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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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Jewish Student Leader Targeted in Two Antisemitic Incidents in Berlin
Graffiti reading “Kill all Jews” was discovered on a residential building in Berlin-Pankow on April 26, 2026, part of a wave of antisemitic vandalism reported across the German capital over the past week, including swastikas and other hate-filled slogans scrawled on multiple sites. Photo: Screenshot
Amid a relentless wave of hostility toward Jews across Germany, the president of the Union of Jewish Students revealed he was targeted in two antisemitic incidents in Berlin within a single week, intensifying alarm within an increasingly embattled community.
In an interview with the German Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine, Ron Dekel described a string of confrontations that began last Thursday after he left a discussion on antisemitism at the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, marking the start of a troubling sequence of incidents.
While walking near Berlin’s government district, he and another union member were allegedly followed by a car blasting loud music. Inside the vehicle, the driver and two female passengers reportedly shouted “Free Palestine” and “To hell with Israel,” while also making obscene gestures.
After Dekel shared a video he recorded of the incident online, it quickly drew hundreds of thousands of views before being taken down, with him also facing a barrage of insults and threats demanding its removal.
At the time, Dekel said one of his friends filed a police complaint in connection with the incident, but authorities have yet to identify any suspects.
A few days later, Dekel recounted encountering the same group of people again outside a synagogue following an event at a Jewish community center, where they approached him and demanded he delete the video.
According to his testimony, the group remained in a car outside the synagogue, while one of the women sat at a nearby café appearing to monitor those entering and leaving the building.
Dekel said the woman even attempted to enter the synagogue, trying to persuade security guards to let her inside before a rabbi intervened and asked her to leave.
“I still do not know how she knew where I was,” Dekel told Jüdische Allgemeine. “It makes me uncomfortable.”
Even after reporting the second incident to police, Dekel said he no longer feels safe, describing what he sees as a broader pattern of harassment since he began openly wearing a kippah earlier this year.
Despite the intimidation, Dekel said he would continue visibly wearing Jewish symbols, underscoring the growing sense of unease surrounding Jewish life in Germany.
“It has religious meaning for me,” he said. “But it also hurts my sense of justice that Jews in Germany in 2026 are being advised not to appear visibly Jewish. I do not want to hide, and more young Jews today feel the same way.”
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Germany has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to recently released figures, the number of antisemitic offenses in Berlin reached a record high in 2025, totaling 2,267 incidents, including violence, incitement, property damage, and propaganda offenses.
By comparison, officially recorded antisemitic crimes were significantly lower at 1,825 in 2024, 900 in 2023, and fewer than 500 in 2022, prior to the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Officials warn that the real number of antisemitic crimes is likely much higher, as many incidents go unreported.
In one of the latest antisemitic incidents in the country, a synagogue in Cottbus, a city in eastern Germany, was defaced on Monday with a swastika painted on its facade, marking the second time in just four days that the Jewish house of worship had been vandalized.
Separately, authorities also discovered antisemitic graffiti on Sunday across several apartment buildings in Berlin-Pankow, including messages reading “Kill all Jews,” a swastika, and the statement “Only a dead Jew is a good Jew,” in a series of disturbing incidents over the week.
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Duke University Lifts Suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine Despite Acknowledging Group’s Antisemitic Post
April 22, 2026: The entrance to Duke University campus, located in Durham, North Carolina. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect.
Duke University’s Office for Institutional Equity (OIE) has reversed an earlier decision to suspend Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for sharing an antisemitic political cartoon on Instagram, arguing that the action fell short of violating the school’s code of conduct despite acknowledging that it “alludes to antisemitic tropes.”
The puzzling move was first reported on Monday by The Duke Chronicle, the official campus newspaper. In correspondence between the office and SJP shared by the outlet, OIE official Sharon Gooding told the group that “the post, while offensive, in that it alludes to antisemitic tropes, does not violate the Policy on Prohibited Discrimination, Harassment, and Related Misconduct because there was insufficient evidence to support the existence of a hostile educational environment.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the illustration depicts a pig labeled “Zionism” hoisting a Star of David as its arm interlocks with another pig, labeled “US Imperialism,” hoisting the Torch of Liberty. It is the work of political cartoonist Emory Douglas, a Black Panther party official who harbored hostility toward the US and Israel.
