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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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Why both sides are ducking settler violence ahead of Israel’s elections
(JTA) — For American Jews who follow Israel closely, one of the hardest things to understand about Israeli politics today is the gap between the severity of settler violence in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, and the relatively limited role it plays in the election campaign.
The phenomenon is not being ignored altogether. Israeli politicians across the political spectrum condemn acts of violence by Jewish extremists, and security experts have warned that Jewish terrorism and nationalist crime have become a serious threat to Israel’s security and democratic institutions. Yet the issue has not emerged as a major dividing line in the elections.
Why? Part of the answer is that Jewish violence in Judea and Samaria is politically inconvenient for both major blocs. On one side stands Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. On the other stands the loosely aligned “change bloc” seeking to replace it. That bloc includes parties with markedly different ideologies: Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar and Yair Golan’s Democrats. They agree on the need for political change, but they do not share a common position on the future of the settlements, Palestinian statehood or the long-term status of Judea and Samaria.
The reason settler violence has not become a defining campaign issue becomes even clearer once two different questions are separated. The first is straightforward: How should Israel deal with violence committed by Israeli Jews against Palestinians? The second is much broader: What should Israel do about the settlements, its control over Judea and Samaria and the long-term future of the territory? These are not the same question.
Distinguishing between these two lines of thought matters because the Israeli opposition may be united in its condemnation of settler violence, but it remains deeply divided over the settlements themselves. Yashar does not advocate for a general evacuation of settlements. B’Yachad supports Jewish settlement and opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state. Yisrael Beiteinu supports strengthening Jewish settlement and Israeli control in parts of Judea and Samaria. The Democrats take a substantially different position, including opposition to illegal settler outposts and an explicit commitment to fighting what they call “Jewish terrorism.”
There is, however, potentially a much broader consensus around law, order and state authority. That is where the political framing becomes important.
The Netanyahu camp does not entirely deny the existence of Jewish violence. After recent incidents in Samaria, Netanyahu condemned what he called a “handful of rioters” and called on law enforcement authorities to prosecute them. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar described those responsible as criminals who should be dealt with severely.
This framing treats the problem primarily as one of law enforcement: Extremists are committing crimes, and the state must enforce the law against them.
That approach is also reflected in a significant proposal by Defense Minister Israel Katz. In August, Katz instructed the IDF to prepare a plan for transferring civilian enforcement involving Israelis in Judea and Samaria to the Israel Police, in part to reduce the military’s involvement in civilian law-and-order incidents.
This position is coherent: If Israel regards itself as sovereign over the territory, Israeli civilians who violate the law should be dealt with by the police, while the military should concentrate on security threats.
But this logic is not inherently a right-wing argument. It can serve the change bloc just as well. The change bloc can describe Jewish violence as evidence of governmental failure, loss of control and the erosion of state authority. That allows parties with very different views about the future of Judea and Samaria to agree on an immediate principle: The state must enforce its laws.
For politicians such as Bennett, Lieberman and Eisenkot, this is a much easier political proposition than making the future of the settlements and their legal status the central issue.
This is where Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, stands out. Golan does not limit himself to terms such as “rioters,” “criminals,” “extremists” or “lawlessness.” He repeatedly uses the term “Jewish terrorism.” While the change bloc party leaders have on occasion used that phrase in English, they do not often use it in Hebrew. Golan is the one who uses the term repeatedly.
In August, Golan said explicitly: “What we are seeing today is Jewish terrorism that is receiving legitimacy from the Israeli government.” He has also presented the fight against Jewish terrorism as one of the issues on which he believes the change bloc can agree.
This choice of language is more consequential than it may initially appear. Once the phenomenon is called terrorism, difficult questions follow: If this is terrorism, should Israel not fight it with some of the tools it uses to fight other forms of terrorism? If Palestinian terrorism is understood as a national security threat requiring intelligence, organized investigation and preventive measures, what should happen when the perpetrators are Jewish Israelis?
Israel has developed extensive counterterrorism mechanisms for dealing with Palestinian terrorism: intelligence gathering, investigations by the Shin Bet internal security and counterintelligence service, administrative detention, military and security operations and other exceptional legal tools.
That does not mean those tools should automatically be applied identically to Israeli citizens. There are important legal and practical differences. But calling settler violence “Jewish terrorism” inevitably raises the question of whether it should be treated as more than ordinary criminality, and is important to harnessing the attention and power of the state to address it even as it labels it something that is an outlier.
