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What Jewish voters need to know about Ron DeSantis, the Florida Republican running for president
(JTA) – In late April, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis visited Jerusalem, voicing support for Israeli West Bank settlements, touting a law he had just signed giving families thousands of dollars per year in private school tuition vouchers and signing a bill that increased penalties for antisemitic harassment.
Two weeks later, his education department rejected two new textbooks on the Holocaust as part of a clampdown on what he has called “woke indoctrination.”
Those two developments may anchor the Jewish arguments for and against DeSantis as he stands on the cusp of announcing a campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Supporters paint him as a steadfast ally of Israel who speaks to the pocketbook concerns of Jewish families. In the years since he became Florida’s governor in 2019, the state has seen an influx of Orthodox Jews, drawn both by lax pandemic policies and the promise of discounted day school tuition.
But DeSantis’ opponents portray him as a cultural reactionary whose anti-“woke” politics are inhibiting education on the Holocaust and antisemitism — along with teaching about race, gender and sexuality. He has repeatedly condemned George Soros, the progressive megadonor who is an avatar of right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theories. Surveys show that his near-total restriction of abortion rights is unpopular with Jews nationally.
And hanging over the campaign is the candidacy of former President Donald Trump, who is running for a second term, is leading in the polls — and shares much in common with DeSantis even as he has attacked him.
While DeSantis’ allies have played up some of their differences (such as DeSantis’ youth and military service), when it comes to their respective records on issues of interest to Jewish voters, Trump and DeSantis are less distinct.
Each has sought to cultivate Jewish support by focusing on Israel and erasing church-state separations that, Orthodox Jewish leaders argue, inhibit religious freedoms. And both have attracted white nationalist supporters while leaning into the culture wars.
DeSantis is set to officially announce his campaign in a chat with Elon Musk, who was just condemned by a wide range of Jewish figures (and defended by a handful of others) for tweeting that Soros “hates humanity.”
Here’s what you need to know about DeSantis’s Jewish record:
He has been an outspoken booster of Israel.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a Jerusalem Post conference at the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem on April 27, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
DeSantis, a Catholic, has a visceral affinity for Israel, and has framed his support for the country in religious terms.
“When I took office, I promised to make Florida the most pro-Israel state in the United States, and we have been able to deliver on that promise,” he said this week, addressing evangelical Christians at the National Religious Broadcasting Convention in Orlando, The Jerusalem Post reported.
He likes to tell audiences that on his first visit to Israel as a U.S. congressman, his wife Casey scooped up water from the Sea of Galilee into an empty bottle to save for baptisms. The couple had yet to have children.
The water came in handy for the baptisms of their first and second children, but after DeSantis was elected governor, staff at his residence cleared away the unremarkable bottle (which was still half full) after their second child was baptized in 2019. Not long afterward, DeSantis mentioned the minor fiasco in passing at a synagogue in Boca Raton, and before he knew it people were sending him bottles of water from Israel.
The gesture still moves him. “I was sent, all the way from Israel, this beautiful big glass jar filled with water from the Sea of Galilee that sat on my desk in the governor’s office in Tallahassee until our third child was born and baptized, and we used that water to do it,” DeSantis said last month when he visited Israel.
DeSantis made Israel a focus when he was congressman, taking a leading role in advocating for moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He was among a group of lawmakers who toured Jerusalem in March 2017 and was bold enough to pick out what he said would be the likeliest site.
In November of that year, as chairman of the House national security subcommittee, he convened a hearing on what he called the necessity of moving the embassy. The following month, Trump announced the move, and the site the Trump administration chose was the one DeSantis had identified.
In May 2019, just months after becoming governor, DeSantis convened his state cabinet in Jerusalem and gave a definition of antisemitism favored by the pro-Israel community the force of law. The same year, he banned government officials from using Airbnb after the vacation rental broker removed listings in West Bank settlements. DeSantis’ blacklisting of the company was seen was key to Airbnb reversing the decision.
He’s garnered allies — and enemies — among Florida’s Jews.
DeSantis has done much to cultivate support in Florida’s growing Orthodox community, which shares his enthusiasm for bringing faith into government.
In 2021, DeSantis came to a Chabad synagogue in Surfside to sign two bills, one affording state recognition to Hatzalah, the Jewish ambulance service, and the other tasking all Florida public schools with setting aside a daily moment of silence, long a key initiative of the Chabad movement.
