c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) American Jewish leaders are paying increased attention to bolstering ties with their Latino political and religious counterparts. The effort is motivated by a concern that Jewish issues, including support for Israel, not be overlooked as Latino political power increases in line with the nation’s shifting demographics.

Jewish-Latino political cooperation has occurred for years, and even decades, in cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, where large concentrations of both groups reside. Most often it consisted of Jews helping Hispanics gain a political foothold in support of shared local interests.

What’s new is a recognition that the power relationship is changing. With Hispanics numbering about 14 percent of the U.S. population and growing, compared to a Jewish population stagnating at 2 percent or less, Jewish leaders now admit they need Latinos as much as Latinos once needed them.

Dina Siegel Vann, who directs the American Jewish Committee’s new Latin and Latin American Affairs Institute, said the recent election of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor of Los Angeles, a city in which Jews have wielded considerable political power in recent decades but failed to elect a mayor, underscores the effort’s importance.

“Los Angeles proves that today the Latino community is as important as any for Jewish political collaboration, and is crucial to maintaining support for American Jewish concerns,” said the Washington-based Vann. “The future for Latinos and Jews is now.”

Israel has also taken notice of the new reality. Israeli consulates in Houston, Miami, New York and Los Angeles have added Spanish-speaking individuals assigned to Latino outreach. “Our job is to promote Israel and you can’t really promote Israel if you don’t speak Spanish and can’t get on Spanish-language TV and into Spanish-language newspapers,” said the Houston consulate’s Sofia Perches.

The Hispanic community’s political diversity makes for a more complicated relationship than the once-solid Jewish-black political alliance, which tended to be wholly in tune with liberal Democratic politics.

Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan Washington research organization, noted that about 40 percent of the 2004 Latino presidential vote went to President Bush, in part because of Latino opposition to gay rights and abortion pushed by conservative Roman Catholic and evangelical Protestant churches, both strongly influential among Latinos.

Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEAO) in Los Angeles, says even the general assumption that Cubans are Republicans and Puerto Ricans are Democrats is wrong. While south Florida Cubans are solidly Republican, New Jersey Cubans lean Democratic, he said. And while northeast Puerto Ricans trend Democratic, central Florida’s Puerto Rican community is Republican.

“Latinos can’t be pigeonholed. It’s a varied community with lots of national identities and different needs involved,” Vargas said.

Despite growing ties between Jewish and Hispanic leaders, relations between ordinary American Jews and Latinos remain circumscribed, said Steve Windmueller, director of the School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles.

“Outside of some strong personal relationships between leaders, there is not much of a strong communal connection because the communities are in very different places economically and because of geographical separation. They just don’t live in the same neighborhoods,” he said.

Those engaged in political outreach insist their efforts will eventually bring ordinary Jews and Latinos closer. Norman Orodenker, a Rhode Island Jewish activist who heads his state’s Latino-Jewish Alliance, said: “If we work together on issues of importance to both communities, the news of this trickles down to the grass roots. That predisposes people to thinking positively about each other. Eventually, opportunities arise for one-on-one encounters in which the goodwill that’s been created comes to bear.”

Rabbi Rigoberto Emanuel Vinas, the Cuban-American leader of Lincoln Park Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue in Yonkers, N.Y., said working with influential Latino clergy is one way to enhance grass-roots relationships.

The Philadelphia Jewish Community Relations Council already works with Esperanza USA, the nation’s largest Latino faith-based community development agency. Esperanza (“hope” in Spanish) is led by Philadelphia’s the Rev. Luis Cortes Jr., one of the U.S.’s most influential evangelical leaders.

MO/JL END RNS

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a photo of Dina Siegel Vann to accompany this story.