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Claudia Sheinbaum is on track to become Mexico’s first Jewish and woman president
(JTA) — The way things stand now, Mexico is headed to elect its first woman president next year. The two leading candidates in the polls for the 2024 election are Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico City’s former mayor, and Xóchitl Gálvez, a senator representing the center-right opposition bloc.
The polls point to another first: Sheinbaum, currently the frontrunner, could become the country’s first Jewish president, too.
Earlier this month, Sheinbaum, 61, was announced as the candidate for the left-wing Morena party, which has been led by the country’s outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Since then, her momentum has only grown — a poll taken by the El Pais newspaper has 47% of voters supporting her, while Gálvez, her closest competitor, notched 30%.
If elected, Sheinbaum would join the ranks of the few Jews outside Israel who have been elected to their country’s highest office, including Janet Jagan of Guyana, Ricardo Maduro of Honduras, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski of Peru and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Sheinbaum would also likely be the first Jewish person in history to lead a country of more than 50 million people.
Here is a primer on Sheinbaum and how her Jewishness has become part of the campaign.
She is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and political liberal who has beaten back crime.
Born to two science professors in Mexico City, Sheinbaum herself studied physics and became an engineering professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her research focused on, among other things, energy usage in Mexico’s buildings and transportation system. Along with a group of other experts on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, she would go on to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
As Mexico City’s head of government, Obrador appointed Sheinbaum as his environmental secretary in 2000. She became a close ally and joined his new left-wing Morena party (named after the country’s Catholic patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe) in the early 2010s. In 2015, she was elected mayor of Tlalpan, Mexico City’s largest borough, before becoming mayor of the entire city in 2018. She stepped down as mayor this summer to enter the presidential race.
Like the term-limited Obrador — whose approval rating of over 60% has been one of the highest in the world — Sheinbaum’s platform includes fighting Mexico’s deeply rooted corruption, continuing cash transfers to Mexico’s most vulnerable populations and developing Mexico’s energy sovereignty. But Sheinbaum will likely be more pro-environment than Obrador — while the current president has bolstered Mexico’s oil industry, Sheinbaum has said most of the country’s future “has to be related to renewable energy.”
As mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum led the city through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Obrador appeared to minimize the threat of the virus, Sheinbaum advocated for masks and increased testing early on. And in a country plagued by violence, she has reduced her city’s murder rate by nearly half.
But some controversy also brewed during her time as mayor. Despite expanding public transport, there were at least a dozen accidents, some deadly, in the city’s subway system. Critics say she hasn’t done enough to fix the city’s crumbling infrastructure.
Sheinbaum also faced controversy involving infrastructure disaster as head of Tlalpan. In 2017, during an earthquake that killed more than 300 people in total, an elementary school collapsed in Sheinbaum’s district, killing 19 children and six adults. An apartment had been built on top of the school, destabilizing it, and some criticized her for allowing district officials to approve the construction permits. She apologized for what happened, but some parents of the deceased children still hold her accountable.
Her Jewish identity is more political than religious.
Sheinbaum had Ashkenazi grandparents who immigrated from Lithuania in the 1920s and Sephardic grandparents who left Sofia, Bulgaria, in the 1940s to escape the Holocaust. She has said that she celebrated holidays at her grandparents’ houses, but at home, her family life was secular.
Sources told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2018 that Sheinbaum feels connected to the history of Jews in political activism, but not as much so to the religion or its traditions. Like many secular, leftist Jews in Mexico, her parents moved to the south of the city to be closer to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a hotbed of political activism. She told a group of Jewish women voters during her mayoral campaign in 2018 that she was a proud Jewish woman.
She also hasn’t made any public pronouncement about Israel or spoken as a member of a minority, even though Jews make up less than 1% of the capital city’s population. It is not known if she belongs to any synagogue or other Jewish institution.
“In Mexico, most of the [Jewish community] is affiliated to one of the five or six major communities,” said Daniel Fainstein, the dean of Jewish Studies at the Hebraica University in Mexico City. The country is known for being home to multiple tight-knit Orthodox communities, many of whom don’t mingle much. “I don’t think she’s affiliated to any of those communities. … She’s not seen as, let’s say, one of us. … I think that she’s seen as someone from Jewish origins that is developing her work as an academician and then as a politician.”