Word of the social media post spread across the Duke Jewish community, the Chronicle said, prompting no fewer than 10 Jewish students to file formal complaints with the university on the grounds that its evocation of anti-Jewish hatred is obvious. Historically, depicting Jews as pigs has been done to reduce them to the status of animals and mock the fact that dietary restrictions forbid Jews to eat pork. The Nazis notoriously did so, but the practice reaches back further back into time, when medieval Germans proliferated the Judensau drawings which portrayed Jews drinking pig’s milk and excrement.
However, despite the context of the image, as well as SJP’s history of harassing and intimidating Jews on campuses across the US, Duke University has told the group it is closing its investigation into the matter and returning the organization to “full status.” The decision unfreezes thousands of dollars in funding and allows SJP to operate unfettered for the remainder of the academic year.
Speaking to the Chronicle, SJP argued that the group is a victim of censorship and expressed doubt that the university even has the authority to sanction it for breaking the rules.
“It took over a month of written correspondence, legal counsel, and public advocacy for our organization to access the basic procedural rights Duke’s own policies guarantee to every student organization,” the group said. “The fact that we had to fight at all is the problem.”
Meanwhile, Jewish advocacy groups and students told The Algemeiner on Tuesday that Duke University has missed an opportunity to send a clear anti-hate message.
“Since ancient times, Jews have been compared in derogatory terms to barnyard and wild animals,” the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law said in a statement. “Such disturbing discourse has long been markers for antisemitism and there should be no tolerance for it at Duke. It is essential that university administrators, faculty, and students on campus understand the types of tropes that characterize antisemitic discourse.”
Said Shira Shasha, a third year Duke University student and co-president of the school’s Students Supporting Israel (SSI) chapter, “They [SJP] used imagery rooted in Nazi-dehumanization. Regardless of the purpose behind it, it causes real harm and unequivocal hostility to Jewish students on this campus. And that harm does not disappear because an intent was disclaimed.”
Carly Gammill of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, a legal nonprofit based in California, told The Algemeiner, “Universities must be clear-eyed about contemporary attacks against Jewish peoplehood, which merely repackage historic forms of antisemitism, and how this misinformation fuels anti-Jewish bigotry.”
While Duke University has not seen the most extreme examples of campus antisemitism that became a near daily occurrence in higher education after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, it has been accused of selectively practicing its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion before. In May 2021, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict of that year, the Duke Student Government (DSG) refused to grant recognition to Students Supporting Israel, a status which qualifies student clubs for funding and reserving space in which to hold events.
DSG had originally voted to confer recognition to SSI, however, but then-DSG president Christina Wang vetoed the decision after an SSI member responded publicly to criticism that its presence on campus represented “settler-colonialism.” No hateful statements were uttered by SSI, but Wang cited the exchange as cause for preventing the establishment of a pro-Israel club on campus. Throughout the conflict, the university refused to intervene even as Jewish advocacy groups maintained that Wang had confected a false pretext to justify discriminating against a Jewish group.
Five years later, Duke Jewish students are seeing that same double standard again, SSI National president Ilan Sinelnikov told The Algemeiner.
“It just shows the reality we’re in,” he explained. “They’re just going to get a little tap on wrist.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iran Has Executed At Least 21 People, Arrested Over 4,000 Since Start of War With US and Israel, UN Reports
A February 2023 protest in Washington, DC calling for an end to executions and human rights violations in Iran. Photo: Reuters/ Bryan Olin Dozier
The Islamic regime in Iran has intensified efforts to oppress the civilian population through arrests and executions since the beginning of the conflict with the US and Israel, according to the United Nations.
On Wednesday, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) revealed that Iran had executed at least 21 people and arrested more than 4,000 over the last two months, following the launch of joint US-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28.
Allegations which resulted in death sentences included espionage (two), opposition group membership (10), and involvement with protests (nine).
“In times of war, threats to human rights increase exponentially,” said Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Türk called for regime officials to “halt all further executions, establish a moratorium on the use of capital punishment, fully ensure due process and fair trial guarantees, and immediately release those arbitrarily detained.”
