After Henry Stern found swastikas drawn on his backpack and faced threats at his Malibu, Calif., school, the then eighth grader readied for a fight. He asked a Jewish friend, who knew karate, to stand by him and use his martial arts skill if necessary and he intended to run a tape recorder to document the violence.

“We had this whole plan,” the now California state senator, told JNS. “I thought I was going to get beat up that day.”

Stern described his identity as a teen as he “happened to be Jewish.” He told JNS that he is “good at talking my way through things” and is “not a super tough guy, but I at least can joke my way around stuff.” He didn’t need to, though, because the class was learning about the Holocaust at the time, and his teacher stopped the regular schedule to invite survivors to come address students.

“I met all these survivors, and they changed my life,” Stern said. “Not every kid has that magical bullying-into-leadership redemption moment. A lot of other kids have to duck it, take their Magen David off and lay low.”

“Going through all that stuff made me realize it doesn’t really matter if you’re religious or not,” he told JNS. “You’re still vulnerable just being a Jew,” and “someone’s going to come for you.”

The swastikas weren’t a once-off. “There was a whole weird thing that was happening at the school newspaper at the time, and they were embedding swastikas into the school newspaper cartoons,” he said. “We found there was a whole crew of guys who were really getting into neo-Nazi stuff, and we had a whole intervention in my eighth grade social studies class where we basically stopped class for the week.”

“That’s my own personal origin story,” the 44-year-old Democrat, who represents about 1 million people, including in heavily-Jewish parts of Los Angeles and Ventura County, in the state Senate.

The Malibu native, whose father is the actor Daniel Stern, of Home Alone fame (the burglar Marv Murchins), graduated from Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. He worked as an environmental lawyer and as a senior adviser on energy policy before being elected to the state Senate in 2016 as the youngest member elected at the time.

In his nine years in the state legislature, Stern has focused on climate policy and Holocaust education. He has also become more religiously observant.

“I wear a kippah now and keep Shabbat much more strictly,” he told JNS.

‘Shabbos island’

The issues of antisemitism and Jewish identity prompted Stern to introduce SB 1387, which would require state agencies to recognize Jewish identity as an ethnicity in demographic data collection, on April 15. If passed, it would help document increasing threats against Jews, he told JNS.

The state senator started observing the laws of Shabbat more intentionally in his 30s. “I started sort of experimenting with it on my own, and then I would have these very contemplative, meditative, but somewhat lonely Shabbats by myself,” he said.

He felt at the height of his personal career. “I was a real hot shot. I felt so cool. I’m on TV and all this stuff’s happening,” he told JNS. But observing biblical and rabbinic prohibitions would mean having to “back off” and skip Saturday events and things like press conferences on Passover.

“I found a way to be beautifully humbled by it all,” he said. “The world actually goes on without me, even when I step back a little bit.”

He married Alexandra Kaufman, an Israeli-American whose parents were Holocaust survivors, and they have two children, ages 3 and 4, and live in the Jewish community in the Valley where they attend the Orthodox synagogue Shaarey Zedek.

“Shabbat took on this other dimension,” Stern told JNS. “Everyone’s around. There’s all these people. It wasn’t a lonely experience at all when I integrated into her life.”

“I wasn’t on a lonely Shabbos island by myself,” he added.

Living in the Valley, Stern has befriended “so many types of Jews: Iraqi Jews and Syrian Jews and different types of folks and backgrounds,” he told JNS. “I’m in the Valley cholent.”

‘Great influence’

Jewish lawmakers in California are in a strong position, according to Stern, who is one of 18—a fortuitously Jewish number—members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.

“We’re a really diverse group of people,” he told JNS. “We have really great influence.”

That strength has helped the caucus advance legislation, including a major Jew-hatred bill signed into law last year, even amid what Stern described as “very nasty objections and threats.”

“We’re kind of strong right now,” he said. “The governor’s got our back over the last few years in a big way, so we feel we’re in a pretty confident position at the moment.” He’s not sure how long that will last though, so he figures “in a weird way, we gotta get as much done as we can right now.” (The current legislative session ends in September.)

Stern told JNS that he endorsed the billionaire Tom Steyer, a Democrat, for governor.

Steyer described AIPAC as “dark money” recently, and Stern responded on April 5 and told the governor candidate that his rhetoric was “dangerous.”

“We can win Tom Steyer without making Jewish Californians like me feel like we don’t belong just because we believe in Israel’s right to exist and that we can eliminate the leverage of petro-states like Iran through clean energy, not with dog whistles about AIPAC and dark money,” he wrote.

Stern told JNS that Steyer is a “very good guy” who will be an “excellent governor.” He also said that “we’ve had this whole trendy thing of everyone wanting to dog whistle about ‘I don’t take AIPAC money,’ or ‘AIPAC is dark money.'”

“There’s a war going on. There’s a lot of weird trends, and you can get advisors that pull you in a lot of strange directions,” he said. “I’m deeply committed to the team. I’m in there as the religious Jewish guy. There’s got to be room for me, too.”

   | Read More JNS.org – Jewish News Syndicate