In his first gubernatorial campaign in 2018, DeSantis campaigned on steering state money to religious day schools. This year he made good on the promise, signing a law that makes $7,800 in scholarship funds available annually to schoolchildren across the state, regardless of income, and to be used at their school of choice.
DeSantis also has plenty of Jewish enemies in a state where the majority of the Jewish community votes for Democrats.
In his first term, he had a contentious relationship with Nikki Fried, a Democrat who, as agriculture commissioner, was one of the four ministers in the Cabinet who had a vote. DeSantis maneuvered to freeze her out of the decision-making process.
Fried, who describes herself as a “good Jewish girl from Miami,” now chairs the state’s Democratic Party. She routinely calls DeSantis a fascist. In April, she was arrested at an abortion rights protest outside Tallahassee’s City Hall.
Under DeSantis, Florida has prohibited abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. That stance has set him up for clashes with other prominent Jews in the state as well. Last year, he suspended Andrew Warren, a Jewish state attorney, because Warren pledged not to prosecute individuals who seek or provide abortions after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
L’Dor Va-Dor, a synagogue in Boynton Beach, spearheaded the first lawsuit filed against Florida’s abortion ban in 2022, citing religious freedom arguments. Daniel Uhlfelder, a Jewish lawyer who drew attention when he dressed as the Grim Reaper to protest DeSantis’s reopening of the beaches during the pandemic, signed on as an attorney for the synagogue.
His “war on woke” has had implications on Holocaust education.
Recently, much of DeSantis’ tenure has been defined by what he calls the “war on woke,” a term originated by Black Americans to describe awareness of racial inequity but now more often functions as shorthand for conservative criticism of progressive values. DeSantis has enacted multiple pieces of legislation restricting what can be taught in schools and has also limited transgender rights, banning gender-affirming medical care for children.
While most of the books challenged under DeSantis’ education laws have focused on race and gender, the study of the Holocaust has been affected as well. In addition to the education department’s rejection of the Holocaust textbooks this month, Florida laws that make teachers liable for teaching inappropriate content to students have led multiple school districts to take Holocaust novels off the shelves, including a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary.
DeSantis calls claims that he’s chilling Holocaust education “fake narratives.” He and his defenders point to his requiring all Florida public schools to certify that they teach about the Holocaust.
Neo-Nazi and white supremacist activity has increased under his watch.
A recent report from the Anti-Defamation League described an upward trend of extremist and antisemitic activity in the Sunshine State, driven in part by emerging white supremacist groups — some of whom have gone to bat for DeSantis in the past.
DeSantis has been dogged by accusations that he caters to the far right. One of the most stinging exchanges in the 2018 election season came when Andrew Gillum, DeSantis’s Democratic opponent in the race, accused DeSantis of not being forceful enough in renouncing the white nationalists who expressed support for him in robocalls.
“First of all, he’s got neo-Nazis helping him out in this state,” Gillum said. “Now, I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.” DeSantis flinched.
DeSantis eked out a victory a few weeks later, and was soundly reelected last year, but he remains sensitive on the issue. Last year, when neo-Nazis intimidated Orlando’s Jews with signs and shouts at an overpass, politicians in the state reflexively condemned them. A reporter asked DeSantis why he had not done so, and after calling the neo-Nazis “jackasses,” the governor said the question was a “smear” and added, “We’re not playing that game.” (Several months later, the leader of the antisemitic propaganda group Goyim Defense League moved from California to Florida, saying he thought the Sunshine State would be more hospitable to his efforts.)
DeSantis has also called liberal prosecutors “Soros-funded”. It’s not an unusual political gambit — the billionaire Jewish liberal donor does fund progressives running for prosecutor. But Soros has also been the focus of multiple conspiracy theories that antisemitism watchdogs say are antisemitic, casting the Holocaust survivor as a malign influence with excessive power.
Some Jewish donors are already supporting him.
DeSantis appeared last year at a conference in New York of Jewish conservatives, where he talked to a friendly audience about his war against the “woke” and was also conveniently in the room with some of the most generous Republican donors.
He is reportedly working some of those donors, who gave generously to his gubernatorial runs. He was a star last November at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual Las Vegas confab, and Axios reported that he met with Miriam Adelson, the widow of GOP kingmaker Sheldon Adelson, as well as other Jewish donors when he was in Jerusalem last month.
A number of them are hanging back, not wanting to alienate Trump while he remains influential in the party. (Adelson has said she does not want to weigh in on the primaries.)
