This story was originally published at J. the Jewish News of Northern California.
Tali Klima walked in the chilly rain in San Francisco alongside thousands of other Jews carrying Israeli flags and signs decrying antisemitism at the Unity March in early 2024.
Then a group of protesters appeared.
“They were heckling us from the sidelines, and everyone tensed up,” Klima said. “It was uncomfortable. It was scary.”
What happened next has stayed with her. Two Hindus walking alongside Jews stepped between the marchers and the protesters. They carried Indian flags in orange, white and green, raising them as a kind of shield.
“It was such a sign of strength, and protection for us,” Klima said. “It was really emotional. I saw so many people come up to thank them afterward.”
For Klima, a South Bay resident and spokesperson for the grassroots advocacy group Bay Area Jewish Coalition (BAJC), that moment points to an alliance between two minority groups that, two years later, has only deepened. Hindu and Jewish organizations across the Bay Area are finding common cause, sharing resources and showing up for each other’s rallies, holidays, celebrations and political fights.
Barry Kramer, an American Jewish Committee (AJC) regional board member and its local liaison to the Hindu community, said the inflection point in the relationship was the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
“The Jewish and Hindu communities have had good relations for a long time, but the level of connection has increased significantly since Oct. 7 in many areas,” he said. “It’s been very heartening and rewarding to see this growth in our relationship.”
Hindus and Jews have been building stronger ties nationwide for decades. One notable milestone came with the 2003 launch of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which is modeled explicitly on the Anti-Defamation League. Hindu advocacy groups have since built AIPAC-style lobbying operations and AJC-style diplomatic efforts, aimed at strengthening U.S.-India ties — much like Jewish groups have long worked to strengthen U.S.-Israel ties.
By 2007, the relationship was formal enough to produce the first Hindu-Jewish Summit in New Delhi.
Members of the two minorities in the United States have much in common: They tend to land in similar income brackets, often lean similarly at the ballot box and feel a deep pull toward an ancestral homeland thousands of miles away.
Vijay Rajvaidya has observed the parallels for decades, first while working in the tech industry and more recently as chief financial officer for San Jose-based India Currents, a publication that has chronicled Indian American life on the West Coast since 1987. For Rajvaidya, the connection can be explained through history.
“We both are ancient civilizations with old religions and beliefs,” he said. “We became independent nations at around the same time. And post-independence, our challenges were also the same.”
Large concentrations of the two minorities live in the Bay Area, each numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The third largest Indian American population in the country lives in the region, concentrated in Fremont, and nearly half of all Indian Americans are Hindu, with smaller subsets identifying as Christian, Muslim or Sikh, according to the Pew Research Center.
In addition, many Israeli and Indian immigrants encounter one another in their Silicon Valley workplaces. Members of both groups are abundant among tech entrepreneurs and software engineers.
Oded Hermoni is a co-founder of J-Ventures, a venture fund built around Israeli and American Jewish entrepreneurs that has since drawn a substantial number of Indian investors and founders into its ranks.
“The best people of India and the best people of Israel sometimes are here in Silicon Valley, and then you can work with them directly,” Hermoni said. “It makes a lot of sense. We feel like brothers. It’s a very similar culture.”
The relationships have led to the creation of joint events, including holiday celebrations. In December 2021, for example, members of the Peninsula Multifaith Coalition brought Jews and Hindus together at Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo to mark Hanukkah and Diwali side by side. About 40 people attended and shared stories behind each group’s festival of lights.
AJC and HAF hosted their first joint cultural gathering in September 2023 in San Francisco, pairing Janmashtami, the birthday of Hindu deity Krishna, with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
March 2025 brought the biggest event of its kind yet, when HAF teamed up with Jewish Silicon Valley and the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area for a joint Holi-Purim festival at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center in Los Gatos. It drew more than 500 people for music, dancing, henna and a mashup of the colorful powders for Holi and costumes for Purim.
Likewise, BAJC plans to participate in the annual India Day parade and festival in mid-August in Fremont.
Mihir Meghani, a HAF co-founder who lives in Fremont, said that the Oct. 7 attack generated a swell of solidarity among Hindu Americans because it reminded them of attacks on their own community throughout history. He attended several vigils and rallies after Oct. 7 calling for the release of the 251 hostages kidnapped by Hamas into Gaza.
“We didn’t look at it like ‘these were Jews killed,’” Meghani said. “This could have been us on a different day. It could have been a Hindu. It could have been an Indian. It could have been us at a local Hindu temple.”
