AJC Presents Gesher Award to Mayor Villaraigosa

For his work building bridges between the Jewish and Latino communities and his consistent support of Israel, American Jewish Committee’s Latino and Latin American Institute presented its third annual Gesher Award to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa at the Skirball Cultural Center in L.A. on Oct. 27.

Speaking to an audience that included local consuls general, the ambassador of Mexico, Rep. Howard Berman and leaders from Los Angeles’s Jewish and Latino communities, Villaraigosa emphasized his long-standing connections to the Jewish community.

“For many, many years, I have stood with this community,” Villaraigosa said, harking back to his youth in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood east of downtown that was once home to a large portion of the Jewish community and then became more predominantly Latino. “Other than my mother and my scout master, who was an Irish immigrant, I think of the people that were there for Antonio Villaraigosa as a kid, and they were all Jews.”

Consul General of Israel Jacob Dayan praised Villaraigosa for speaking out on Israel’s behalf during the Gaza War in 2009. “He could easily have said, ‘No I’m a mayor, this is not my issue. It’s a war in the Middle East,’” Dayan said. “But he came, he had a press conference. He took a lot of heat for that.”

The AJC’s Latino and Latin American institute was created in 2005 to build connections between Jewish and Latino communities domestically, to express solidarity with Jews in Latin American countries and to improve relations among the United States, Latin American, and Israel.

The Gesher (Hebrew for bridge) Award was established by AJC’s Latino and Latin American Institute in 2008; previous awards have gone to Latino community leader Raul Yzaguirre and Rep. Eliot Engel. Villaraigosa is the first leader not based in Washington, D.C., to receive the award.

Villaraigosa was first elected mayor in 2005, and he noted at the end of his speech that he had “970-odd days left” in his second term, and that he might not continue his political career afterward.

Dina Siegel Vann, director of the AJC’s Latino and Latin American Institute, said that the mayor’s political future did not play a role in the selection of Villaraigosa for the award. “It was never part of our calculation,” Vann said. “If he’s gone, he’s gone, but that’s not the point. The point is what he has done and the legacy that he has left behind, and the fact that those ties are stronger because of someone like Mayor Villaraigosa.”