Association (CTA). CTA has a full-time Sacramento lobbyist, who needs to hear more from the base on bills that censor classroom discussion. Anti-Zionist members of teacher unions must push their locals to oppose the Caucus’ biased education bills and urge the CTA lobbyist, whose salary is paid for by CTA members, to advocate on their behalf.

#4) Activists must become more engaged at the state legislative level to demand their assembly and senate representatives refuse lobby trips to Israel paid for by Zionists organizations, such as the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California and the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council. These are the organizations which sponsored a February 2024 trip to Israel that included Democratic Sens. Scott Wiener of San Francisco and Henry Stern of Los Angeles, and Democratic Assembly members Jesse Gabriel of Woodland Hills, Esmeralda Soria of Fresno (Latino Caucus member), Damon Connolly of San Rafael, Josh Lowenthal of Long Beach and Al Muratsuchi of Torrance (Asian American Pacific Islander Caucus).

Unions like AFSCME and CTA, along with progressive political organizations, such as Democratic Socialists of America and Progressive Democrats of America, should withhold endorsements of local, state and federal lawmakers who take Israel lobby trips. Anti-Zionists, including those in the Green Party or Peace and Freedom Party, could confront compromised lawmakers whenever they appear in public.

#5) Anti-Zionists must choose the most politically vulnerable members of the Legislative Jewish Caucus to primary in upcoming elections–even if the challengers are merely ankle biters nipping at the heels of caucus members to inform constituents of their member’s caucus activity. An alternative to primary campaigns would be to encourage more caucus members to decline co-sponsorship of caucus bills. Interestingly, Senator Ben Allen (Santa Monica) and Jacqui Irwin (Thousand Oaks) are not listed as sponsors or co-sponsors of any of the bills discussed in this article.

In the words of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglas, “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” so let the demand be the Legislative Jewish Caucus untether itself from the State of Israel to advocate for lively debate in our schools and colleges, where young minds yearn not for propaganda but for truth. Such rigor would underscore Jewish values that stress the importance of education, not indoctrination.

Reprinted from the LA Progressive with the author’s permission.

Marcy Winograd is co-chair of the Peace in Ukraine Coalition and coordinator of CODEPINK CONGRESS, which organizes Capitol Hill calling parties to mobilize co-sponsors and votes for peaceful foreign policy legislation.