Iranian courts have reportedly fast-tracked convictions and sentencing in recent months, citing the war as justification.
According to the OHCHR, those detained face brutal conditions, overcrowding, and even torture to coerce confessions. The bodies of some detainees who have died in custody appear to show possible torture. Those detained also experience weaponized medical neglect, a human rights violation which has reportedly led to the deteriorating health of imprisoned Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi.
In addition to forced confessions, Iranian judges can also resort to the principle of elm‑e‑qazi, a concept in Iran’s Islamic Penal Code which allows a guilty sentence based solely on circumstantial evidence.
Last week, Maryam Rajavi, president‑elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), spoke about the regime’s executions at the European Parliament in Brussels.
“The mullahs are exploiting wartime conditions to resort to relentless executions to block the path of popular uprisings. Today, political prisoners face the threat of mass killing,” Rajavi said. “The silence of European Union leaders and member states is unjustifiable. And today, I wish to once again raise my voice in protest against this silence in the face of these executions.”
Rajavi added that “a number of young people have been arrested in recent weeks on charges of alleged contact with or support for the Mojahedin Organization,” referring to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), an Iranian opposition group.
“The names of a group of them have been submitted to and communicated to international bodies,” she said. “By order of the regime’s judiciary chief, pressure and torture on political prisoners have intensified, and their sham trials and the issuance of criminal sentences have been expedited.”
Stating that 11 political prisoners alleged to be members of the MEK face execution, Rajavi implored that “urgent action must be taken to save their lives. Our position is that a halt to executions in Iran, as a demand of the entire Iranian people, must be included in any international agreement.”
Last month, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), an independent group monitoring, released a report documenting that from March 2025 to March 2026, police had arrested 78,907 people on ideological or political grounds.
Executions in the last Iranian year (covering much of calendar year 2025) reached at least 2,488, according to HRANA, with 63 of them women and two children. Drug offenses accounted for 955 executions, approximately three killings per day on average.
The Islamic regime chose to conduct 13 of the executions in public.
Earlier this month, the European groups Iran Human Rights (IHR) in Norway and Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) in France released a separate joint report finding that Iran executed at least 1,639 people in 2025, a 68 percent leap from the 975 killed in 2024 and the highest seen since tracking began in 2008. All known executions were reportedly conducted by hanging.
Differences in methodology partially explain the discrepancy in tallies. IHR warned in its report that the full body count is likely much higher, as the group requires two sources to confirm an execution.
Iran’s penal code offers a variety of options for killing a human being, including hanging, firing squads, and even crucifixion or stoning. Hanging was the only method used from 2008 until the firing squad execution of Kurdish political prisoner Hedayat Abdullahpour on May 11, 2020.
In executions for murder under a sentence known as qisas, the Islamic regime encourages the family members of the victim to carry out the killing themselves. IHR has received reports of family members taking advantage of what is regarded as a “right” to do so.
In cases of public executions, prison officials use cranes. This brutal method leaves the condemned suffocating and strangling, lifted above the crowds for as much as 20 minutes before their suffering can conclude.
Photographs have documented children in attendance at public executions in Iran to watch the violence and cruelty. A 2006 study found that 52 percent of 200 children who witnessed public executions in Iran later showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with “88 suffering re-experiences, 24 avoidance and 62 hyperarousal.”
IHR has not found any executions by stoning since 2010, following the international outcry of the sentencing of Sakineh Ashtiani whose sentence was commuted, allowing her 2014 release.
Given the historical impact of the global community’s condemnations, Iranian officials have sought to hide human rights abuses from the world, imposing an internet blackout for 61 days since the war with the US and Israel began.
“This is denying people across the country access to vital information, silencing independent voices, and inflicting enormous social and economic harm,” Türk said. “It is exacerbating an already precarious humanitarian and economic situation and must be lifted immediately.”
Concluding her address to the European congress in Brussels, Rajavi called on the gathered representatives to implement a new policy toward Iran.
Rajavi advocated an approach that “provides the necessary technical means to ensure the Iranian people’s access to a free internet. Conditions relations with the clerical regime on an end to the execution of political prisoners and the killing of protesters. Brings the regime’s leaders to justice for crimes against humanity and genocide.”