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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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As Trump officials cozy up to Germany’s far right, everything alt is neu again
In the 1930s, American Nazis looked to Berlin for inspiration. The German-American Bund held torchlit rallies in New York, slandered Jews, preached white supremacy, and sent their children to Hitler Youth-style summer camps for indoctrination — all in service of importing the Führer’s vision to U.S. soil.
Nine decades later, the current is flowing in reverse, as Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) party makes pilgrimages to Washington, D.C. — at the invitation of Trump administration officials who see the German party as unfairly ostracized.
This September, two top AfD figures met with staff from Vice President JD Vance’s office and with State Department employees. Later that month, more AfD parliamentarians arrived in D.C., where they conferred with Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter now embedded in the State Department.
Over the past several months, the Trump administration has, in effect, taken the AfD under its wing. Trump’s MAGA movement and the AfD both cast themselves as defenders of a civilization threatened by nonwhite outsiders, and both have tolerated displays of antisemitism from operatives within their ranks.
At Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration rally, Elon Musk made a gesture resembling a Nazi salute and declared, “My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.” Musk later denied any Nazi intent. But he raised eyebrows again when he appeared remotely at an AfD campaign rally in Halle, Germany, in February, where he praised the party as “the best hope for Germany” and urged citizens to “move beyond” their country’s Nazi past.
At the annual Munich Security Conference in mid-February, Vance rattled America’s European partners by saying democracy in Europe was threatened not by populist parties like the AfD, but by governments’ refusal to treat them like legitimate political actors. Vance added insult to injury by having a private meeting with Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, before returning to the states.
This chummy relationship between the Trump administration and a German political party that has been designated an extremist organization by German intelligence presents a sort of reverse mirror image of the state of affairs between the two countries back in the 1930s.
Let’s set the time machine back to July 18, 1937, and the location to a summer camp in New Jersey — Camp Nordland. Operated by the German-American Bund, it wasn’t just a retreat; it was a staging ground for fascist pageantry. Swastika flags flanked the entrance. Uniformed men marched in formation. Children sang songs of Aryan pride. Politicians and Bund leaders gave speeches praising Hitler’s vision and denouncing Roosevelt’s “Jewish government.” It was America’s own slice of the Reich, nestled in the woods of Sussex County.
Camp Nordland was not an isolated hive of American-style Nazism. There were about 200 other camps like it, stretched across the nation.
The Bund’s rallies were near-perfect replicas of Nazi spectacles in Germany, none more brazen than the one held at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 20, 1939. More than 20,000 people packed the arena as uniformed men and women marched down the aisles in Nazi-style regalia. Swastikas flanked a towering portrait of George Washington. The crowd raised stiff-arm salutes as Bund leader Fritz Kuhn took the stage and declared, to roaring applause, that “the Jew is one thousand times more dangerous to us than all the others” and that the government must be “returned to the American people who founded it.”
The Bund’s dream of an American Reich collapsed soon after. Kuhn was convicted of embezzlement. The FBI cracked down. World War II made their allegiance to Hitler politically toxic. Camp Nordland was raided and shut down in 1941. But the ideology didn’t die — it went dormant, and it is resurfacing on both sides of the Atlantic.
Following the AfD’s September visits to Washington, Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz traveled to Berlin in November, calling the AfD members of the Bundestag and party supporters “bold visionaries.”
“We are in this together,” said Bruesewitz, according to Politico. “The forces arrayed against us aren’t just ideological opponents, they’re manifestations of evil, seeking to extinguish the light of faith, family and freedom.”
“This spiritual battle isn’t confined to the United States,” he continued. “Oh, no. Germany and America may be separated by thousands of miles of ocean, but we face the same exact enemies, the same threats, the same insidious forces trying to tear us down.”
A month before Bruesewitz’s trip to Berlin, two AfD lawmakers were treated to a private reception in Manhattan, where an opera tenor serenaded them with the first stanza of “Deutschland über Alles” — a verse officially excluded from Germany’s national anthem and widely considered taboo for its Nazi associations, according to a Reuters report. The event was hosted by the New York Young Republican Club, a chapter of the national Young Republican Federation. Notably, a fall exposé by Politico revealed leaked Telegram messages from Young Republican leaders in multiple states, in which members praised Hitler, joked about gas chambers, slandered Jews and Black Americans, and fantasized about violence against political opponents.
All of this raises the question: Is there any danger in this transatlantic camaraderie between Trump’s MAGA movement and the AfD? Probably more so for Germans than for Americans.
