Protesters from the left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow shut down a Los Angeles freeway in downtown on Dec. 13, 2023 to call for a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hamas conflict. Photo by Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

By Louis Keene April 30, 2025

The Los Angeles city attorney is going after protesters from a Jewish left-wing group who shut down a freeway on Hanukkah over the Israel-Hamas war — but her tweets from Oct. 7, 2023, are getting in the way.

City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto is pursuing misdemeanor charges against 31 members of IfNotNow, who were arrested in December 2023 after they walked onto the 110 freeway in Downtown L.A. and sat down, grinding rush-hour traffic to a halt.

But a judge has taken up the protesters’ argument that Feldstein Soto’s social media activity — and her tendency not to prosecute in similar situations — betray anti-Palestinian bias. In one of the posts, Feldstein Soto, who is Jewish, said that “every moral person must support Israel in defending her people.”

Finding “some evidence” supporting the defendants’ claim of selective prosecution, Judge Mark Windham ordered the city attorney’s office in February to turn over all emails and texts related to prosecuting pro-Palestinian protesters to the defendants’ lawyer.

Dropping the charges — which included failure to disperse, unlawful assembly, failure to comply and obstruction of a street — would have allowed Feldstein Soto to avoid disclosure. Instead, she handed over the communications last week in a thumb drive — an unusual and potentially messy move in a protest case.

“My job as city attorney is to do the right thing and to play my part in the criminal justice system,” Feldstein Soto said in an interview. “It is not to listen to noise and not to be bullied by innuendo and intimidation. I will not stand down from doing the job that I was elected to do.”

Colleen Flynn, who represents the protesters, called Feldstein Soto’s persistence in pursuing the case “unhinged.”

“I’ve been doing protest cases for 20 years — environment, immigration, police issues, war stuff,” Flynn said, “and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Windham’s order put the city attorney’s office on the defensive as Feldstein Soto announced separate charges related to the UCLA and University of Southern California encampment protests last April — which, like the IfNotNow protest, finds the city attorney prosecuting Jewish protesters of the Israel-Hamas war.

Tweeting through it

Feldstein Soto, a former corporate bankruptcy attorney elected to the office in 2022, was raised in Puerto Rico by a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Feldstein Soto told the Forward in 2023 that the household observed no religion growing up, but she started keeping kosher and observing Shabbat not long after she reached bat mitzvah age and underwent conversion as a teenager.

At the heart of Flynn’s claim of selective prosecution are the city attorney’s social media posts.

Feldstein Soto has not been especially active on X since her election to the office in 2022. But she sent a pair of tweets on Oct. 7, 2023, as Israel was still fighting off the Hamas-led attack.

“Every nation and every moral person must support Israel in defending her people,” she wrote that night at 8:37 p.m. A few minutes later, she added, “I stand with the Israeli people with all my heart, all my soul and all my might.”

“What happened on October 7 was horrific,” Feldstein Soto said Tuesday, “and the question is whether my tweet and my absolutely human reaction to a horrible thing indicates bias on protests half a globe away in the city of Los Angeles. And I submit to you that it does not.”

Other posts have touched on pro-Palestinian protests in the Los Angeles area. In November 2023, Feldstein Soto commented on the death of Paul Kessler, a pro-Israel protester who fell after a pro-Palestinian protester allegedly hit him on the head with a megaphone in Westlake, California. Feldstein Soto wrote Kessler was “murdered” and that the attack was antisemitic. (The protester has since pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter.)

His name was Paul Kessler, 69 years young, murdered for peacefully waving an Israeli flag in Westlake CA. May his memory be a blessing. Violence and antisemitism are rising at alarming rates right here and now and must be named and stopped. #StopAntisemitism #NeverAgainIsNow

— Hydee Feldstein Soto (@ElectHydee) November 7, 2023

She also posted that month about a protest outside the Los Angeles home of AIPAC President Michael Tuchin in which protesters threw smoke bombs and spattered fake blood.

Those four tweets make up more than a third of Feldstein Soto’s posts from her personal account since Oct. 7.

The Kessler and Tuchin posts, she said, reflected her position that physically harming another person should be prosecuted.

‘Selective prosecution’

Flynn pointed to other street protests that went unprosecuted, like a hotel union blocking traffic on a major thoroughfare outside Los Angeles International Airport.

The city attorney’s office says it has prosecuted those cases when it has enough evidence to pursue them. Feldstein Soto said it had pursued charges in connection with eight other protests during her tenure, against a total of 11 protesters.

The scale of the prosecution in this instance, she said, was due in part to the impediment the IfNotNow posed on a highway, as opposed to a surface street.

“I take blocking freeways pretty seriously,” she said.

Flynn agreed that stopping traffic on a freeway was “not okay.” But in certain circumstances — she cited the Dobbs Supreme Court decision and President Donald Trump’s first inauguration as examples — she said, “the freeway becomes a legitimate site of public protest.”

Campus charges

As she pressed forward with the IfNotNow case, Feldstein Soto also announced charges against a pair of Jewish protesters — one pro-Israel, one pro-Palestinian — in connection with the encampment protests last spring at UCLA.

The office said Edan On, 19, was charged with battery and using a deadly weapon — allegedly a pipe or pole — in a fight. Earlier news reports indicated that On, a former student at Beverly Hills High School, was present at the pro-Israel attack on the UCLA encampment on April 30, 2024.

In video of the attack, a man in a gray sweatshirt can be seen wielding a wooden pole to beat a pro-Palestinian protester and throwing an object into the encampment. On’s mother, Shiran On-Siboni, confirmed to CNN that the man in the video was her son, though she later said that her son told her he was not there.

On could not be reached for comment.

Matthew Katz, 31, a former UCLA student who was participating in the encampment protest, was charged with the unlawful use of force, violating the personal liberty of another — allegedly a UCLA facilities management employee — and resisting arrest.

The school’s assistant vice chancellor of facilities management, Kelly Schmader, said Katz grabbed him to stop him from pulling down a Palestinian flag the protesters were flying from atop a scaffolding near the protest.

Schmader said in an interview Monday he wasn’t aware the city planned to press charges, but that he thought doing so was “probably the right thing.”

“They went too far,” Schmader said. “It’s one thing to go to a scaffold unauthorized and tie something to it. It’s another thing to accost someone who’s trying to take it down.”

Katz declined to comment, citing active legal proceedings.

Flynn, the IfNotNow defense attorney, said Feldstein Soto’s unwillingness to prosecute more than one participant in the pro-Israel riot at UCLA underscored her bias.

“If you have an anti-Palestinian bias, you can pepper-spray people, beat them with boards, beat them with metal poles with impunity,” she said. Yet if a person with pro-Palestinian politics stops traffic, Flynn said, “they will throw the book at you and fight the case with a lot of resources and a lot of time.”

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