When Steve Hilton was young, his father told him that while playing for the Hungarian hockey team in the 1936 Olympics in Germany, he changed his Jewish-sounding name.
“It was the first time I ever really understood about anti-Jewish hate,” the former Fox News host who is running as a Republican to be the next California governor, told JNS. “I’m just going to fight incredibly hard for this community.”
Hilton was one of five gubernatorial candidates to speak at a forum at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles on Feb. 26. The center and several groups, including the local Federation, organized the event.
Hilton, who is leading the race in some polls, told JNS at the event that he was “very happy to support the Jewish community but also to make the point that we need change in California.”
“It’s always interesting to hear the Democrats on stage in these debates pointing out all the things that are wrong in California. Everything that needs to change,” he said. “You have to ask, well, who’s been in charge? Who’s been in charge the last 16 years?”
“One-party rule. These Democrats,” he said. “It’s time for change.”
Hilton, whose parents are Hungarian immigrants who fled communism, told JNS that “it was a very great honor to be here to make that argument to this particular community that I feel so strongly connected to.”
One of his focuses, he told JNS, is teachers’ unions, which he believes are “one of the main instigators of the hate that everybody here condemned.”
“Of course, the Democrats are completely the puppets of the teacher unions, so let’s not kid ourselves that they’re going to actually make anything different happen,” he said.
“When you see the results in the schools, quite apart from their role in fomenting the kind of hate that we’re all against here, just the sheer failure of the system to educate our kids properly,” he said. “That’s actually the strongest weapon we have to confront them and defeat their very negative influence on our school system in California.”
Hilton told JNS that beyond enforcing AB 715, a law that creates a statewide coordinator of antisemitism prevention at schools, it is important to excise hateful ideology from all parts of the school system in California.
“You’ve got to really make sure that anybody who is in any way pushing the kind of divisive ideology, antisemitic ideology, that ‘river to the sea’ kind of nonsense that we’ve had so much of—just can’t hold a position like that in our system,” he said.
“This is pervasive throughout California, and we’ve got to really stamp it out,” he said.
Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Los Angeles mayor and former speaker of the state Assembly, also spoke at the event. He showed up wearing a pin with U.S. and Israeli flags on it.
Villaraigosa told JNS that all the candidates spoke well, but their records are what matter.
“I have a relationship with this community that’s deep and long that frankly none of the people on this stage have anything closely approximate,” he said. “I’ve stood with this community throughout the decades, and I will continue to do that.”
“At the end of the day, I’ve been clear. I believe in Israel’s right to exist,” he said. “I’ve taken on hate wherever it raises its ugly head, whether it’s racism, antisemitism or homophobia, and I’ll continue to do that.”
When he was mayor of Los Angeles, he got to know the city’s Jewish and Israeli communities. “I know the difference between Shabbat and Shabbos, and as you heard me say, I know what tikkun olam, tzedakah and mitzvah mean,” he said. “It means, ‘Let’s heal the world.’”
Candidates who placed in the top five in a recent, credible and independent poll and who had raised at least $1 million since July 1 were invited. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and businessman Tom Steyer participated.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), former U.S. secretary of health and human services Xavier Becerra and Riverside County sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican, were invited but didn’t attend. David Bocarsly, executive director of Jewish California, formerly the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California, told JNS that the three didn’t come due to “scheduling conflicts.”
All five participants said they support and would enforce AB 715, oppose boycotts of Israel and would continue California’s relationship with the Jewish state.
Jesse Gabriel, a Democratic state Assembly member and chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, told JNS that the candidates “said the right things on issues that matter to our community.” He appreciated that all supported AB 715.
“That, for me, is very reassuring, because we as a caucus will be very engaged in working with whoever the next governor is to make sure that that bill is implemented, implemented strongly, aggressively in a way that protects Jewish students and students of all backgrounds,” he said.
“This was a really important moment to meet those candidates, to educate them,” he told JNS. “For them to understand where the Jewish community stands on this, to see that you have such an incredibly broad and diverse group of organizations that have come together to ask those questions, to underscore our values, to underscore the issues that are important to us.”
“I think that was a really important moment of learning and engagement and dialogue,” Gabriel said.
Elizabeth Barcohana, chair of the California Republican Party’s subcommittee for Jewish engagement, told JNS that she was “very pleasantly surprised that the loudest applause and longest applause in the room multiple times over were from comments that Steve Hilton made.”
“He really connected with the audience here on the issues that really resonated, not just things that Jewish voters care about,” she said. “On homelessness, on the economy.”
The Democratic candidates “attacked President Trump relentlessly, even though President Trump is the greatest friend to the Jewish state,” she said.
Steyer denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Jewish Americans in California don’t agree about the Netanyahu administration and what’s been going on there, and the people in Israel don’t agree about what’s going on with the Netanyahu administration,” Steyer said.
“Mr. Netanyahu’s quite a close confidant, ally and co-believer with our president, and there’s nothing about our president literally that I agree with,” he said.
Villaraigosa said, as governor, he would work with Israel, but is “no Netanyahu fan,” even though he knows the Israeli prime minister well.
“I don’t agree with him. I don’t agree with his government,” he said. “But I respect the Israeli people.”
Mahan, the San Jose mayor, said, “You don’t have to agree with the government of Israel to be able to say strongly and clearly that Israel has a right to exist, to defend itself, to be proud of its history, of its culture, of its people.”
He and Hilton didn’t name Netanyahu in their remarks.
Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of Jewish Federation Los Angeles, told JNS that the event was the first time that the Federation and partners held a gubernatorial candidate forum of this magnitude.
“It is all about us working together,” he said. “We are too small. Even though there are 1.2 million Californians who are Jewish, we are too small a minority to do these things alone.”
