Zev Yaroslavsky

Zev Yaroslavsky (born December 21, 1948) is a politician from Los Angeles County, California.

He was a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors from District 3, an affluent district which includes the San Fernando Valley, the Westside of Los Angeles and coastal areas between Venice and the Ventura County line.

Zev Yaroslavsky, the son of David and Minna Yaroslavsky, was born on December 21, 1948, in Los Angeles.

He and his older sister, Shimona (married name: Kushner), were the children of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire and grew up in a Zionist household in Boyle Heights.

His father was a founder of the Hebrew Teachers Union in Los Angeles, and both parents, who were born in Ukraine, were founders of North American Habonim, a Labor Zionist youth movement.

Yaroslavsky recalled that his parents spoke to their children only in Hebrew to prepare them for emigrating to Israel.

Yaroslavsky's visited Israel when Shimona was thirteen and Zev was five.

Shimona later emigrated permanently.

Yaroslavsky attended Melrose Avenue Elementary School, Bancroft Junior High School and Fairfax High School.

In the primary, Yaroslavsky ran second to Savitch, eliminating from the race Rosalind Wiener Wyman, who was seeking to retake the seat she held from 1953 to 1965.

Wyman endorsed Yaroslavsky in his grass-roots general election campaign.

When Yaroslavsky was sworn in as the council's then-youngest member at age 26, Mayor Bradley quipped: "Congratulations. Now you're part of the establishment."

"Yes," Yaroslavsky recalled retorting, "but the establishment is not part of me."

During his tenure, Yaroslavsky served as chairman of two of the council's most powerful committees—one that oversaw the city's budget and finances, the other that oversaw the Los Angeles Police Department.

He had a reputation among his colleagues as driven, ambitious and bright, someone who "knows the value of…good box office issues."

Yaroslavsky vacated his seat early after his successful election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

In December, 1969, they organized a candlelight protest march that would attract more than 5,000 people, including then-Mayor Sam Yorty and television performer Steve Allen.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts in history and economics from UCLA in 1971 and a Master of Arts in history, specializing in the British Empire, from the same school in 1972.

Afterward, he taught Hebrew at temples in Pasadena and Bel Air.

Yaroslavsky first gained public notice as a UCLA student who had begun orchestrating high-profile protests in Los Angeles against oppressive treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union.

After a revelatory trip to visit relatives in Russia, he formed the California Students for Soviet Jews, which, as its first major action, picketed Soviet athletes in town for a track and field event at the Coliseum.

Although a self-described "flaming liberal" at the time, Yaroslavsky recruited conservative TV newsman and commentator George Putnam, who, Yaroslavsky said, "was anti-Soviet and very favorable to Soviet Jews."

In 1971, as executive director of the Southern California Council on Soviet Jewry, Yaroslavsky made news again when he led protests against the Bolshoi Ballet and boated into Los Angeles Harbor to paint "Let My People Go" on the side of a Soviet freighter.

He was arrested during one Bolshoi protest but no charges were filed.

He also was "deeply involved" in a campaign to burn Standard Oil credit cards after the company sent a letter to 300,000 stockholders that appeared to support a pro-Arab Middle East policy.

He resigned from that $150-a-week job to campaign for the City Council.

Yaroslavsky served on the Los Angeles City Council from 1975 to 1994.

During his tenure in Los Angeles politics, Yaroslavsky played an influential role in limiting housing construction and development in the city, leading a "slow-growth movement."

Yaroslavsky's 1975 election to the City Council's 5th District on Los Angeles' Westside stunned the city's political establishment, which had supported his opponent, Frances M. Savitch, a former aide to then-Mayor Tom Bradley.

Savitch had secured endorsements from, among others, California's two U.S. senators, members of Congress and an assortment of state office holders—"some of the strongest political muscle ever assembled in a City Council race," as the Los Angeles Times put it in a post-election analysis.

Yaroslavsky was on the city council from 1975 to 1994.

He authored Proposition U, a successful 1986 ballot initiative, that the Los Angeles Times called "the largest one-shot effort to limit development in the city's history."

Yaroslavsky argued in 1987 that Los Angeles had "filled up."

In the 1990s, he blocked expansion of light rail into Santa Monica and authored Proposition A, a successful 1998 ballot initiative which prevented new expansions of the Los Angeles Metro Rail.

He was first elected to the board in 1994.

In a 1994 story marking his first day as a supervisor, the Los Angeles Times noted that "Yaroslavsky was more often than not a dominant player in virtually every municipal initiative of note since he joined the City Council in 1975."

When he opted not to run for re-election in 1994 and instead ran for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Yaroslavsky's wife Barbara unsuccessfully ran to replace him on the city council.

Yaroslavsky successfully obtained ordinances that reduced neighborhood building heights and imposed severe restrictions on hillside development.

Yaroslavsky also led an effort to substantially limit the scale of development in Century City.

Yaroslavsky was credited with orchestrating the negotiations concerning the use, for the first time, of potential traffic congestion measurements to help determine the scope of a project.