After school, Joey Freeman doesn\’t have much free time. He\’s got homework to contend with from his classes at Milken Community High School. He\’s slogging through a heap of college applications. And, oh, yeah — he\’s also helping to run an entertainment industry executive\’s campaign for Los Angeles City Council.
If you want to really annoy Adeena Bleich, just ask her what it feels like to be a young Orthodox woman running for City Council. I know, because when we sat\ndown recently for lunch at Shiloh\’s, the first thing I asked her is what it felt like to be a young Orthodox woman running for City Council.
Real estate developer Sev Aszkenazy recently settled a lawsuit with the city of San Fernando over a liquor permit he was denied for a planned steak house. He said the denial was due, in part, to anti-Semitic bias.
David Nahai is an environmentalist and an attorney, not an engineer, and his major previous management challenge was running a 15-employee law firm. But he is the man Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tapped take on the $304,000-a-year job as general manager of the Department of Water and Power, the nation\’s largest — and frequently troubled — public municipal utility. He\’s also the first ever to helm the DWP without decades of experience in either the utility business or city government.
Today, Jews remain a key constituency in Los Angeles politics and generate plenty of strong candidates. The dramatic rise of Latinos in local politics, though, has carved out another niche for minority candidates that once largely belonged to African Americans.
For the first time since 1971, the City Council\’s 2nd District will elect a new representative. The winner of the Dec. 11 election will fill the seat of Joel Wachs, who left the position in October to head an arts foundation in New York.
There will be no Jews on the Board of Police Commissioners if the L.A. City Council confirms Mayor Hahn\’s appointees, as it is expected to do this month.
Jews may provide the swing vote in next week\’s tight race for the City Council\’s 5th District between the well-known Tom Hayden and newcomer Jack Weiss.
In a race that has enough candidates for a minyan, the fight for the 5th District City Council seat being vacated by city attorney hopeful Mike Feuer became even tougher following the Jan. 12 addition of Tom Hayden. With the former state senator expected to win a plurality in the April 10 primary, speculation is now limited to which of the other 10 candidates will face Hayden in the June 5 general election.
During the early years of the 20th century, a jour-nalist, Lincoln Steffens, published a series of exposés that were eventually turned into the book \”The Shame of the Cities.\” It was a sensational work of non-fiction, but it was also quite depressing. Steffens uncovered corruption from the top on down in one city after another across America. It was a portrait of how American democracy was not working, and it did not inspire much confidence in our urban future.\nThe mayor, the judges, the police, the city\’s
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