Among the Jewish donors and fundraisers said to be in DeSantis’s camp: Jay Zeidman, a onetime Jewish White House liaison who is now a Houston based businessman; Gabriel Groisman, a lawyer who is the former mayor of Bal Harbor; and Fred Karlinsky, a leading insurance lawyer.
Last week, Jewish conservative political commentator Dave Rubin tweeted that DeSantis would bring “Freedom, sanity and competency” to the country. Groisman shared the tweet with the word “This.”
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The post What Jewish voters need to know about Ron DeSantis, the Florida Republican running for president appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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There’s something rotten in our approach to antisemitism. Tucker Carlson exposed it
The federal government has cracked down on antisemitism from the left, while ignoring or justifying antisemitism on the right. That’s a cold, hard and very uncomfortable fact.
After anti-Israel protests swept campuses amid Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Congressional panels subjected university administrators to withering public cross-examinations over antisemitism. President Donald Trump’s administration levied millions in fines, and withheld or threatened to cancel billions in federal funding, including to university medical research.
It was a quick and harsh reaction to protests that, in some cases, veered into antisemitism and singled out Jewish students. “Nobody gets the right to harass their fellow students,” Vice President J.D. Vance said at the peak of the student protests. “Nobody gets a right to set up 10 encampments and turn their college campuses into garbage dumps. And nobody gets the right to block their fellow students from attending class.”
Contrast that to Vance’s reaction earlier this month, when the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson hosted the far-right activist Nick Fuentes on his popular podcast, kicking off a massive debate about the mainstreaming of extremist views on the right.
Fuentes, who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and called for the execution of “perfidious Jews,” told Carlson that the great challenge to American social harmony is “organized Jewry.” Carlson didn’t push back. And when asked for comment, Vance said he didn’t want to take part in Republican “infighting.”
Trump, too, declined to join the Carlson critics.“I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it. Get the word out. Let them,” Trump told reporters.
Get the word out? What, exactly, is going on?
Ignoring horseshoe theory, at our peril
Defenders of this lopsided response might argue that the administration actually has leverage over universities in the form of billions of taxpayer dollars. The government has legal recourse to hold colleges and individual students accountable.
Carlson’s choice to play nice with Nazis, on the other hand, is a matter of free speech — even if it is ominous, incendiary speech. What action could the government take against a privately-funded podcaster?
The obvious answer is: At least condemn it. But that has not happened at any level of this administration.
Carlson himself, in a long new interview with a New York Times reporter, downplayed Fuentes’ overt antisemitic statements and positioned himself as someone who, like Fuentes, merely questions U.S. policy toward Israel.
“Mr. Carlson said he abhors antisemitism and that he has numerous Jewish friends who share his qualms with the Israeli government,” wrote the Times reporter.
If that sounds awfully familiar, it’s because anti-Israel protesters at the other extreme say much the same things. Some of their best friends are Jewish, and they too hate what Israel’s leaders are doing.
American Jews are witnessing the horseshoe theory of politics in real time — the idea that the far-left and the far-right bend more toward each other than to the center. The ideology that the extremes are converging on is that Jews are the problem.
Both extremes, beginning with outrage at Israel, have a propensity to slide into overtly anitsemitic conspiracy theories that blame Israel for the Iraq War, 9/11, NYPD violence, manipulating Congress, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Meanwhile, the political leaders who can confront both these extremes through words and policy, only seem to be hammering away at one side: the left.
A virus among young conservatives
The organized Jewish community, too, is highly attuned to instances on the left when anti-Israel attitudes bend toward outright Jew hatred. The most vocal critics of New York’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani accused him of just that — fomenting antisemitism and supporting antisemites in opposing Israel.
Immediately after Mamdani’s election, the ADL announced it was debuting a special program to monitor his administration for antisemitism.
But the ample evidence that a growing segment of the right is slipping back into the well-worn alliance that characterized the United States in the 1930s, when isolationists and antisemites made common cause against the Jews, doesn’t raise the same institutional alarms.
Trump has engaged with the extremist right, where antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment have both flourished for years, since the beginning of his first presidential run. Yet his Jewish supporters have given him far more leeway than they would ever think of giving Mamdani.
Meanwhile, that antisemitic segment of the conservative movement has quietly expanded, and found increasing tolerance in mainstream conservative spaces. The conservative analyst Ron Dreher wrote recently that he estimates some 30 to 40% of the Republican Gen Z’ers who work in official Washington are Fuentes fans.
Antisemitism “is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation,” he wrote.
