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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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Was Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite play the original ‘Nobody Wants This’?
The Emmy-nominated Netflix show Nobody Wants This, a series about the challenges of an interfaith romance between a “hot rabbi” and his non-Jewish girlfriend, is now back for a sophomore season. When it debuted last fall, Nobody Wants This sparked heated criticism for trafficking in negative stereotypes about Jewish women. A writer for Glamour called her own mother to lament of the series: “I can’t imagine any guy who watches this show who would then say, ‘I really want to date a Jewish girl!’”
The commentary on Nobody Wants This is just as noteworthy for what it does not emphasize: the possible implications of interfaith marriage for the perpetuity of the Jewish people. That silence is all the more notable given the Jewish reaction more than a century ago to another dramatization of Jewish-Christian romance: The Melting-Pot, by the British Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill.
Whereas the early 20th-century play provoked outrage for seeming to endorse Jewish self-erasure, the modern TV program has not stoked such existential angst. Comparing Jewish reactions to these two tales of interfaith love reveals how much the landscape of Jewish life has shifted to accept blended families.
Noah Roklov, the hot rabbi in question played by Adam Brody, confronts professional and familial pressure to leave Joanne Williams (Kristen Bell) in favor of a Jewish substitute; Joanne—memorably described by Noah’s senior rabbi and boss as a “nice blonde crabcake”—struggles to confront the reality that she might have no place in his future.
When Nobody Wants This debuted, there was practically instantaneous pushback to its portrayal of Jewish women, all of whom were depicted as either materialistic, nagging or controlling—or some combination thereof. There’s Noah’s ex-girlfriend, Rebecca, who cares far more about achieving the milestone of marriage than about who she would be marrying. Even worse is Esther, Noah’s sister-in-law, whose principal purpose in life is to berate her daffy husband into obeisance.
The apex of Nobody Wants This’ deeply flawed Jewish female representation is that of Noah’s mother Bina, who tries to puppeteer her son out of his relationship with Joanne through both cajoling and sabotage. (Would it even be a hackneyed Jewish trope without the archetype of the overbearing Jewish mother?)
In contrast to the portrayal of Jewish women, the communal response to a rabbi in an interfaith relationship was notably muted. The show itself was very much alive to those stakes—Noah’s boss cautions that his path with Joanne, absent her conversion, would lead to a world in which every Jew “marries a goy, then there are no more Jewish children, and then our people become extinct.” Yet critiques of the series overwhelmingly focused on its unflattering portrayal of Jewish women.
This relative silence from critics about Jewish continuity would have stunned Jewish audiences of Theodore Roosevelt’s era, who railed against the celebration of Jewish-Christian romance in The Melting-Pot. That play tells the tale of David and Vera, both emigrants from Russia who found their way to New York. David is a Jewish survivor of the notorious Kishinev pogrom, a real-life massacre in what is now Moldova that took place in 1903. Vera is the Christian daughter of a Russian military official.
Their improbable romance takes root in the assimilative soil of the New World. The young couple is even able to overcome the morbid revelation that Vera’s father had ordered troops to shoot innocent Jews during the Kishinev pogrom. Yet in Zangwill’s idealized version of the United States, newcomers like David and Vera could free themselves from the tired identities and bitter tragedies of the Old Country and smelt their ethnicities into an unadulterated American identity.
In the play’s closing scene, David watches the sun set over the Western horizon and reflects in awe, “There she lies, the great Melting Pot. … Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow.” Vera warmly presses into David and adds, “Jew and Gentile.” He goes on, “Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame!”
The Melting-Pot premiered in October 1908 at the Columbia Theatre, mere blocks from the White House. Then-president Theodore Roosevelt himself was in attendance on opening night. After the final curtain, the president called down to Zangwill from his box, “A great play! A great play!” Roosevelt’s Jewish constituents did not share his enthusiasm.
Across the country, Jews denounced The Melting-Pot for ostensibly making a virtue of self-annihilation through interfaith marriage. A throng flooded into the Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side to hear Rabbi Leon Harrison condemn Zangwill’s production. The rabbi warned that “the little Jewish race would be diluted to extinction” if life imitated Zangwill’s art. Harrison excoriated the playwright for “sacrificing the ancient sanctities of his people’s faith on the altar of sentimental claptrap.”
The repudiation was no less pointed on the other side of Central Park, where Rabbi Judas Magnes of Temple Beth-El seethed against Zangwill’s “pernicious” play. “The melting process glorifies disloyalty to one’s inheritance,” Magnes griped. He saw in The Melting-Pot the alarming prospect of voluntary eradication, insisting, “We cannot be thankful to anyone for preaching suicide to us.”
Even as Zangwill’s fantasy of mass assimilation into the American Dream applied to all subgroups, Rabbi Magnes argued that intermarriage posed a particular menace to the Jewish people. After all, the new immigrant from Ireland or Germany could marry outside their heritage while resting assured that back home, their people would endure from generation to generation. But the Jew had no homeland where fellow coreligionists would ensure Jewish survival. “America spells his great hope for the preservation of Judaism,” Magnes pleaded.
The divergent reactions to Nobody Wants This and The Melting-Pot are striking. Perhaps one reason that the TV show has prompted a muted response regarding Jewish perpetuity might be that multi-faith matches have become normalized. When Zangwill’s play first ran, interreligious unions for Jews were exceedingly rare; his idealization of Jewish-Gentile love shocked the Jewish conscience.
