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He was president of his synagogue. Now he wants to be LA’s next mayor.
LOS ANGELES — Adam Miller volunteered with a Reform social justice movement as a teenager, lived in Israel as a young adult and was and became a leader of one of the country’s most successful synagogues.
But Miller, a businessman who is running for mayor of Los Angeles, hasn’t said much about his Jewish background on the campaign trail. Instead, he has been talking about his entrepreneurial credentials — he sold his software company for $5.2 billion in 2021 — and touting the accomplishments of the nonprofits he started. His campaign site doesn’t mention his Jewish connections at all.
Seated at a cafe in his tony West LA neighborhood of Brentwood, Miller explained why. In today’s political environment, he said, he felt he’d had to downplay his Jewish, pro-Israel identity early in the campaign. But with California’s nonpartisan June 2 primary approaching — with the top two winners going on to the general election — he was ready to open up.
“It pains me a little bit when other candidates are acting like they’re going to position for the Jewish vote,” said Miller, who is running as a Democrat. “They’re acting like all of a sudden they’re very aligned with the Jewish community, when I know as a Jew that’s not necessarily true.”
Miller, who is self-funding his campaign, is currently running third or fourth, depending on the poll, in a race to unseat incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. More than 40% of voters remain undecided. He’s pitching himself as a get-things-done moderate — and a course correction from the growing influence in City Hall of democratic socialists, members of the same left-wing movement that helped make Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City. Four Democratic Socialists of America members sit on LA’s City Council. One, Councilmember Nithya Raman, is Bass’ most formidable opponent in the primary.
At debates and in interviews, Miller has focused on the city’s most pressing issues: homelessness, housing, immigration and budget. Yet Miller’s Jewish bona fides may also hold his clearest arguments for leadership of the city. He leaned forward when talking about Ikar, the nondenominational synagogue where he once served as president, and about his identity as a Zionist — “even though it’s a dirty word now,” he said.
And a series of high-profile incidents affecting LA’s Jewish community during Bass’ term had helped clarify for Miller the problems facing the city.
“Look, to the vast majority of Angelenos, antisemitism is certainly not a top issue,” said Miller. “But as a Jew, antisemitism, freedom of speech, protection of religious freedom, is extremely important. And we can do better.”
A year in Israel
Miller’s Jewish story intersects with his journey into politics. As a teenager growing up in New Jersey, he was active in the National Federation for Temple Youth, a Reform youth movement, and was eventually elected social action chair of his region. The position involved traveling to Washington to lobby Congress on key issues — which in the 1980s included fighting apartheid in South Africa.
Miller recounts that he was always primed to be a supporter of Israel, raised with a grandfather who dreamed of living there, and in NFTY as a Zionist organization. After he finished graduate school, he visited the country for the first time, staying in Herzliya.
“I decided, after being there for almost a month, that I was going to give myself 10 days to see if I could get a job in Israel,” he recalled. He got hired at an investment bank in Jerusalem and lived there for a year, attending ulpan in the evenings.
The experience was formative. His company, Cornerstone OnDemand — a human resources enterprise software — later opened an office in Tel Aviv. “We were the No. 1 workplace in Israel for olim chadashim,” Miller beamed, using the Hebrew for new immigrants.
Miller’s involvement with Ikar began when the congregation was meeting in a JCC gym. Enchanted, he asked the rabbi to coffee. That was Rabbi Sharon Brous, then a mostly unknown Jewish Theological Seminary graduate, who invited him to that night’s board meeting. He served as Ikar’s president for a term in the mid-2000s.
In that time, he helped transform the congregation from an experiment in non-movement Judaism into a dynamic religious community that today has 1,200 member families — a directory that includes Steven Spielberg and former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti — and a multimillion-dollar budget.
When Miller stepped down from the board in February after entering the mayor’s race, Brous — now one of the most sought-out rabbinic voices in America — gave him a blessing in front of the congregation. (Brous did not respond to an inquiry.)
Miller, who said he’s reached out to Garcetti for advice about the office, was eager to connect his experience at Ikar to his qualifications to lead City Hall. Both institutions, Miller said, were full of good people with great ambitions, adding that his unique advantage is practical organizational leadership experience — budgeting, development and operations.