Antisemitism for me, but not for thee
That boom might explain the disparity between Trump and Vance’s stance on college protesters and on Carlson and Fuentes.
Like so much else in our polarized society, antisemitism itself has become politicized. Your Jew-hatred is abhorrent, the thinking goes, but mine is free speech. Yours must be prosecuted. But I’m just asking questions.
The best hope American Jews have is that enough brave souls from across the political spectrum will step up and speak out, even against their own political tribe, knowing the dark fate of societies that go down this path.
Dreher, in a private meeting with Vance earlier this month, told the vice president that standing up to Nazis and their publicists like Tucker Carlson is not “infighting,” but a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, and of the U.S.
No word on how Vance responded. But can I suggest the ADL monitor him, too?
The post There’s something rotten in our approach to antisemitism. Tucker Carlson exposed it appeared first on The Forward.
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‘My teenager’s going to boarding school. I’m panicked she’ll face antisemitism’
Dear Bintel,
My daughter’s dream, throughout middle school, has been to go to a private boarding high school. I didn’t fight her on it because it was so out of our price range. My plan was to let our finances be the villain. She ended up finding the money herself through grants and scholarships and was accepted.
Now I’m panicking because I’m afraid she’ll experience antisemitism or anti-Israel hate. She experienced that in middle school but she came home and we helped her. I don’t want to hold her back but I worry high school is too young to deal with this alone. She’s very proud of her Jewish and Israeli heritage and wears a Star of David necklace from her grandma everywhere. Any advice?
Signed,
Worried Mama
Dear Mama:
First of all, congratulations on raising an incredible daughter. Self-directed, resourceful, smart — I know plenty of adults who are far less successful at setting goals and realizing their dreams than your amazing teenage girl!
But I also want to recognize something that you don’t bring up, and that’s your heartbreak at losing this golden child. You probably thought you had another four years before this baby bird would leave the nest. Now suddenly she’s flying away much sooner than expected. That’s a huge adjustment for any parent — and it’s not just about your desire to protect her from a potentially hostile world. Many of us grieve when kids leave home, even when those kids are older than yours. You see the empty bedroom, the missing dinner plate, the “one less” member of the family at every gathering, and you just want to cry.
So let’s acknowledge that pain. You weren’t ready for this to happen so soon, and it’s OK to feel sad about it. You’re going to miss her something awful, and I’ve no doubt that no matter how well she does at boarding school — and I bet she will thrive — she’s going to miss you too. But that’s what cellphones are for, right?
Now let’s talk about your antisemitism worries. Your daughter already had to deal with this in middle school, so there’s no guarantee that a local high school would be less problematic than boarding school. The difference, of course, is that when she was living in your house, she had immediate access to your wisdom.
But you’ve already helped her develop coping skills. The proof is that she still proudly wears her Star of David. She’s not afraid. She’s not hiding. She’s ready to take on the world. She knows you’re only a phone call or text away, and you’ll always be there to listen, with unconditional love and support as needed.
Just don’t go overboard with the warnings and advice. Sometimes kids don’t want to burden their parents if they think we’re freaking out about something. They try to protect us by holding back, and that can make it worse for them.
In fact, when you say you’re “panicked” on her behalf, I can’t help but wonder if that’s part of what’s driving her to leave the nest so young. Is it possible she needs some distance from your emotions? I don’t know, but it might be helpful for you to have a few sessions with a therapist about separating your feelings from hers. You need to figure out how to express concern without suffocating her.
You might also reach out to the boarding school’s guidance counselors. I’m sure they’re used to helping parents manage their anxiety over sending a young teen away from home. Perhaps there’s even a parents’ group where veterans who have older kids can share how they’ve coped.
I’d also ask the counselors how the school typically handles student conflicts and bias. Offenses related not only to religion but also to race, ethnicity, politics and gender have unfortunately become commonplace in our world, and every school has had to develop protocols for dealing with these situations. My hope is that you’ll feel comforted knowing what policies are in place to support your daughter, and that the wonderful job you’ve done raising her so far will keep her flying high.
Signed,
Bintel
What do you think? Send your comments to bintel@forward.com or send in a question of your own. And don’t miss a Bintel: Sign up for our Bintel Brief newsletter.
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Some blame Qatar and unions for K-12 antisemitism. Experts say that’s the wrong focus
While antisemitism at colleges and universities gets the most attention, discrimination against young Jewish students is also growing in pernicious ways that often have less to do with nuanced political debates over Israel than outright bullying, including Nazi salutes, jokes about Hamas killing Jews and memes in the online forums where many students socialize.
