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