Image: Instagram/Vote4Oscar
Tonight, the City Council will hear an item in “Councilmember Discussion Items” introduced by Oscar de la Torre that will likely cause extended public comment about the scandal that has been raging over anti-semitic remarks allegedly made by de la Torre in 2019 when he was a member of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Board of Education.
Despite this scandal being an issue in the campaign, not much has been said about it in the local press other than in the “letters section” and articles here at Next. For anyone just joining the discussion, here’s a timeline of what’s been happening in the last month.
On September 24, Jason Mastbaum published a piece in Santa Monica Next based on a staff report presented to the City Council in 2013 that recommended that the city stop funding the Pico Youth and Family Center. The report contained letters from four board members of the PYFC that resigned in protest of what they said was racist and abusive behavior. There was also a letter from the head of the local NAACP chapter asking the city to cease funding and substantiating the accusations of racism and antisemitism made by the resigning board members.
While the debate over funding PYFC was covered in the Daily Press, there was no mention of de la Torre’s alleged behavior. The piece focused on fiscal matters, meaning this is the first time these accusations were reported on.
Later that night, Mastbaum confronted de la Torre during public comment at the City Council meeting. “…here’s just a sampling of quotes about one of our city council members from some of his former colleagues contained in the city staff report for consideration by the community,” stated Mastbaum before reading portions of the resignation letters from the 2013 report.
De la Torre responded with a forceful defense of his work at PYFC and accused Mastbaum of bringing up this old report because of the upcoming election. “…for you to come up here and speak on something that’s old history, and to try to make it sound like I’m anti Jewish…I mean, that’s what you’re trying to allude to in your comments. That’s despicable,” de la Torre responded.
The full statement by Mastbaum and de la Torre was transcribed and posted at Next on September 26.
On October 7, in a Northeast Neighbors meeting, de la Torre singles out city council candidates Dan Hall and Natalya Zernitskaya as newcomers to Santa Monica politics, claiming Hall has basically just arrived and says of Zernitskaya, “Natalya…I can’t even pronounce her last name because I haven’t seen her long enough, to know who she really is. I don’t even know where she came from.
“Some of these folks. They just come into our community, and we don’t know who really they are, but it looks like they were handpicked. They’re there to follow an agenda.”
On October 8, Mastbaum sent in his September 24 article, which had not been posted in time for the written public comment cutoff time for that day’s city council meeting, as written public comment for the October 8th council meeting. De la Torre, who has not publicly denied the contents of the 2013 city staff PYFC report, sent a private denial to Mastbaum at 1:20 AM on the morning of October 9th, while the October 8th council meeting still had about an hour and a half left to go. He also included “The negativity you focus on can affect your health. Try being more positive.”
On October 11, the Santa Monica Daily Press published a letter from Jon Kean stating that on August 9, 2019 de la Torre (then a member of the school board) said, “The biggest problem with the school board is that it’s run by the Jews.” Kean goes on to explain that he didn’t speak up then because in private conversations with de la Torre, he sensed growth and he was concerned that as Councilmember he would seek revenge against Kean and thus the school district should he speak out. However, after statements made by de la Torre during debate on a cease-fire resolution between Israel and Palestinians and the back and forth between him and Mastbaum, he had to speak up.
“For me, I cannot ignore what I have experienced and felt that if I failed to speak up before this important election, I would have failed the Jewish people once again. That was a bridge too far for me to stay silent any longer,” he concluded.
On October 12, de la Torre responded with a letter in the Daily Press forcefully both denying the allegation and claiming that Kean was just playing politics because Kean and the slate of candidates opposing de la Torre are endorsed by the same political groups. He also says that Kean could be motivated by the desire for payback himself because of de la Torre’s advocacy for district based elections for SMMUSD that would change the makeup of the elected board on which Kean serves.
He wrote, “After five years, why is this being presented to the public for the first time? The alleged comment is so offensive that Mr. Kean would have had a moral and ethical duty to publicly repudiate anyone for making such a comment when it allegedly occurred. No elected official should get a pass for hate of any kind.”
On October 16, a second SMMUSD Board of Education Member was published in a letter in the Daily Press corroborating and expanding on Kean’s accusation. Dr. Richard Amir Tahvildaran-Jesswein, who was board president in 2019, gave details of a conversation he had with a government improvement consultant who met individually with each school board member.
“As Board President at the time, I was later informed by the facilitator Ms Maniker, who is Jewish, she could no longer continue her work with the Board due to antisemitic comments made during her meeting with de la Torre. According to her, de la Torre remarked that the Board was “controlled by Jews,” Tahvildaran-Jesswein wrote.
Also on October 16, Santa Monica Forward, a progressive political group in the city, launched an online petition calling for de la Torre to resign in light of the scandal. The petition has 130 signatures as of the writing of this story.
On October 17, the agenda for tonight’s City Council meeting was posted, and it had an interesting agenda item that appears to be in response to the scandal by de la Torre. Item 16 B (Agenda, for links to supporting documents), uses a lot of words to do two things should the Council pass it. First, it directs the city manager to ask SMMUSD Superintendent to use “the 1991 Hate Crime Letter” that de la Torre received in response to student activism as a learning tool to teach about racism. The second is to direct the city to spend $2,500 to sponsor a national conference against anti-semitism that will be in Beverly Hills in December.
Also on October 17, Mastbaum reached out to several of the PYFC board members who resigned in 2012 to see if they had any comment on Oscar’s attempt to deny the contents of the staff report or the back and forth in the Daily Press between Kean, de la Torre, and Tahvildaran-Jesswein. One, Jill Moniz, responded regarding de la Torre’s October 9 comment to Mastbaum about “the negativity you focus on can affect your health”, saying, “Sounds like the same old Oscar making veiled threats about people’s health when they raise concerns about the way he acts with impunity.”
On October 18, Rev. Jim Conn weighed in with another letter to the Daily Press. Conn, a former mayor and retired Methodist Minister, took de la Torre to task. “That evil out of his mouth was reported by two current and upstanding members of the school board in these pages. I was particularly chagrined because I endorsed his election to the school board. In fact we have worked together and advocated together from time to time over the past several decades. I expected more of him.”
Over the weekend, Mayor Phil Brock, who is running with de la Torre on a slate for re-election to the City Council was confronted in a Nextdoor group about the accusations against de la Torre. We copied his responses to the accusations below.
In response to the accusations made by Kean and Tahvildaran-Jesswein, Brock defended de la Torre’s character before saying the two were playing politics.
If I had evidence that Oscar was anti-semitic, I would take action. All that has been published has been two reports by two enemies of his, who also serve on the SMMUSD school board. Neither person was there during the supposed incident, they are relying on hearsay. Oscar is a person who has stood for those who otherwise had no representation for decades, including the diverse populations and those who were ignored by society. I have known Oscar for almost two decades, and I have never heard any words from him that are anti semitic. If there is firm evidence, let it be published. The incident supposedly occurred in 2019. It was not broadcast before or even before (sic) the 2020 election cycle. It seemed quite opportune for this supposed information to come out three weeks before the 2024 election.
As for the report by Mastbaum on 2013, Brock said the accusations occurred so long ago they were “old news:”
I believe this was reported in the City Council report at the time, it’s old news that was settled within Oscar’s board. It occurred when the city council was trying to defund the PICO Youth and Family Center, a nonprofit that Oscar was president and founder of.
On October 21, Vivian Rothstein wrote to Next on de la Torre’s comments about Jewish city council candidate Natalya Zernitskaya, “The words were said in a public neighborhood meeting, slurring the background of Council candidate Natalya Zernitskaya, an American citizen and Jewish refugee from Belarus.”
