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Mexico’s Sheinbaum Blazes Trail as First Jewish Woman President

Morena party’s Claudia Sheinbaum at Zocalo Square in Mexico City, Mexico June 3, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

Claudia Sheinbaum basked in the glow of a thumping presidential win late Sunday, thanking supporters who gathered at the capital’s iconic Zocalo plaza shortly after 1 am to applaud Mexico‘s first female Jewish president.

For months, the Nobel prize-winning physicist-turned-Mexico City mayor was the clear frontrunner in the contest to succeed popular outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, her mentor and principle political benefactor over nearly a quarter century.

Sheinbaum now faces the task of forging her own path, including the delicate balancing act of advancing the leftist Lopez Obrador’s state-centric economic polices, especially over natural resources such as oil and minerals, while also making progress on issues seen as his weak points like the environment and crime.

The standard bearer of the ruling MORENA party will also face a ballooning budget deficit, complicating her own spending plans.

Preliminary results from the INE electoral authority showed Sheinbaum leading her main opposition rival, Xochitl Galvez, by about 60 percent to 28 percent.

“I’m emotional and I feel grateful,” said the 61-year-old, who will make history as the first president of Jewish heritage to lead the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country.

“And I won’t let you down,” she added with a broad smile.

Sheinbaum’s triumph caps an unlikely four-decade climb that has taken the daughter of activist academics to the pinnacle of power in the Spanish-speaking world’s most populous nation, for decades known as a socially conservative bastion with a macho culture.

“It took way too many years to get here,” said Francisco Labastida, a veteran Mexican politician with the once-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, who was the presidential runner-up in 2000.

Labastida said he was especially proud that Mexico had achieved the feat before its northern neighbor the United States, which has never had a woman president.

Sheinbaum’s ability to separate herself from Lopez Obrador once she takes office in October is “the great unknown,” added Labastida, since the famously stubborn leader would likely try to impose his own vision despite his pledge to retire to his ranch in tropical southern Mexico.

MAKING HISTORY AGAIN

Six years ago, Sheinbaum made history as Mexico City’s first elected woman mayor. Until she stepped down last year to run for president, Sheinbaum was known as a data-driven manager, winning plaudits for reducing the megacity’s homicide rate by half, boosting security spending on an expanded police force with higher salaries.

She has pledged to replicate the strategy across Mexico, where powerful drug cartels exert widespread influence.

But Sheinbaum will be confronted with a wide budget deficit, which is set to end 2024 at nearly 6 percent of gross domestic product, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The incoming leader nonetheless has pledged to build on Lopez Obrador’s social spending largesse, which has included expanded old-age pensions and youth scholarships.

While she has expressed an interest in attracting private investment to grow renewable energy projects, she has also pledged to ensure the dominance of Mexico‘s state-owned oil and power companies while swearing off any privatizations.

In 1995, Sheinbaum earned her doctorate in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and then pursued a teaching and academic career, including a stint on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which later shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore.

She launched her political career in 2000, when Lopez Obrador, then-Mexico City’s newly-elected mayor, tapped her to be his environment chief tasked with improving the smoggy capital’s air quality, highways, and public transport.

Sheinbaum served as the chief spokesperson for Lopez Obrador’s first campaign for president in 2006, which he narrowly lost.

In 2015, she was elected to run Mexico City’s largest borough, Tlalpan, and became the capital’s mayor three years later, the same year her mentor’s third bid for the presidency ended in a landslide victory.

Paula Sofia Vazquez, a Mexico City-based political analyst, suggested that the Sheinbaum’s command over the country’s military would provide an early test, since Lopez Obrador has greatly expanded the remit of the armed forces to key economic policies including major transport and building projects.

“It seems to me that’s a challenge no male president would face,” she said, arguing that the military’s culture can tend toward misogyny.

Vazquez singled out at least one more factor that would likely make Sheinbaum’s job even harder.

“Empathy is required from women. Women are required to have a certain sensitivity towards problems that men are not required to have,” she said. “Results are demanded from men, while women are required to show results but also a human touch.”

The post Mexico’s Sheinbaum Blazes Trail as First Jewish Woman President first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Obituary: Ronald Weiss, 68, a musical doctor who performed a record-breaking 58,789 non-surgical vasectomies

Ronald Weiss was disciplined and determined, personal qualities that he applied to his first love of music—and then to his medical career. He was affectionately known as the “Wayne Gretzky […]

The post Obituary: Ronald Weiss, 68, a musical doctor who performed a record-breaking 58,789 non-surgical vasectomies appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Harvard Antisemitism Lawsuit Cleared to Proceed to Discovery Phase

Harvard University president Alan Garber attending the 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

A lawsuit accusing Harvard University of ignoring antisemitism has been cleared to proceed to discovery, a phase of the case which may unearth damaging revelations about how college officials discussed and crafted policy responses to anti-Jewish hatred before and after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.