The AfD has become a powerful player in German politics since its emergence just twelve years ago, rising from a fringe Euroskeptic movement to a dominant force — especially in the former East, where economic dislocation and cultural resentment have fueled its ascent. While Germany’s mainstream parties have steadily shed voters, the AfD has gained them. Of the Bundestag’s 630 seats, the AfD now holds 152, making it the second-largest delegation in the federal parliament. And yet, despite its electoral strength, the AfD remains politically isolated: Germany’s mainstream parties have refused to cooperate with the AfD on legislation or coalition-building.
The AfD hopes its courtship of Trump and his MAGA movement will increase pressure on Germany’s governing Christian Democrat–Social Democrat coalition to dismantle the firewall that has kept it politically isolated. Doing so wouldn’t just amplify the AfD’s influence — it could clear a path for the party to join a future governing coalition. To many Germans, this scenario evokes chilling memories of how Hitler rose to power: not by winning outright, but by exploiting the weakness and fragmentation of mainstream parties.
The AfD insists it is not a threat to democracy, despite being officially designated a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency in May. Party leaders call the label a smear, an attempt to silence dissent. That view has found defenders across the Atlantic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the designation as “tyranny in disguise.”
It could be argued that in some ways, what many Germans fear for their country has already happened here. In Germany, far-right ideologues are still waiting to enter government. In the U.S., they’re already inside — drafting policy, staffing agencies, shaping foreign alliances. What Germany still treats as a red line, America has already normalized.
The post As Trump officials cozy up to Germany’s far right, everything alt is neu again appeared first on The Forward.
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Some Black Jews feel more ostracized from Jewish communities post-Oct. 7, survey finds
Growing up as a Black woman in the South with a Jewish father, Autumn Leonard often felt like “an outsider looking in” on Jewish communities. She wasn’t raised particularly Jewish, and her Black and Jewish identities felt disconnected from each other — as if she had to choose one.
But after she married a Jewish man and wanted to raise Jewish children, she sought out ways to engage more deeply with her Jewishness. She found groups that affirmed both of her identities, chairing the “Race Working Group” at the progressive Brooklyn synagogue Kolot Chayeinu and becoming a lead organizer with the Black Jewish Liberation Collective.
“That made me feel like, Oh, Jewish is something I can be — as opposed to something over there that comes from my ancestors,” Leonard said.
After the attacks of Oct. 7, however, Leonard said she began to notice a shift. Jewish communities seemed more inward-looking, she said, with a heightened focus on combating antisemitism and a retreat from commitments to racial justice. She began hearing stories from Black Jews who felt increasingly sidelined or isolated.
So she set out to gather empirical evidence to test her hunch.
The result was a survey conducted through the Black Jewish Liberation Collective, a progressive group that connects Black Jews for political organizing and cultural events. The group circulated the survey beyond its own membership and received 104 responses from a geographically diverse group — most from New York state, but also with respondents in Canada, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Participants were between 21 and 75 years old and reported a range of religious observance levels, from just ethnically Jewish to Orthodox. Responses were collected between October 2024 and January 2025.
The survey — which represents a tiny subset of the estimated 1% of U.S. Jews who identify as Black — found that 62% of respondents reported “increased marginalization” in a Jewish community or space after Oct. 7, 2023.
Those feelings of ostracization largely had to do with disagreements around Israel and Gaza, according to the survey. While survey participants generally identified as more left-leaning on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, respondents on both sides of the political spectrum said they felt alienated.
In Jewish spaces, some respondents felt they were assumed to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause because of their race. Meanwhile, in progressive spaces, some Black Jews felt they were assumed to be Zionist because of their Jewishness.
“I do feel some kind of internalizing shame where I am more careful around the ways that I share my Jewishness in non-Jewish spaces,” one survey respondent wrote. “I resent the ways that Zionism is conflated with Jewishness, and the ways I have to extricate [or] preface that.”
According to Leo Ferguson, a member of the Black Jewish Liberation Collective’s steering committee, another troubling post–Oct. 7 trend is that people who voice criticism of Israel are increasingly labeled “fake Jews.” Black Jews often already face that accusation because of their race — and adding political litmus tests, he said, only intensifies the problem.
“What I have witnessed is more scrutiny of Black Jews. There is an ongoing question as to whether or not we will stand up and be ‘real Jews’ which means aligning with whoever’s politics is judging us,” one survey participant wrote.
