Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post What Jewish voters need to know about Ron DeSantis, the Florida Republican running for president appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
I’m an Israeli who watched ‘Naza.’ And I am shook.
I have seen NAZA and I am shook. Not simply because of what the film reveals about how Israel is waging the war in Gaza, but because of what it reveals about how a society becomes capable of doing this at all. And as I’ve watched the reaction in Israel since the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, I’ve come to see that the reaction itself reflects the very systems the film exposes.
There are two systems at the center of NAZA, which opens Sept. 30 in New York City. The first is the technical one: the surveillance, targeting, artificial intelligence and military technologies that allow the Israeli army to identify and kill people at enormous scale. The second is the psychic and narrative system that makes the first one possible. It allows people inside the military to participate in this machinery, and journalists, filmmakers, politicians and ordinary people outside it to absorb what is happening, rationalize it, defend it or simply carry on.
The reaction to the film has become part of the evidence. That is what has shaken me.
The film, by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, takes us inside the systems of surveillance, targeting and killing used by the Israeli military in Gaza. But it is also an investigation into the people inside those systems and the stories they tell themselves about what they are doing.
Some of the officers interviewed are members of Israel’s elite military and intelligence units. They speak about their work with an almost surreal normalcy. One talks about coming home after his work and continuing to work on his Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Another talks about going to Poland on a Holocaust trip in high school, being taught that the Nazis were pure evil, and now understanding them.
Abraham asks those they interview whether anyone questions what they are doing. No one.
This blindness doesn’t stop with the military.
It lives in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we are defending, whose lives we are responsible for, and whose suffering can be pushed outside the frame. It lives in the deep Israeli and Jewish memory of vulnerability and annihilation, in the knowledge that Jewish safety is not an abstraction. It lives, too, in what happens when that memory becomes so consuming that another people’s suffering becomes something we can only see through our own fear.
I have watched that dynamic reveal itself over and over since Venice.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attacked the film and announced plans to pursue legislation that could strip citizenship from Israelis who “defame” Israeli soldiers abroad, explicitly citing NAZA and its filmmakers. Culture Minister Miki Zohar has called Abraham and Szor traitors and sought to have their citizenship revoked.
Protesters have gathered outside Szor’s parents’ home for multiple nights, chanting “death sentence for traitors.” Demonstrators have sought out the offices of Local Call, where Abraham works, and activists have threatened to track down the filmmakers and their families. Graffiti depicting the filmmakers as traitors has appeared on the streets.
And all of this is happening before almost anyone in Israel has even seen the film. The film has not even been released in Israel — but the fury has not waited for a screening.
I cannot get past that.
The reaction is not some separate story happening around NAZA. It is part of what NAZA is showing us.
Attack the person asking the question. Question their loyalty. Invoke existential danger. Change the subject. Make the person holding the mirror into the threat.
This is where Oct. 7 enters the story.
Of course Oct. 7 happened. Israelis were murdered and kidnapped. The trauma is real. The responsibility of journalists to verify serious allegations is real.
But there is a difference between acknowledging Oct. 7 and requiring every critique of Israel’s military actions to pass through it before it can be heard.
I watched veteran journalist Raviv Drucker’s interview with Abraham and found myself increasingly disturbed by the frame. The questions repeatedly returned to whether the film was sufficiently balanced, whether Abraham had sufficiently accounted for Oct. 7, whether his sources could be trusted.
These are not illegitimate questions. But when they become the ritual through which every serious critique of Israel’s military actions must pass, something else is happening. The burden keeps shifting onto the person asking the question: Prove that you understand us. Prove that you see our pain. Prove that you are not erasing us. Prove that you are still one of us.
Only then can we begin to talk about what Israel is doing.
And then there was something that happened to me personally. The head of one Israeli film forum told me it would be better not to defend Abraham and Szor publicly because it could cost “us” the elections.
I understood exactly what she meant. And that is what frightened me. Don’t make things harder. Don’t give ammunition to the other side. Don’t jeopardize the political outcome. Don’t defend these two young filmmakers too loudly. The instinct is the same: don’t disrupt the story that allows us to keep going.