Sheinbaum’s Jewishness is shaping up as a simmering issue in the race.
Even though Mexicans are generally devout Catholics, according to Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, a Mexican sociologist at the University of California San Diego, the country has a strong history of separating religion from politics.
“Mexican politics has actually been quite secular,” he told JTA. “So the religion of the president and the religious practices of the president are never discussed.”
In a break from that unspoken tradition, former President Vicente Fox called Sheinbaum a “Bulgarian Jew” in an apparent attempt to minimize her candidacy. “The only Mexican is Xóchitl,” Fox added, referring to Sheinbaum’s opponent.
Fox later apologized, and Gálvez condemned Fox’s comments. But since announcing her candidacy, in only a few months of official campaigning, Sheinbaum has already released her birth certificate on Twitter — twice — and published campaign ads emphasizing her Mexican identity in the face of attacks about her origins.
Pardo-Guerra said he didn’t think Sheinbaum’s Jewish identity would play a major role when the votes are counted next year. But he said it can be difficult to distinguish “stupidity from antisemitism” in Mexican political discourse.
“What has been said about Claudia Sheinbaum on some occasions is very close to antisemitism,” he said. “Most of it is ignorance, but I wouldn’t say there isn’t some other position out there.”
Tabea Alexa Linhard, a comparative literature professor at Washington University in St. Louis who teaches courses on Mexican and Jewish Diaspora cultures, also said Fox’s tweet had “a little bit of both” antisemitism and ignorance.
“Different forms of antisemitism endure in Mexico, as they do elsewhere,” she wrote in an email. “It is hard not to see echoes of the conspiracy theories involving Barack Obama’s place of birth. It is a political ruse, but in the U.S., this certainly had important consequences, and this kind of dog whistle may also be consequential in Mexico.”
Most Mexican Jews probably won’t vote for her.
The average Mexican may not care about Sheinbaum’s religion, but the average Mexican Jew is probably not voting for her. Like most other Latin American Jewish communities, the majority of Mexico’s Jews lean conservative politically. Sheinbaum’s platform is not radically left-wing when compared to other leftist leaders in Latin America, but Gálvez, who founded two tech firms, may be more appealing to conservative-leaning Jews, many of whom are business owners.
“I think that most [Mexican Jews] will vote for Xochitl Galvez,” said Fainstein. “[Their decision] is not related to the Jewish or non-Jewish origins of the candidates.”
He added that most “upper middle class” people vote against Morena, not just Jews. However, he did mention that “there are other groups of Jews who are active in Morena and support Morena also.”
Linhard also said the Jewish vote will not be dependent on the ethnic background of the candidate.
“Mexico’s Jewish community is very diverse,” he said. “Some will identify with Sheinbaum, others will not. But the vote of Jewish Mexicans will likely depend … on her and her opponent’s platform.”
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The post Claudia Sheinbaum is on track to become Mexico’s first Jewish and woman president appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Al Jazeera Hit With Defamation Lawsuit by Syrian Jewish Ex-Refugee
The Al Jazeera Media Network logo is seen on its headquarters building in Doha, Qatar, June 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Naseem Zeitoon
A defamation lawsuit was filed against the Qatar-based Al Jazeera media network on Wednesday by Abraham Hamra, a Syrian pro-Israel advocate and lawyer.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Hamra “is a Jewish refugee from Syria, born in Damascus. He fled Syria with his parents and siblings in 1994 at the age of eight, following the partial lifting of restrictions on Jewish emigration by the Syrian regime under President Hafez al-Assad in 1992.”
The Algemeiner obtained a copy of the complaint, which explains that, on Aug. 25, Al Jazeera posted a video claiming that Hamra was paid by the Israeli government to visit an aid site of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an Israel- and US-backed program that delivers aid directly to Palestinians, operating independently from UN-backed mechanisms.
“This accusation is false in its entirety. Plaintiff has never received any payment, compensation, or financial incentive from the Israeli government or any affiliated entity for visiting aid sites in Gaza,” the lawsuit claims.