In April 2025, he said, the scenario he feared became real. Islamist terrorists opened fire on tourists in Pahalgam, a town in Indian-administered Kashmir. Twenty-six people were killed, all but two of them Hindu.
In solidarity, Jewish groups such as StandWithUs and BAJC joined public memorials and other events in Fremont, Santa Clara, Redwood City and San Jose.
“It was almost like Oct. 7 flashing back, just replace the actors,” BAJC co-founder Oded Shekel said. The victims were attacked “not because of what they’ve done, [but] just because of who they are and what their identity is. I think that’s what connects immediately to us.”
Gilli Yahalom, who is in charge of BAJC’s partnerships with non-Jewish groups, said the two communities bonded in part over a shared threat.
“Our people really felt such a strong connection because we really share the same pain and fear from radical Islam,” Yahalom said.
The relationships have evolved into something more lasting than simply common fear, Klima said.
“If that is all it was, then I think it wouldn’t hold over time,” she said.
Klima and others described a flourishing in grassroots activism around local issues that matter to both communities.
Ahead of California’s June 2026 primary, for example, BAJC-Action, the group’s political affiliate, enlisted hundreds of volunteers to create an online voter guide, working alongside the Hindu American PAC to assess where candidates stood on antisemitism, Hinduphobia (prejudice or antagonism toward Hinduism and Hindus) and the geopolitics of Israel and India alike.
“We are committed to supporting public and political figures in every role who are good for both the Hindu community and Jewish community,” Yahalom said.
Ties are also being forged around statewide issues. In June, HAF’s Samir Kalra and Jewish civil-rights attorney Julie Marzouk articulated a shared grievance in an op-ed in the Jerusalem News Syndicate, arguing that California’s anti-hate infrastructure runs on an “oppressor vs. oppressed” framework that shortchanges Jewish and Hindu Californians alike. They wrote that state programs fail to track anti-Hindu incidents and minimize the state’s own data on the rise of antisemitic hate crimes.
For Meghani, the HAF co-founder, this partnership reflects a specific faction.
“Our communities, we are, I would say, the silent majority,” Meghani said. “We’re the middle ground, the moderates who don’t really get heard often in primaries. We don’t want people elected based on their using their elected office to reiterate what extremist international bodies are saying incorrectly about Israel or India.”
Not every Hindu-Jewish alliance in the Bay Area looks like the one Meghani describes, though. There is also a left-wing counterpart: Hindus and Jews who have built their own solidarity around opposing, rather than echoing, each other’s nationalistic pride.
That current surfaced, for example, at a pro-Palestinian encampment at Stanford University in May 2024 when Hindus and Jews organized an “interfaith rally against terror” across from the tents.
On the encampment side, a protester wearing a kaffiyeh-patterned sweatshirt held a sign: “Hindus demand: Permanent ceasefire now!”
Vivek Kembaiyan had joined the encampment as the Bay Area organizer for the progressive group Hindus for Human Rights. He said he was inspired to show up after taking a “Palestine and Zionism 101” course from the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
“I think JVP’s activism — and seeing people who are Jewish speak up for Palestine — is really significant and I was really moved by that,” Kembaiyan said. “It did get me thinking about Hindu nationalism and the role of progressive Hindus to speak out against it.”
Kembaiyan and like-minded activists have come to think of Zionism and of Hindu nationalism, which is known as Hindutva, as similar and nefarious forces. They associate Hindutva with Hindu mob violence against Muslims and other religious minorities in India.
That progressive interpretation has traveled. In June, an LGBTQ-friendly bar in San Francisco’s Mission District posted a sign that read: “Death to Zionism, Hindutva, YT [white] supremacy.”
HAF rejects that framing. The organization sees Hindutva as a cultural and civilizational philosophy, not a supremacist ideology. HAF also sees critics who equate it with supremacy or fascism as smearing Hindus who speak positively about their identity or support a strong U.S.-India relationship.
One of the Jewish activists who Kembaiyan has worked with is Seth Morrison, who is active in JVP’s Bay Area chapter. In May 2025, the two spoke out against AB 715, California’s landmark antisemitism prevention law for K-12 schools, before the state Assembly’s education committee.
Morrison sees the collaboration as an outcome of occupying similar positions within their own communities.
“When you are a minority within a minority, which both anti-Zionists and opponents of Hindu nationalism are,” Morrison said, “it becomes particularly important to find allies.”