The case, filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (Brandeis Center), centers on several incidents involving Harvard Kennedy School professor Marshall Ganz during the 2022-2023 academic year.

Ganz allegedly refused to accept a group project submitted by Israeli students for his course, titled “Organizing: People, Power, Change,” because they described Israel as a “liberal Jewish democracy.” He castigated the students over their premise, the Brandeis Center says, accusing them of “white supremacy” and denying them the chance to defend themselves. Later, Ganz allegedly forced the Israeli students to attend “a class exercise on Palestinian solidarity” and the taking of a class photograph in which their classmates and teaching fellows “wore ‘keffiyehs’ as a symbol of Palestinian support.”

During an investigation of the incidents, which Harvard delegated to a third party firm, Ganz admitted that he believed “that the students’ description of Israel as a Jewish democracy … was similar to ‘talking about a white supremacist state.’” The firm went on to determine that Ganz “denigrated” the Israeli students and fostered “a hostile learning environment,” conclusions which Harvard accepted but never acted on.

On Friday, Brandeis Center chairman and founder Kenneth Marcus told The Algemeiner that the latest development in this case, prompted by the judge presiding over it, is a step towards achieving justice for the organization’s Jewish clients.

“Attempting to halt discovery was Harvard’s best chance to convince the court that we didn’t have a case, and they failed,” Marcus said. “The court found that our claims stated violations of the law, and we now have an opportunity to substantiate them by asking for Harvard’s documents, interviewing interrogatories of Harvard, and finding other information about the university in other discovery means. The evidence we obtain will then be used at trial.”

Harvard University has fiercely fought the lawsuits brought by its Jewish students. Another filed by a group led by graduate student Shabbos Kestenbaum recently overcame an effort it to have it dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiffs lack legal standing. At least one elite college, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been successful in quelling the claims of its Jewish students by appealing to a similar argument.

The Brandeis Center and Kestenbaum cases cannot be so easily disappeared, Marcus said.

“Our complaint is much more detailed and laden with a greater number of incidents described in detail and show matters of real gravity, including physical assault,” he continued. “The Harvard Kennedy school matter is one which resulted in the university’s own independent investigator’s determining that Ganz’s actions constituted violations of Harvard’s rules. Harvard, meanwhile, had a significant amount of time to address these problems and has failed to do so, but it has repeatedly failed to do the right thing.”

The Brandeis Center is seeking injunctive relief “preventing defendant [Harvard] violating Title VI [of the US Civil Rights Act] going forward” and the awarding of attorneys’ fees.

According to court documents, the situation for Jewish students at Harvard worsened after Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught. Following the tragedy, while scenes of Hamas terrorists abducting children and desecrating dead bodies circulated worldwide, 31 student groups at Harvard issued a statement blaming Israel for the attack and accusing the Jewish state of operating an “open air prison” in Gaza. Students stormed academic buildings chanting “globalize the intifada,” a mob followed and surrounded a Jewish graduate student, screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” into his ears, and the Harvard Law School student government passed a resolution that falsely accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

High-level university officials and faculty also engaged in questionable conduct.

In December, former Harvard president Claudine Gay told a US congressional committee that calling for a genocide of Jews living in Israel would only violate school rules “depending on the context.” In February, Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine — a spinoff of a student group allegedly linked to terrorist organizations — shared an antisemitic cartoon on social media which showed a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David, containing a dollar sign at its center, dangling a Black man and an Arab man from a noose. The group’s former leader, history professor Walter Johnson, later participated in a “Gaza encampment” protest in which students clamored for a boycott of Israel.

Harvard president Alan Garber, installed after Gay resigned from office after being outed as a serial plagiarist, has, experts have said, been inconsistent in managing the campus’ unrest.

During summer, The Harvard Crimson reported that Harvard downgraded “disciplinary sanctions” it levied against several pro-Hamas protesters it suspended for illegally occupying Harvard Yard for nearly five weeks, a reversal of policy which defied the university’s previous statements regarding the matter. Unrepentant, the students, members of the group Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP), celebrated the revocation of the punishments on social media and promised to disrupt the campus again.

Earlier this semester, however, Garber appeared to denounce a pro-Hamas student group which marked the anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks by praising the brutal invasion as an act of revolutionary justice that should be repeated until the State of Israel is destroyed, despite having earlier announced a new “institutional neutrality” policy which ostensibly prohibits the university from weighing in on contentious political issues. While Garber ultimately has said more than Gay when the same group praised the Oct. 7 massacre last academic year, his administration’s handling of campus antisemitism has been ambiguous, according to observers — and described even by students who benefited from its being so as “caving in.”