“The visit by Plaintiff related to Israel and Gaza was undertaken independently, in his personal capacity, on his own dime, as an advocate for his community and to bear witness against misinformation,” the suit continues.
The UN and critics of Israel have expressed concerns that the GHF’s approach forces civilians to risk their safety by traveling long distances across active conflict zones to reach one of its four food distribution points, at times creating chaotic scenes where Israeli forces have used gunfire to control the crowd.
However, supporters of the GHF argue that it bypasses the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which often steals humanitarian supplies for its own purposes and sells the rest at inflated prices. The GHF has called on the UN to publicly condemn the killing of aid workers in Gaza and to collaborate in order to provide relief to the enclave’s population, accusing the UN of perpetuating a “vast disinformation campaign” aimed at tarnishing the foundation’s image.
The lawsuit notes that the social media post from Al Jazeera, which included the image of Hamra, “cites no sources for the ‘reportedly paid’ claim, and publicly available information about Plaintiff, including his professional bio, social media posts, and known activities, demonstrates he is an independent US attorney with no financial ties to foreign governments.”
Al Jazeera also “failed to conduct even basic fact-checking, such as contacting Plaintiff for comment or verifying the allegation, despite their status as a major media network with resources to do so,” according to the lawsuit.
Al Jazeera did not respond to a request for comment from The Algemeiner.
The lawsuit argues why the allegedly false claim rises to the level of libel, saying it “constitutes libel per se under New York law because it accuses Plaintiff of committing a serious crime, namely, violating FARA [the Foreign Agents Registration Act] by acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Israel, and tends to injure him in his profession as a lawyer.”
“FARA requires individuals acting as agents of foreign principals to register with the US Department of Justice, and failure to do so is a federal offense punishable by fines and imprisonment,” the suit says. “By falsely alleging Plaintiff was paid by a foreign government to promote its interests, the statement implies criminal conduct and undermines his professional integrity.”
Consequently, Hamra is seeking payment for damages of at least $1,00,000 and requesting a trial by jury.
Read the lawsuit here: Hamra v Al Jazeera ECF No. 1 Complaint
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US Lawmakers Launch Investigation Into Wikipedia Over Claims of Systemic Anti-Israel Bias
US Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC). Photo: Reuters
The US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has opened an investigation into the nonprofit that operates the Wikipedia website, demanding answers over concerns that hostile foreign actors are exploiting the popular online encyclopedia to spread anti-Israel propaganda and antisemitic narratives.
Republican Reps James Comer (KY), who chairs the committee, and Nancy Mace (SC), who chairs the panel’s subcommittee on cybersecurity, information technology, and government innovation, on Wednesday sent a letter to Maryana Iskander, chief executive of the Wikimedia Foundation, asking the nonprofit to turn over records showing how the platform polices disinformation campaigns that target articles related to Israel and the Middle East.
The lawmakers cited studies showing that pro-Russia networks and other state-backed operations have sought to manipulate Wikipedia entries on conflicts involving Israel, often by inserting anti-Israel or antisemitic framing designed to sway Western audiences. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), for example, published a report earlier this year arguing that “malicious” Wikipedia editors have inserted anti-Israel bias onto the site, oftentimes violating the organization’s neutrality policies in the process.
Meanwhile, a report from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found evidence of Russian-linked attempts to shape narratives used to train AI chatbots by twisting information about Israel.
“The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by US taxpayer dollars to influence US public opinion,” Comer and Mace wrote. They emphasized the importance of stopping organized attempts to “inject bias into important and sensitive topics.”
Specifically, the committee is demanding records on possible coordination by nation-states or academic institutions to influence Wikipedia pages, internal arbitration files documenting how the site has handled editor misconduct, identifying data for accounts flagged for suspicious activity, and any analysis showing patterns of manipulation tied to antisemitism or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The letter also requests details of Wikipedia’s editorial policies to ensure neutrality and prevent the spread of bias.
Although the committee acknowledged that most online platforms face disinformation threats, the letter stressed that Wikipedia’s outsized influence as one of the most visited websites in the world and a key training source for artificial intelligence systems makes it especially important to prevent anti-Israel narratives from taking root unchecked.
The Wikimedia Foundation has previously stated that it takes action against volunteer editors who violate neutrality rules, but lawmakers say further transparency is needed to guarantee accountability.
