After San Francisco Supervisor Leslie Katz was elected in 1996, she learned her name had been a great asset in her electoral quest.
“I can’t count the number of people who came up to me on the street and said ‘Katz, a nice Jewish girl. I voted for you. You must have good values,”’ Katz said at a Tuesday morning panel on “Jews, Politics and San Francisco.”
Supervisor colleagues Barbara Kaufman and Mark Leno backed up Katz’s premise that being Jewish and a politician in the City by the Bay doesn’t create a conflict.
“Being Jewish is clearly not a disadvantage in San Francisco politics,” said Kaufman, the board’s immediate past president. “It probably is an advantage.”
The Business and Professionals Division of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation sponsored the early-morning bagel breakfast, held at the downtown investment management firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
Several dozen men and women in business suits crowded into a 43rd floor conference room with a panoramic view of the city to hear the board’s Jewish supes talk about the overlay of Judaism and politics.
“Each of our supervisors wears his or her Jewishness freely,” said moderator Elliot Brandt, regional director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Indeed, the three spoke proudly of their Jewish backgrounds. Kaufman, whose mother was a Russian immigrant, has been involved with the organized Jewish community for almost 40 years, volunteering for the federation and Jewish Family and Children’s Services.
“She really is the mother of the Jewish community here in the Bay Area,” said Brandt, in one of a number of comments that gave the event a haimish touch.
Leno — whose parents, in a twist of Jewish geography, attended high school in Milwaukee with Kaufman — dropped out of rabbinic school at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion before moving to San Francisco and starting a small sign-making business.
He has helped raise money in the gay community for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Meanwhile, Katz (who is no relation to this reporter) grew up steeped in Jewish values in a Conservative home in Berkeley. Her father, an attorney, once represented the Rev. Martin Luther King. An attorney herself, Katz cut her political teeth working on various campaigns and participating in AIPAC’s young leadership program.
The three agreed that Jews have assimilated rather seamlessly into San Francisco civic life. In addition to holding political posts, they occupy seats on many community boards, frequently serving as board presidents.
Kaufman joked there have been just as many Jewish presidents of the United Way as there have been of the Jewish Community Federation.
“The Jewish community has matured in such a way that essentially there aren’t ‘Jewish issues’ anymore,” she said.
Between 70,000 and 75,000 Jews reside in San Francisco, according to the Jewish Community Relations Council.
The last explicitly Jewish issue, the panel agreed, arose in 1994, when a Malcolm X mural at San Francisco State University was labeled anti-Semitic because of its inclusion of Stars of David and crossbones. The mural caused heated controversy. It was sandblasted from the wall after public outcry drew national media attention, and it was later replaced with a new Malcolm X mural in 1996.
While the city’s Jewish community is not monolithic, the supervisors said, it tends to be more unified than other, more factionalized ethnic communities.
Still, expect some disagreement from the three Jewish supes.
After an audience member asked how the daunting problem of the city’s homeless should be handled, the politicians differed on whether money should be given directly to the homeless or to organizations that aid them.
Joking about the adage “Two Jews, three opinions,” Brandt said to the supervisors, “You’re all right.”