Now, committed to fighting lawsuits it could have settled with terms favorable to the alleged victims of discrimination — a course of action taken by Columbia University and New York University — Harvard’s handling of antisemitism may be decided by a judge.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Harvard Antisemitism Lawsuit Cleared to Proceed to Discovery Phase first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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‘F—k Israel’: Monument in France Honoring Nazi Victims Defaced With Antisemitic Graffiti

Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect

A monument honoring victims of the Nazis located in eastern France was vandalized over the weekend with graffiti reading “Nique Israël,” or “F—k Israel” in English, continuing a surge in antisemitism over the past year that has devastated the French Jewish community.

The vandalism in Bron, a suburb of the city of Lyon, was discovered on Saturday afternoon, according to French media.

The defaced World War II memorial pays tribute to 109 Jews and anti-Nazi resistance fighters, detainees at Montluc prison in Lyon, who the Germans took to Bron and murdered in August 1944 before leaving the area. Days later, Montluc — which the Nazis used to intern, torture, and kill people during their occupation of France — was liberated.

In a post on X/Twitter, the prefect of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the region that includes Bron, lambasted the defacement and said law enforcement had launched an investigation into the incident.

“The act of vandalism committed on the monument in homage to the dead of Montluc, victims of Nazi barbarity in Bron, is despicable,” the prefect wrote. “The [police] made the findings and opened an investigation under the direction of the judicial authority.”

So far, the perpetrators have not been identified, according to the regional French newspaper Le Progrès.

Saturday’s incident came as France has experienced a record surge of antisemitism in the wake of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7. Antisemitic outrages rose by over 1,000 percent in the final three months of 2023 compared with the previous year, with over 1,200 incidents reported — greater than the total number of incidents in France for the previous three years combined.

This year, anti-Jewish hate crimes in France have continued to skyrocket.

Last month, for example, a man wearing a sports jersey with the words “Anti-Jew” written in French was photographed riding the Paris metro, prompting an investigation by law enforcement and outcry from Jewish leaders who lamented what they described as public indifference to surging antisemitism in France.

Days earlier, a visibly Jewish teenager was assaulted by two youths as he was leaving a metro station in the northwest suburbs of Paris.

That incident followed three men brutally attacking a Jewish woman at the entrance to her home in Paris on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities. The victim stated that the assailants threatened her with a box knife, made antisemitic threats, and mentioned the events of last Oct. 7.

In September a kosher restaurant in Villeurbanne, near Lyon, was defaced with red paint and tagged with the message “Free Gaza.”

The incident came days after French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.

Two months earlier, an elderly Jewish woman was attacked in a Paris suburb by two assailants who punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”

In another egregious attack that garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a different Paris suburb on June 15. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack. In response to the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing his country.

Around the same time in June, an Israeli family visiting Paris was denied service at a hotel after an attendant noticed their Israeli passports.

In May, French police shot dead a knife-wielding Algerian man who set fire to a synagogue and threatened law enforcement in the city of Rouen.

One month earlier, a Jewish woman was beaten and raped in a suburb of Paris as “vengeance for Palestine.”

Such incidents are part of an explosion of antisemitic outrages across France that has continued since last Oct. 7.

In August, then-French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin warned that incidents targeting the country’s Jewish community spiked by about 200 percent since Jan. 1.

“Two-thirds of anti-religious acts … are against Jews,” he added, according to French broadcaster BFM TV.

Darmanin’s comments followed him stating weeks earlier that antisemitic acts in France have tripled over the last year. In the first half of 2024, 887 such incidents were recorded, almost triple the 304 recorded in the same period last year, he said.

Amid the wave of attacks, France held snap parliamentary elections in July which brought an anti-Israel leftist coalition to power, leading French Jews to express deep apprehension about their future status in the country.

“It seems France has no future for Jews,” Rabbi Moshe Sebbag of Paris’ Grand Synagogue told the Times of Israel following the ascension of the New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of far-left parties. “We fear for the future of our children.”

The largest member of the NFP is the far-left La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) party, whose leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, has been lambasted by French Jews as a threat to their community as well as those who support Israel.

Despite widespread concern among French Jews, senior officials including Macron have repeatedly said they are committing to combating antisemitism and supporting the country’s Jewish community.

The post ‘F—k Israel’: Monument in France Honoring Nazi Victims Defaced With Antisemitic Graffiti first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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