However, a detailed investigation by Pirate Wires in October 2024 revealed that a powerful group of roughly 40 Wikipedia editors coordinated to “delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and reshape the narrative around Israel with alarming influence,” particularly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. Notably, one editor removed mention of Hamas’s 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the Hamas article just six weeks after the attack. The group also reportedly sought to suppress documented human-rights abuses by Iran, and a related effort by a Discord-based collective known as “Tech For Palestine” coordinated mass editing of articles related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to a report by the Jewish Journal, Wikipedia’s arbitration committee (ArbCom) permanently banned two editors outright for engaging in off-platform coordination tied to the “Tech for Palestine” Discord campaign, citing violations of policies. Additionally, the committee imposed indefinite topic bans on eight editors in the Israeli-Palestinian area for disruptive behavior such as non-neutral editing, personal insults, and misrepresentation of sources. In December 2024, ArbCom permanently banned two anti-Israel editors and placed restrictions on three others for violation of site policies in the Israeli-Palestinian topic area.
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Tunisian Brothers to Face Trial for Cutting Down Olive Tree Honoring Murdered Jew Ilan Halimi in France
A crowd gathers at the Jardin Ilan Halimi in Paris on Feb. 14, 2021, to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Halimi’s kidnapping and murder. Photo: Reuters/Xose Bouzas/Hans Lucas
Two Tunisian twin brothers have been arrested in France after allegedly cutting down an olive tree that had been planted to honor Ilan Halimi, a young French Jewish man tortured to death nearly a decade ago.
According to the Bobigny prosecutor’s office, two 19-year-old undocumented men with prior convictions for theft and violence were arrested for vandalizing Halimi’s memorial in the northern Paris suburb of Épinay-sur-Seine.
Both brothers appeared in criminal court on Wednesday and were remanded in custody pending their trial, scheduled for Oct. 22.
They will face trial on charges of “aggravated destruction of property” and “desecration of a monument dedicated to the memory of the dead on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion,” offenses that, according to prosecutors, carry a sentence of up to two years in prison.
Both suspects were taken into custody around noon on Monday while returning to the crime scene, French media reported.
Investigators tracked them down after discovering two slices of watermelon left by the perpetrators at the base of the olive tree, which contained their DNA.
Halimi was abducted, held captive, and tortured in January 2006 by a gang of about 20 people in a low-income housing estate in the Paris suburb of Bagneux.
Three weeks later, Halimi was found in Essonne, south of Paris, naked, gagged, and handcuffed, with clear signs of torture and burns. The 23-year-old died on the way to the hospital.
In 2011, an olive tree was planted in Halimi’s memory. Earlier this month, the memorial was found felled — probably with a chainsaw — in the northern Paris suburb of Epinay-sur-Seine.
Halimi’s memory has faced attacks before, with two other trees planted in his honor vandalized in 2019 in Essonne, where he was found dying near a railway track.
Hervé Chevreau, the mayor of Épinay, announced that a new memorial tree will be planted in the second half of September.
After the attack, French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the incident, vowing that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.
“Felling the tree in honor of Ilan Halimi is a second attempt on his life,” the French leader said in a post on X.
Halimi’s sister, Anne-Laure Abitbol, also condemned the incident, warning that public denunciations are no longer enough and calling for concrete action.
“In France, we are no longer safe, neither alive nor dead,” Abitbol told RTL in an interview.
“I feel less safe in France,” she said. “By recognizing a Palestinian state, Macron is encouraging antisemitism and failing to take action against antisemitic attacks in the country.”
Last month, Macron announced that France will recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly in September as part of its “commitment to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”
Israeli officials have criticized the move, which was followed by several other Western countries, calling it a “reward for terrorism.”
France’s Jewish community has faced a troubling surge in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel sentiment since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Jewish leaders have consistently called on authorities to take swift action against the rising wave of targeted attacks and anti-Jewish hate crimes they continue to face.
According to the French Interior Ministry, 646 antisemitic incidents were recorded from January to June this year — a drop from the previous year’s first-half record high but a 112.5 percent increase compared with the same period in 2023, when 304 incidents were reported.