“You have to have the right mission, but you also have to have the ability to execute,” he said. “Ikar is a good example. We had great ideas early on. We had a lot of excitement and hope and compassion, but I put in operational structure to make it a reality.”
Two longtime congregants who asked not to be named for publication agreed, crediting Miller for professionalizing the organization when it was still a fledgling startup.
“That understanding and capability,” Miller said, “is what I’ve been able to do over and over again across a number of different organizations, and what I will bring to City Hall. And none of the other candidates have that.”
Campaigning in counterpoint
Miller is likely right that most Angelenos don’t regard antisemitism as a top issue. But the last four years have offered Jewish residents of the city plenty of opportunities to rate the incumbent.
Bass’ term has seen an antisemitic shooting in Pico-Robertson, the city’s largest Jewish neighborhood; a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA that drew national attention; and dueling protests outside an Israeli real estate seminar at Adas Torah, an Orthodox synagogue, that devolved into a brawl. More recently, pro-Palestinian protesters entered Wilshire Boulevard Temple to protest an Israeli defense contractor speaking there.
Miller said the mayor’s response in each case reflected the same pattern. “I think the city just generally shows no urgency to any problems,” he said. “We see that with the fires and the slow recovery, we see that with the encampments, we see it with trash and public safety, but we also see it clearly with antisemitism — just not a sufficient response. Period.”
Local Jewish leaders have lobbied for buffer zones outside of synagogue entrances where protesting would be prohibited, a measure Miller sees as a no-brainer. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has vetoed a bill that would have mandated a police perimeter outside of schools, citing First Amendment protections. (Mamdani meanwhile signed a bill that created such a space around houses of worship, which passed with a veto-proof majority.)
Like many American Jews, Miller was alarmed by Mamdani’s rise, as he was by the rising influence of DSA on local politics, saying the movement, whose platform includes a boycott of Israel, “has been overall antisemitic.” But he hoped Los Angeles, under a Miller mayoralty, would be a counterweight to Mamdani’s militantly anti-Israel stance.
“It’s an enormous opportunity to do that,” he said. “And conversely, if both coasts are run by DSA mayors, I think we put the Jews at real risk.”
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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Spain reports 86% rise in antisemitic incidents, as interior minister takes aim at ‘xenophobia’
(JTA) — Antisemitic offenses in Spain rose 86% last year amid the country’s highest total hate incidents on record, according to a report from the Spanish government.
Jews were targeted in 69 hate crimes and incidents in 2025, up from 37 in 2024, according to a report released last week by Spain’s Interior Ministry. Islamophobic attacks also increased from 15 to 35 incidents.
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said in a video posted on Facebook that his office documented 2,417 total hate incidents last year, the highest figure since it began recording in 2014. Spain is home to about 70,000 Jews, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain.
The ministry defined antisemitism as any act of hatred, violence or discrimination directed against Jews or “nationals of the State of Israel.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has become one of Europe’s sharpest critics of Israel and its military action in Gaza, which he says constitutes genocide. Spain imposed a total arms embargo on Israel in 2025 and permanently withdrew its ambassador in March, following Israel’s withdrawal of its ambassador to Spain in 2024.
The Interior Ministry said hate crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia accounted for the largest number of offenses at 934. Grande-Marlaska called out “public officials” for rhetoric and policies that he said inflamed xenophobic sentiment.
Grande-Marlaska released his report as Spain’s far-right, anti-immigration Vox party advocates for a “national priority” policy that favors Spaniards over others in access to public aid and benefits, such as subsidized housing and healthcare. Vox recently struck deals with the conservative People’s Party to insert the “national priority” clause into coalition agreements in the regions of Extremadura, Aragón and Castile and León.
“The national priority is xenophobia,” Grande-Marlaska said. “It is institutionalized xenophobia, protected and promoted by public officials who legitimize and amplify hate speech that, in the past, would have been condemned when it entered the public sphere.”
Vox is strongly supportive of Israel, whose government has allied with the party despite a history of neo-Nazis in its ranks. Vox leader Santiago Abascal visited Israel in 2024 to show his support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Sánchez recognized a Palestinian state.
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