Compounding these trends, some Jewish institutions have shifted away from the idea that advocating for a broad range of minority groups also benefits Jews, focusing instead on antisemitism linked to Israel. Just last month, the Anti-Defamation League entirely removed from the “What We Do” page of its website a section called “Protect Civil Rights” amid threats from the Trump administration. Although that change occurred after the survey was conducted, some respondents already saw the trend emerging.
“The way in which much of [the] Jewish community has turned from barely doing antiracism work wholly toward Israel and self-protection is so discouraging, especially as the racism within Jewish community is so severe,” one survey respondent wrote.
The survey offers recommendations based on the survey’s findings, including welcoming ideological diversity in Jewish spaces; having a time and place for Israel discourse, rather than letting it “bleed into all aspects of Jewish life”; and maintaining connections between Black and Jewish advocacy groups even if they disagree on issues surrounding conflict in Gaza.
“The discussion around Israel Palestine has taken up so much of the oxygen that it has made it impossible to then also talk about things like racial justice,” Ferguson said.
The post Some Black Jews feel more ostracized from Jewish communities post-Oct. 7, survey finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Hasan Piker Bashed Gal Gadot in Villainous ‘Variety’ Feature
Hasan Piker. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In case you missed it, The New York Times recently did a fawning profile on popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, in which it mentioned, only in passing, that he once said America deserved 9/11. The article didn’t mention that Piker said he supported Hezbollah or that he took every chance to vilify Israel. It didn’t mention that he interviewed someone who he said was a member of the Houthis, only to later say he wasn’t.
Now comes an article in Variety by Tatiana Siegel, who uncritically lets Piker says his statement about 9/11 was about “blowback” and doesn’t push any further, accepting this nonsense that his own words were “weaponized” against him.
Siegel is more interested in writing that Piker is 6’4″, muscular, and plays basketball, instead of writing about how he interviewed a Houthi and vibed with him. Why get into any of that stuff? It’s much more important for Siegel to repeat a line from the Times article, as if it was her own, that Piker could be a possible answer to when the left-wing will find its own Joe Rogan. Maybe if they repeat it, suddenly Piker will be the next Joe Rogan!
Siegel tries to cast Piker as a moderate, because he disagrees with the insane conspiracy theory that Israel killed Charlie Kirk.
Siegel also interviews Taylor Lorenz. Yes Lorenz, the fool who said she felt joy when she heard news of the murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson. Lorenz, who in televised interviews has said she thinks Piker is hot, and says the entire Internet has been weaponized against him. I doubt she’d be so quick to say this if Piker was unattractive.
Of course, Siegel is uncritical of Piker for saying that Amy Schumer should be cancelled, though she at least points out he falsely attributes a statement to Schumer that she never made.
But the kicker is Piker’s disdain for Gal Gadot, who has been a very vocal supporter of Israel. Piker likes his Jews quiet and embarrassed. He calls Gadot a “dogs**t actress” and complains of her normalizing Israel. I don’t remember Piker being a film critic — and of course no one talks about how Piker normalizes antisemitism. Good thing they got a writer with a Jewish-sounding last name to write a puff piece.
As Norman Finkelstein said when speaking about what Zohran Mamdani needed to do to fight off charges of antisemitism (which of course Finkelstein thought were fake) — people like this need to find Jews to do the “dirty work.”
Jewish actress Natalie Portman is okay, according to Piker, because she never served in the IDF. The Jewish actor who plays Superman is fine, because he’s not pro-Israel from what he’s seen. Who’s the Jewish influencer who says which Muslim actors are okay to watch in movies or not?
Oh, that’s right, there is none, as that would be seen as Islamophobic. But Piker gets another free pass to spew his hatred.
The article could not be complete without a little “Jews control the media” implication, as Piker criticizes Bari Weiss because she represents everything he “despises about access journalism.” Of course, Siegel doesn’t bother to mention that Piker got his career from his uncle, Cenk Uygur, founder of the Young Turks, one of the most noteworthy left-wing YouTube channels, for which Piker used to work. And there’s no mention of Weiss’ courage to quit the New York Times to start The Free Press. Because when Jews succeed, it can’t have anything to do with merit — it must be that they all help each other!
The writer could have asked about the Piker controversy surrounding his dog for which he’s received immense criticism, but I wasn’t shocked she didn’t mention it. That might get in the way of him being the next Joe Rogan!
The article ends with Piker saying he doesn’t have bodyguards, citing Fidel Castro who claimed to have a moral vest.
The article is good for only one thing — pointing out how much the media hates the Jews.
The author is a writer based in New York.