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JEWISH JOURNAL

Courting the Jewish Vote

The Los Angeles mayoral race officially began this week, 52 candidates vying for the April 20 election. A June 8 runoff is assured.

“You must come meet my candidate,” the friend of one mayoral wanna-be told me. “A real person. I tell you, a star is being born. A diamond in the rough.”

That’s the way this race is heading. Candidates will be campaigning on the “real-person” ticket, or the haimish ticket, building coalitions in the sand. The appeal to Jewish voters will be full frontal, based on friendship, alliances and even a common love for Israel--all more or less equally diversionary to a city with a $300 million debt.

Los Angeles is a minority city (the ballot will be printed in seven languages) but European-Americans still carry 60% of the vote and the Jewish electorate alone makes up as much as 10% of the total. The tribal instinct is running high throughout Los Angeles as communities seek comfort among those they can trust.

The desire for self-representation is only part of the equation. The American Jewish Congress on Tuesday joined 29 other liberal ethnic and business groups (including the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Asian, homeless and environmental organizations) in releasing a list of 16 questions aimed at the mayoral candidates. By joining with other groups to ferret out common concerns, rather than seeking private answers on its own, AJ Congress sent a message that Jews this era are not so open to special-interest politicking.

The Jewish vote has yet to coalesce around a mayoral hero. Woo, Wachs, Riordan, Katz, Patsaouras and latecomer Griego all have their champions. We wait and see.

From a commentary by Managing Editor Marlene Marks. The Jewish Journal is a weekly published Fridays in Los Angeles.

INDIA WEST

Same Name, Two Languages

George Bernard Shaw said, “England and America are two countries divided by the same language.”

I never gave much thought to this perceptive statement until an American friend, on return from a recent European visit, teased, “You speak the Queen’s own English with a distinct accent to boot.”

Born and bred in India, a former Crown colony, I could relate to that remark instantly; the British influence where educated Indians speak English English, as opposed to American English, in a cultured voice. Although Uncle Sam’s slang is popular among teen-agers in India today, thanks to Hollywood, the U.S. usage of the English language is still so different that for an immigrant it can create high comedy in the most mundane of situations, like buying a new dress in a department store.

Wanting to try on a pair of designer jeans on my first visit to a mall in this country two years ago, I asked the young salesgirl to direct me to the trial room. To my amazement she began to giggle. It took the celebrity cases of William Kennedy Smith and Iron Mike to make me associate the trial room only with the halls of justice.

Variation in vocabulary also stumped an adolescent Indian girl who recently migrated to this country. While doing sentence formation in class, the youngster wanted to borrow a rubber to delete a spelling error, only to learn after a lot of ribbing that the word she was looking for was eraser.

From a commentary by Nelima Gandhi Bajaj. India West, a weekly published Fridays in Emeryville, has a Los Angeles bureau.