Mexico’s First Jewish President Has Scant Ties to the Country’s Jews

In the recent elections, Mexicans chose Claudia Sheinbaum as their next president—making her, as news outlets have noted, both the country’s first female head of state and its first Jewish one. Yet Sheinbaum has little connection to the country’s Jewish communities, and prefers to describe herself, when she mentions the subject at all, as having “Jewish origins” (of which she has said she is proud) rather than as being Jewish. Canaan Lidor observes that her detractors are far more eager to bring up the subject:

In an op-ed from December by Francisco Ruiz Quirrín, a columnist for the ultra-conservative weekly Primera Plana, he warned, in connection with a Sheinbaum victory, that “The Jewish community is willing to exert whatever pressure is necessary to influence one of its own over any political commitment.”

Vicente Fox, a former president and Mexican right-wing stalwart, has apologized for posting on [social media] last year that between Sheinbaum and Xóchitl, “the only Mexican is Xóchitl,” referring to Xóchitl Gálvez, Sheinbaum’s main rival in the elections. Fox did this in a repost of a text characterizing Sheinbaum as a “Bulgarian Jew.” Later that same year, he posted “Jewish and also a foreigner” about a picture of Sheinbaum wearing a crucifix pendant.

Nor should anyone think that Sheinbaum has any sympathy for the Jewish state:

In 2009, . . . Sheinbaum condemned Israel’s bombing in Gaza that year: “Nothing justifies the murder [sic] of Palestinian civilians. . . . Nothing can justify the murder of a child,” she wrote in a letter to a local newspaper. But she appears to have remained largely silent on Israel following Hamas’s October 7 slaughter in southern Israel. . . . This has not prevented allegations online that she is a “Zionist,” but it may have not hurt her appeal to voters critical of the Jewish state.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Anti-Semitism, Latin American Jewry, Mexico

A Letter to the Liberal Jews of 2024

One of the phenomena Wertheimer discusses in that essay is the people who call themselves “October 8 Jews” to describe “their transition from slumbering complacency to vigilant activism.” But there is no small number of American Jews who slumber on, or remain half-awake, unable to process fully events that run deeply contrary to their assumptions about the world. John Podhoretz addresses this group:

[I]n the year since October 7, you have taken odd solace at odd moments, as when Israel comes under criticism for the supposedly indiscriminate tactics it’s using in Gaza. That wouldn’t seem to be a good thing, but it does allow you to express that wondrous complexity, according to which, yes, of course, Israel must be allowed to defend itself—but within limits, within reason, and certainly not with this brute at its helm. Gazans must eat! Israeli soldiers must be put at greater risk of harm to lower the death toll!

Does it matter that Hamas has rejected fourteen separate cease-fire proposals designed with that very purpose? It doesn’t. Because the harsh reality—that Hamas and the Iran axis are evildoers who seek the mass murder of Jews and the elimination of the Jewish state—is just not very complicated at all. [This truth] compels you to accept that the blessed gift of being an American Jew over the past century has lulled you and people like you into an entirely false sense of safety and security. From your privileged perch, you have spent decades viewing with withering contempt others who take in the span and arc of Jewish history and say, as on Passover, “In every generation, they stand against us to destroy us.”

So simplistic, you thought. So vulgar. And yet, so true.

Read more at Commentary

More about: American Jewry, Gaza War 2023, Liberalism