These incidents have prompted a growing interest in countering K-12 antisemitism — the Anti-Defamation League is ramping up pressure on districts and a new political action committee is seeking “pro-Jewish” school board candidates. But alongside these efforts has been a hunt for a boogeyman supposedly driving the problem.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an influential neoconservative think tank, along with Republican lawmakers in Congress have sought to lay the blame on Qatar for “fueling anti-Jewish bigotry in K-12 schools” by, among other things, distributing for years a map of the Middle East to some schools that omitted Israel.
Teachers unions have also come under special scrutiny, especially after a contingent of National Education Association members unsuccessfully tried to cut the union’s ties with the ADL over the summer. Eric Fingerhut, chief executive of the Jewish Federations of North America, went on a self-described “rant against the NEA” from the stage of his organization’s annual conference this week in which he described the union as “invidious” and “one of the biggest, most serious problems that we have.”
This framing presents the plight of young Jewish students as an especially daunting front in the ongoing fight over how Israel is treated in American society; most concerns about both the NEA and Qatar are focused on growing hostility toward Israel.
But away from the conference’s main stage, experts working on the issue had a less conspiratorial outlook.
“It’s exciting to believe that if only we get rid of foreign funding we could solve this problem,” Hindy Poupko, a top lobbyist for the UJA-Federation of New York, said during a Tuesday panel on K-12 antisemitism. “It’s not true.”
Poupko added that some Jewish leaders were painting unions with too broad of a brush in describing them as anti-Israel and she credited the positive relationship Jewish organizations in New York City have with local unions, including the teachers union, for their success in blocking a ceasefire resolution at city council.
***
Rather than a sinister plot to seed classrooms with antisemitism or a political agenda about Israel, Poupko and the other experts suggested the problem was much more prosaic: Teachers have limited time and resources to learn about Jews, Israel and antisemitism.
David Bryfman, chief executive of the Jewish Education Project, said that many teachers simply Google to find information to teach about current events and are increasingly turning to ChatGPT — the artificial intelligence chatbot — to build lesson plans plagued by the flimsy sourcing and false information caused by the bot’s “hallucinations.”
One effective solution has been to provide classroom materials that teachers can easily integrate into their lessons. UJA-Federation distributed lesson plans pegged to Jewish American History Month to New York City schools along with posters of “Jewish heroes,” including authors Judy Blume and Emma Lazarus.
They’ve also promoted an interactive theatrical performance, featuring actors portraying Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. who come to classrooms for a show that weaves together the writings of both figures.
The local Jewish federation in Toronto realized that the only lessons about Jews in many schools centered on the Holocaust, so they wrote materials about ancient Israel that could be worked into the block on “ancient civilizations” taught to every fourth grader, and distributed books about Hanukkah to teachers.
And Bryfman is working on a database of educational resources about Jews and Judaism that teachers can both access directly and that will be given to artificial intelligence models with the hope that, when teachers search online in the future, they’ll turn up more accurate information.
***
None of these are groundbreaking solutions, but I appreciated hearing about them because they provide an important reality check. If we imagine antisemitism to be the result of a malignant conspiracy — Qatar turning teachers into sleeper agents for Hamas, or the NEA seeking to indoctrinate kindergarteners against Israel — the challenge of addressing it can seem insurmountable in the absence of a magic bullet.
Certainly, hanging a poster of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a middle school hallway isn’t going to solve antisemitism. But these kinds of practical interventions can help make Jewish students feel included at a time when many are feeling stigmatized and isolated.
Poupko said that, at least anecdotally, Jewish students had reported excitement at seeing their school hold an assembly block on Jewish heritage month for the first time, and data has found that Americans who personally know at least a few Jews are less likely to believe antisemitic stereotypes.
That’s the same logic behind a George Washington University project that offers a summer institute for faculty at schools of education at universities around the country, some of whom come in not knowing what the “Hebrew Bible” refers to, according to Ben Jacobs, the professor who runs the program.
And Be the Narrative, a group that trains Jewish students to present basic information about Judaism to their non-Jewish peers, found that 78% of teachers believed the presentations helped reduce antisemitism in their schools.
One throughline in all of these strategies is that they’re focused on working in good faith with teachers and school administrators. This is much harder when organizations view them as enemies rather than potential partners, as Fingerhut was encouraging.
“We can’t out mob the mob,” Poupko said. “Our special sauce is relationships with the people who are actually in positions of power.”
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