“I’m Latino, I’m gay, I’m Jewish. I do what I want. I don’t fit in the boxes that they want me to fit in.” So said George Santos—recently elected as the congressman for a district that includes parts of Long Island and Queens—during a campaign interview in August. But since his election, reporters have uncovered several holes in Santos’s claims about his background and finances. Matthew Kassel scrutinizes the stories the thirty-four-year-old Republican has told about his ancestry:

In his campaign materials and on the trail, George Santos, . . . wove a compelling family narrative, tracing his maternal grandparents’ flight from Jewish persecution in Soviet Ukraine to Belgium, where, he has claimed, they fled the Nazi occupation before settling in Brazil.

Brazilian records from a national civil-identification database . . . reveal that Santos’s maternal grandmother, Rosalina Caruso Horta Devolder, was born in 1927, and is unlikely to have immigrated from Belgium in 1940, as Santos has previously claimed. . . . It is likely that both Santos’s grandmother and her mother . . . were born in Brazil. His maternal grandfather, Paulo Horta Devolder, was, “by all indications, Brazilian,” according to Fábio Koifman, a historian at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro who specializes in the entry of foreigners into Brazil between 1937 and 1945.

While his story has varied on the different occasions he has told it, Santos has most frequently said his grandfather, who was born in 1918, escaped Stalin’s persecution when he fled Ukraine in the 1920s, and met the woman who would become his wife in Belgium. But Koifman, who recently assembled an extensive genealogical record of Santos’s family, . . . said there is “no evidence that he was born in Ukraine or that he was Belgian or came from Belgium.”

Meanwhile, none of Santos’s maternal ancestors “suggest any closeness to Judaism,” Koifman said. “All were baptized, married, and buried according to Catholic rites and traditions.” Though he has described himself as a practicing Catholic, the congressman-elect expressed a personal sense of connection to his purported Jewish heritage.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.