The kind of collective psychosis allows my people, including my people in Tel Aviv, to go about their lives as if things are normal while Gaza is being destroyed is not separate from what NAZA describes. It is part of it.
I am my grandfathers’ granddaughter. One was killed in 1948 fighting for the creation of Israel. The other survived the Holocaust and became a human rights activist. I have spent my life carrying these two parts of Jewish history inside me: the absolute necessity of Jewish safety and the absolute necessity of human rights. I don’t experience those things as contradictions.
What NAZA has forced me to confront is what happens when one of those truths becomes a shield against the other.
That is what shook me about NAZA. Not only what it shows us about Gaza. Not only what it shows us about the technology that makes killing possible, or the people who learn to participate in it. But what it shows us about the stories we need to tell ourselves in order not to see what is happening in front of us.
And what happens when someone holds up a mirror and refuses to let us look away.
The post I’m an Israeli who watched ‘Naza.’ And I am shook. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
In a legal settlement, UC Berkeley offers a dance scholar a position it denied her because she’s Israeli.
(JTA) — (J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — For more than nine months, UC Berkeley has failed to honor a legal settlement with an Israeli dance scholar who was denied a teaching position due to her nationality.
In response to a J. inquiry, a university spokesperson said the delay was caused by “internal miscommunication.” The university now promises that the scholar, Yael Nativ, will receive the job offer she was guaranteed in the December 2025 settlement “no later than the week of Sept. 28.”
“We deeply regret this unfortunate delay and look forward to welcoming Dr. Nativ back to our campus,” UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof said in a statement.
Nativ said she received an apology for the delay and the promise of an imminent job offer in a Sept. 21 email from a university administrator.
“It’s always a surprise when I get emails from them because the correspondence was so little to none,” Nativ said. “I’m so tired of this case.”
Nativ, a sociologist specializing in Israeli dance, taught in UC Berkeley’s dance department during spring 2022 as a visiting professor through the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies. Her course focused on contemporary dance in Israel through social, political and cultural perspectives.
The institute invited Nativ to reapply for another year of teaching. But after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, SanSan Kwan, chair of the dance department, informed Nativ that she would not be rehired. In November 2023, Kwan told Nativ in a WhatsApp message: “My dept cannot host you for a class next fall. Things are very hot right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”
The university’s civil rights office investigated the matter and concluded that Nativ was discriminated against based on her Israeli identity.
Nativ sued the university, with representation from the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, in August 2025. When the two sides settled the lawsuit in December 2025, the university acknowledged its wrongdoing and committed to apologizing to Nativ and inviting her back to campus.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons apologized to Nativ over Zoom on Feb. 3, but no job offer arrived.
The lapse was publicized by Malcolm Feeley, a retired UC Berkeley Law professor, who wrote about Nativ’s case in a Sept. 16 article in the Jewish Review of Books.
“Justice delayed is justice denied. This is justice delayed in the extreme,” Feeley said in an interview. “It takes a concerted effort of badgering to get [the university] to move an inch.”
In a statement to J. following the publication of Feeley’s article, Mogulof said the university hadn’t sent Nativ a job offer due to a misunderstanding among administrators about who was responsible for doing so.
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Ben Hermalin will personally ensure the offer will come within the next two weeks, according to Mogulof.
Nativ went on to work as a research fellow at Ben-Gurion University in Israel after she left Berkeley. She said her main goal since the lawsuit has been to hold UC Berkeley accountable, not to land a job.
“It wasn’t urgent for me to go [back to campus]. It’s more about making a point, getting my justice,” she said. “But if they invite, I will consider.”
This story was first reported by J. The Jewish News of Northern California and is reprinted with permission.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In a legal settlement, UC Berkeley offers a dance scholar a position it denied her because she’s Israeli. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The choice in Michigan between El-Sayed and Rogers is one all American Jews have to make
Sometimes the most important part of making a decision is articulating what the decision actually is. What are the choices?
