Rep. Luz Rivas (D-Calif.) is not Jewish, but she is well aware that Jewish constituents feel unsafe in their communities in the San Fernando Valley.
“Some older Jewish constituents are worried about their grandchildren, because they’re facing more antisemitism than they did in the past,” she told JNS. “We need to work together to make sure that this ends.”
JNS spoke to Rivas, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) and John Lee, a member of the Los Angeles City Council, during the Jewish Federation Los Angeles’s “Shabbat in the Park” event on Friday.
The event, held at de Toledo High School, a private Jewish school in the West Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, drew about 700 people.
“These are tough times for the Jewish community, but whenever we can get together and see everyone, it’s always great,” Rivas told JNS.
She has been to Israel twice, once in 2022 as a member of the California State Assembly and in 2025 as a member of Congress. Growing up, she didn’t know much about the Jewish state, she said.
The trips helped her “understand the issues, especially the geography and the different cultures that are there and how important security is to all Israelis,” she told JNS.
Last month, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) introduced an amendment to end aid to Israel, and 98 of 215 House Democrats voted against the amendment (including territories). Rivas was one of those 98 lawmakers.
“It was a Republican amendment, and it was put there to try to divide the Democrats,” she told JNS. “His amendment was extreme, and I felt that this is not the way to do policy.”
JNS asked Rivas about Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the anti-Israel former Detroit public health director, who won the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat in Michigan, and about candidates whom the Democratic Socialists of America has backed across the country.
“Some people are running on being anti-Israel, and they think that’s why they’re winning,” she said. “Unfortunately, in some communities, it is working.”
“But I represent Los Angeles. I represent a Jewish community—especially in Valley Village—and that’s not something I would ever do: run on being anti-Israel,” she told JNS. “I think people don’t realize that when you have to represent all of your constituents.”
‘Kinetic activities’
JNS spoke to Sherman at the Federation’s “Shabbat in the Park” in 2025. Since then, “a lot has happened,” the congressman told JNS. He cited the “kinetic activities in the Gaza Strip” that have been “considerably reduced” and the war with Iran.
“I do think that it’s critical to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon,” the Jewish congressman said. “But the president is learning that Iran is not Venezuela. It’s not easy, and your plan can’t be, ‘Well we hit the top guy, then everything goes our way.’ Well, it doesn’t work that way.”
JNS asked Sherman about a newly released California attorney general’s office report, which found that nearly three-quarters of religion-based hate crimes targeted Jews in the state in 2025.
Sherman said that he was “proud” to have secured a federal grant worth more than $1 million for the Federation’s security program that works with Jewish institutions in Southern California, although he’s “sad that it was important to get that money.”
“We face not only antisemitism online, but kinetic antisemitism as well,” Sherman said. (He said that he means “physical” when he says “kinetic.”)
“You see a level of antisemitism in this country and many other places in the world that my father told me about, but I never saw until now,” he told JNS.
Sherman believes that the federal government’s next step toward addressing antisemitism should be to officially adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred.
“You can’t fight it if you won’t define it,” he told JNS. “If you call for the destruction of Israel, as the world’s only Jewish state, that is antisemitic.”
Sherman was also one of the 98 Democratic lawmakers who voted against the Massie amendment. He stated on the House floor at the time that the amendment was a “political stunt” aimed at “driving a wedge through the middle of the Democratic Party.”
The congressman told JNS that “we’ve got a lot of work to do in world public opinion.”
“We’re facing some problems on the Right in the United States,” he said. “We have problems on the Left as well.”
Sherman believes the Israeli government should spend more money on its foreign ministry, noting that Israel spends as much as Belgium does on foreign affairs despite having “more problems than Belgium.”
“If you saw, for example, the PBS report last night on settler violence, that is really hurting Israel in the world,” Sherman told JNS. “I don’t think that the Israelis understand that.”
Sherman thinks that El-Sayed is “not the Democrats’ strongest candidate in the general.”
“I don’t know if he can win,” he said.
‘Antisemitism has become normalized’
Lee, the city councilman, told JNS that the 2025 hate crimes report reflects what he has seen over the past two years—that “antisemitism has become normalized.”
“That’s unfortunate,” he told JNS. “We just have no tolerance for it in my district. If you see graffiti, we’ll have it down in 48 hours. You see a hate symbol of any kind, I will have it down that day.”
“I think it’s important that we send a message that this will not be tolerated,” he said. “I’m always here to be able to make sure that Jewish people know that they have my support.”
Lee thinks that the city leadership hasn’t always been “strong enough” in combating Jew-hatred and hate crimes. He pointed to proposed legislation in the City Council to establish “safety bubbles” around religious institutions and people entering and exiting houses of worship.
There are “some voices out there that don’t see this as an issue,” he told JNS.
He believes that Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, has a “great relationship with the Jewish community.”
“We are responsible in the City Council for the legislation,” Lee told JNS. “She’s responsible for signing it. I think it’s our job to get things on her desk.”
Lee thinks that to combat Jew-hatred, the council needs to consistently spread the message that “hate of any kind will not be tolerated in the City of Los Angeles.”
“Diversity is our strength here in LA,” he told JNS. “We should be celebrating that.”