But nuptials between a Jew and non-Jew are now more common than not, especially outside the Orthodox community. A 2020 study from Pew found that 72% of non-Orthodox Jews who had married in the preceding decade were wedded to non-Jews. Another possible explanation why Nobody Wants This did not elicit angst about Jewish self-erasure is that the children of Jewish-Gentile couples are increasingly likely to identify as Jewish. That same Pew study determined that among children resulting from interfaith marriages, those under 50 were more than twice as likely to identify as Jewish as their older peers.
This trend might preempt worries that intermarriage inevitably marks the end of Jewish tradition for that family line. Still another factor is Israel: no longer do Jews lack a homeland designed to safeguard their peoplehood.
The Jewish responses to Nobody Wants This and The Melting-Pot are in a sense mirror images of each other—the former effectively criticizes Jewish characters for being too insular, the latter for not maintaining enough distance. After all, the Jewish women of Nobody Wants This are at their worst in their rage-laden rejection of Joanne. Critics’ consternation about the show’s gender stereotyping can be understood, then, as a kind of plea: “America, don’t believe this show. Jews are actually warm and welcoming, not gratingly clannish.”
It is telling that the most favorably depicted Jewish female character, Noah’s former Jewish camp counselor, is also the one most favorably disposed toward his Gentile girlfriend. The Jewish reaction to The Melting-Pot was, of course, just the opposite, inveighing against any embrace of interfaith romance.
But in another sense, critics then and now have really wrestled with the same question: how should Jews navigate the fraught relationship between belonging and survival? To win the acceptance of Gentiles is to ensure Jewish security. Yet when acceptance becomes so complete that Gentiles are willing to marry Jews and raise children together, then Jews risk dissolving into the broader society. Belonging could well spell the end of survival.
Such is the tightrope walk of the Jew. Too little inclusion can threaten your safety; too much might result in your self-induced disappearance. Whether to shift your weight more to one side or the other in order to maintain equilibrium will depend on the contingencies of the day.
With season two of Nobody Wants This finally here, our own critical reaction—even more than the show’s plot—will suggest much about how Jews think they can best maintain an always precarious balance in our own uncertain moment. To stick to the tribe at all costs, or melt into the culture around you? No matter the decade, the same Jewish questions persist.
The post Was Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite play the original ‘Nobody Wants This’? appeared first on The Forward.
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JD Vance condemns Knesset vote on West Bank annexation as ‘very stupid’ as Trump says it ‘won’t happen’
(JTA) — Vice President J.D. Vance denounced a vote by Israeli lawmakers to advance West Bank annexation as “weird” and personally offensive, in comments as he departed Israel after a two-day visit aimed at shoring up the Gaza ceasefire.
In part to increase pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right-wing lawmakers signed off on two bills related to annexation on Wednesday in an early stage of the legislative process. Most members of Netanyahu’s party boycotted the votes, and the bills are seen as unlikely to advance to become law.
President Donald Trump has said annexation is off the table in his view as he seeks to solidify peace in the region and secure additional relationships between Israel and Arab nations.
Vance said he was told the Knesset vote was purely symbolic, which he said he did not understand. “If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it,” he said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is replacing Vance in Israel, two weeks into the U.S.-brokered truce in the Gaza war amid questions over its durability. Trump’s plan said it aimed to create “a credible pathway” toward a Palestinian state, of which portions of the West Bank would be an expected component.
Rubio also criticized the annexation vote in comments to reporters late Wednesday. “They’re a democracy, they’re going to have their votes. People are going to take these positions,” Rubio said. But, he added, “We think it might be counterproductive.”
Trump’s stance on the issue received new clarity on Thursday as Time Magazine published the full transcript of its interview with him earlier this month. Asked what the consequences would be if annexation moved forward despite Trump’s instruction to Netanyahu not to allow it, the president said the cost would be steep.
“It won’t happen. It won’t happen. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries,” Trump said. “And you can’t do that now. We’ve had great Arab support. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. It will not happen. Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”
The post JD Vance condemns Knesset vote on West Bank annexation as ‘very stupid’ as Trump says it ‘won’t happen’ appeared first on The Forward.
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JD Vance condemns Knesset vote on West Bank annexation as ‘very stupid’ as Trump says it ‘won’t happen’
Vice President J.D. Vance denounced a vote by Israeli lawmakers to advance West Bank annexation as “weird” and personally offensive, in comments as he departed Israel after a two-day visit aimed at shoring up the Gaza ceasefire.
In part to increase pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right-wing lawmakers signed off on two bills related to annexation on Wednesday in an early stage of the legislative process. Most members of Netanyahu’s party boycotted the votes, and the bills are seen as unlikely to advance to become law.
President Donald Trump has said annexation is off the table in his view as he seeks to solidify peace in the region and secure additional relationships between Israel and Arab nations.
Vance said he was told the Knesset vote was purely symbolic, which he said he did not understand. “If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it,” he said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is replacing Vance in Israel, two weeks into the U.S.-brokered truce in the Gaza war amid questions over its durability. Trump’s plan said it aimed to create “a credible pathway” toward a Palestinian state, of which portions of the West Bank would be an expected component.
Rubio also criticized the annexation vote in comments to reporters late Wednesday. “They’re a democracy, they’re going to have their votes. People are going to take these positions,” Rubio said. But, he added, “We think it might be counterproductive.”
Trump’s stance on the issue received new clarity on Thursday as Time Magazine published the full transcript of its interview with him earlier this month. Asked what the consequences would be if annexation moved forward despite Trump’s instruction to Netanyahu not to allow it, the president said the cost would be steep.
“It won’t happen. It won’t happen. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries,” Trump said. “And you can’t do that now. We’ve had great Arab support. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. It will not happen. Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”
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The post JD Vance condemns Knesset vote on West Bank annexation as ‘very stupid’ as Trump says it ‘won’t happen’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.