When Nathan Hochman is sworn in on Tuesday as Los Angeles’ district attorney, after defeating incumbent George Gascón by nearly 20 points, the longtime criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor will be wearing a suit with a yellow ribbon pinned to it.

“This is a daily reminder for me about this issue,” Hochman told Jewish Insider in an interview last month. “The minute you stop thinking about the hostages in Gaza is the minute that you’ll start thinking about a whole lot of other things, and then they will be forgotten.”

The homage to the hostages still held by Hamas 14 months after the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel comes from a place of genuine concern from Hochman, 61, who grew up steeped in the Los Angeles Jewish community. It also hints at how the war in Gaza, thousands of miles from L.A., played an unlikely but important role in this race. Following months of raucous anti-Israel activity — from activists shutting down the busy 405 freeway or demonstrating violently outside a synagogue in Beverly Hills — in which protesters faced few consequences, Hochman had an easy pitch to Jewish voters.

“If you want to shut down a freeway, if you want to shut down the airport, if you want to vandalize a college campus and make it so students can’t get an education there, if you want to attack Jews in front of a synagogue in the Pico-Robertson area, you will be held accountable,” Hochman said.

Hochman’s message to voters was that Gascón, a self-described progressive prosecutor elected in 2020 amid a groundswell of anti-police sentiment on the left, was out of touch with the everyday concerns of mainstream Angelenos. It’s a message that resonated with people unhappy with the perception that crime is on the rise in Los Angeles County, home to more than nine million people. 

“Safety is probably the crossover issue of 2024, and I know that having spoken to literally thousands of people over the last year and a half from across the political spectrum,” Hochman said. 

His ascension to the L.A. County DA’s office, which employs nearly 1,000 attorneys, represents a remarkable political turnaround for Hochman, who just two years ago lost the California attorney general race by a double-digit margin. He ran as a Republican two years ago, but describes himself now as a centrist. (District attorney is a nonpartisan position.)

That a candidate who very recently mounted a statewide campaign as a Republican now defeated a progressive in deeply blue Los Angeles suggests that voters in L.A. are tiring of Democrats’ 2020 sharp turn toward the left. Hochman does not consider himself a conservative, and he said he agrees with his predecessor about some of the challenges in the criminal justice system. But he thinks a more moderate approach is needed. 

“Gascón identified a number of real problems in the system that still exist, whether it’s explicit or implicit racism, whether it’s police accountability issues, whether it’s exonerating factually innocent people who are in prison,” said Hochman. “I believe that you can bring real and effective criminal justice reform, but you have to prioritize public safety in the process. He was willing to enact a whole bunch of policies that deprioritized public safety.” 

Public safety is an issue that Jewish Angelenos are paying close attention to, particularly after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel last year. During the campaign, Hochman went after Gascón for neglecting to address rising antisemitism. 

“In 2024, the Jewish community banded together in in a very unique and palpable way to not only elect a great Jewish prosecutor, Nathan Hochman, but to reject the four years of misguided policies of George Gascón,” said Sam Yebri, a lawyer and Jewish community activist in L.A. who raised money for Hochman’s campaign. “Nathan did not shy away from talking about how important fighting antisemitism was, as well as standing with Israel.”

When an anti-Israel protest outside a Pico-Robertson synagogue turned violent in July, garnering condemnations from Mayor Karen Bass and President Joe Biden, Hochman called Gascón “missing in action” for failing to even mention the violence. 

“We didn’t feel like Gascón was very receptive or listened very much to the Jewish community of Los Angeles,” said Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation, which does not endorse political candidates. “From a Jewish community perspective, it’s clear to me that he [Hochman] will be more responsive and receptive, that when we ask for meetings, he will take them.”

Hochman served as an assistant U.S. attorney in L.A. in the 1990s, and he was an assistant attorney general for the tax division at the U.S. Department of Justice during the George W. Bush administration. From 2011 to 2016, he was a member of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission. He is the first criminal defense attorney to be elected DA in Los Angeles. 

His immediate priority once he takes office is setting up task forces to address the five biggest issues he hopes to focus on as DA: fentanyl enforcement, human trafficking, the “homeless situation,” organized retail crime and residential burglaries. He argues that in order to deter would-be criminals, laws on the book must be enforced — and he has vowed to roll back some of Gascón’s policies, which lessened sentences for many offenses, including hate crimes, and stopped prosecuting some low-level crimes entirely.  

“If I truly believe that my goal is to deter people committing crimes, then they have to understand what the crime is that they’re potentially committing, and what the consequences are of committing it,” Hochman said. That’s a philosophy that he thinks applies to antisemitism, too, and hate crimes more broadly: not just prosecution but education. “Antisemitism is not that simple, or they would have gotten rid of it a couple thousand years ago. It’s a combination of both enforcement and education.” 

Born and raised in L.A., Hochman learned Jewish values from his parents, each of whom at one point served as president of the L.A. Jewish federation. A legal award at the Jewish federation is named in honor of Hochman’s late father, Bruce, a yeshiva-trained tax attorney.

“He believed in — they say there’s three pillars of Judaism. It’s Torah, prayer and works of good deeds. He really focused a lot on the last one, works of good deeds,” said Hochman, referring to a message from the ancient Jewish book Pirkei Avot, Ethics of Our Fathers. 

He shared two other teachings he learned from his parents: “Tzedakah doesn’t mean charity, it actually means justice. The idea is that the more charitable good works you do, the more justice you bring in society,” Hochman said. “The other is the notion of tikkun olam, that you have an obligation, not an optional exercise, but an obligation, to repair the world, starting with your own community.”