So it is in Michigan, where Jewish Democrats are asked to choose between Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat who is against providing military aid to Israel and who campaigned with leftist streamer Hasan Piker, and Mike Rogers, a Republican and an election denier who would help keep the Senate in the hands of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and who is presenting himself as the choice for Jews offended by El-Sayed. Either Rogers wins; El-Sayed wins without Jewish support; or El-Sayed wins with Jewish support. Those are the only possible outcomes.
Two groups have shown two different ways of dealing with this choice. The first, “Nonnegotiable Michigan,” a group of Jewish Michiganders including rabbis and cantors, has listed five “baseline needs,” or “nonnegotiables,” for their support, which include “Jewish sovereignty in Israel” along with full and safe participation in American life for all Jews including Zionists and a vision for a better Middle East.
The second, Michigan Jews for Democracy, has pledged its support for El-Sayed while noting some reservations and concerns. As one signatory, David Jaffe, put it in a statement released along with Michigan Jews for Democracy’s declaratory letter, “I am a proud Jew. I’m voting for El Sayed despite our disagreements, to support domestic policies that reflect Jewish values. I’m voting against grave threats to the safety of Jews and to American democracy. Rogers unquestioningly supports an authoritarian administration, its arbitrary arrests, its white Christian nationalism, and myriad terrible policies that have never in history been ‘good for the Jews.’”
In other words, one group has said the Democratic candidate cannot count on their support because of their disagreements with him, while the other has said that he has their support despite them. One is trying to get a candidate to say what they want to hear before the election; the other, that they will support him in the election and hope to be a “voice at the table” after.
Jewish groups are, of course, not the only ones who have grappled with such questions (“Nonnegotiable” calls to mind the “Uncommitted” movement to press for a ceasefire in Gaza and to end military aid to Israel from the 2024 presidential election). But to consider these two specific groups together is to consider a choice that an increasing number of Jewish Democrats — which is to say, the vast majority of American Jews — all over the country can expect to be making soon if they haven’t already had to.
Democrats (and younger Republicans) are less supportive of Israel and of US support for it. Candidates will need to speak to their voters and make campaign promises that are aligned with what those voters want to hear. And Jewish Democrats will have to be honest with themselves about the limited options before them and decide for themselves whether they want these candidates to win with or without them.
Per an AP-NORC poll from this summer, about 58% of Democrats think the United States is too supportive of Israel, while roughly half think Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza. Not every candidate who makes it out of a primary and into a general election will say the same, but many will, both because of their own conviction and because they want to win Democratic votes.
For some Jewish Democrats, this presents no tension or contradiction; the same poll said that roughly three in 10 Jewish adults agree that Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza. There are American Jews for whom El-Sayed’s vision for the Middle East is not threatening but comforting and correct. But about half of American Jews rejected the idea that Israel carried out a genocide. And, as JFNA found, the vast majority of American Jews want Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state (though just 37% now identify as Zionist). Many may feel a tug of war between their support for or attachment to Israel and their liberalism.
There will be some who say that American Jews should reject the idea that this is a choice, that there is no contradiction between being a liberal Democrat and supporting Israel. That is all well and good in theory, but, come election day, voters in Michigan will make a choice between these two men. There is El-Sayed, who does not want to send military aid to Israel and who said “hurt people hurt people” after Temple Israel was attacked, referring to the fact that the perpetrator’s family was reportedly killed in an airstrike in Lebanon (El-Sayed has since apologized). And there is Rogers, who says he loves Israel and also denies the results of the 2020 presidential election (and pushed to ban abortion and opposed marriage equality, to take two examples from his record).
While Jewish Democrats can, of course, try to influence where Democratic candidates and voters are on Israel, they do not get to dictate it. They do not, in the Michigan general election, get to choose a candidate who supports democracy and also talks about how much they love and want to support Israel. They get to choose whether they want El-Sayed to win and Mike Rogers to lose and, if so, whether they want to be a part of making it happen regardless of El-Sayed’s views on Israel. Every Jewish Democrat, like every other voter, will have to make that choice, and can withhold their vote for whatever reason. But they should be clear about the reality of what they are choosing between.
There are only so many choices in Michigan. And outside of Michigan, too.
The post The choice in Michigan between El-Sayed and Rogers is one all American Jews have to make appeared first on The Forward.