The future of Judea and Samaria may be one of the most consequential questions facing Israel, but voters appear to be focusing more immediately on security, the economy, military service and Netanyahu’s political future. Here’s the dilemma all the parties are facing: The issue of settler violence can be important enough to condemn, but too politically complicated to campaign on.
For the Netanyahu bloc, emphasizing the systemic nature of settler extremism risks highlighting failures within a political constituency that is central to its coalition. For the change bloc, emphasizing it as a distinct political problem risks reopening the much larger argument over the settlements — an issue on which the change bloc itself remains divided.
Nevertheless, ahead of the elections, politicians can demand vigorous enforcement against violent settlers without supporting the dismantling of settlements. One can oppose illegal outposts without opposing the settlement enterprise as a whole. And one can regard Jewish violence primarily as a security, governance and even terrorism problem without having a position on the ultimate political status of Judea and Samaria, as important as that may be.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why both sides are ducking settler violence ahead of Israel’s elections appeared first on The Forward.
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How a Jewish play from 1908 enshrined the idea of America as a cultural ‘melting pot’
It’s long been unfashionable to refer to the United States as a “melting pot.” Identity politics and multiculturalism have undermined the ideal of an assimilation so complete that it obliterates ethnic distinctions. Now the persistence of difference is hailed, at least in some quarters, as enriching rather than estranging, even if the associated metaphors — “salad bowl,” “kaleidoscope,” “mosaic” — lack poetic vigor.
The first reference to the U.S. as a melting pot is said to date to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Framer, in which he wrote: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” Similar notions surfaced in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner. But it was Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot, that injected that industrial metaphor into the national consciousness.
Set in New York City, the play is a love story between a musically gifted Russian Jewish immigrant of Sephardic extraction and a gentile settlement house worker from the pogrom-wracked city that he fled. Its backdrop is the turmoil of an early 20th-century America trying to make sense of massive waves of Eastern European, and particularly Jewish, immigration. The playwright was an English Jew, a disillusioned Zionist who had begun looking to the U.S. as the promised land.
After its debut in Washington, where it was praised by President Theodore Roosevelt, The Melting Pot moved to Broadway in 1909 and has since enjoyed occasional revivals. Crescendoing debates around immigration, antisemitism and who deserves to be an American seem to lend it renewed currency.
So, at least, was the reasoning of Jesse Bernstein, producing artistic director of Philadelphia’s Theatre Ariel, whose focus is Jewish-themed work. Bernstein adapted and directed Zangwill’s play, and has teamed with the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, which produces rarely seen classics, to mount it. Their streamlined, modern-dress version, part of the America250 celebration, opened Wednesday at Philadelphia’s historic Arch Street Meeting House.
Bernstein said in an interview that he pruned as much as half an hour from the original (it now runs about 95 intermission-less minutes) with an ear to modern sensibilities. He also has made some additions that undercut the play’s triumphalism. The Melting Pot nonetheless remains an odd fusion of melodrama and polemic, interesting mostly as an historical curiosity.
Bernstein’s direction does the piece no favors with a stiff, presentational style, in which characters frequently address the audience rather than one another. On the other hand, when they turn away, the meeting house’s unfavorable acoustics make them more difficult, sometimes impossible, to hear. Offstage characters sit in chairs behind the action awaiting their cues. Meghan Jones’s spare set, representing both the Quixano family home and different locations within the settlement house, is draped with oriental rugs and strewn with steamer trunks and valises.
The protagonist, David Quixano, played with endearing sensitivity by Adam Galloway, survived the infamous 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which all his immediate family were murdered and he himself was shot and left for dead. After that trauma, America has become both his dream and his salvation. In New York, he lives with his cynical uncle, Mendel, also a musician; his Yiddish-speaking grandmother; and an Irish American housemaid, Kathleen (Jessy Gruver), who wrestles comically with Jewish customs and dietary laws.
Through a violin concert, David meets and falls for the lovely Vera (Lexi Thammavong), a former Russian “revolutionist” who now combats poverty through settlement house work. David is composing an American symphony that will convey his rapturous views of his adopted homeland. He finds a ready admirer in the German conductor Herr Pappelmeister (Adam Pelta-Pauls, speaking convincing German).
Standing in David’s way, personally and professionally, are two villains — the wealthy, unscrupulous nativist Quincy Davenport (Eli Lynn), a married man who lusts after Vera, and Vera’s estranged father, Baron Ravendal (Brian McCann), a reactionary Russian military commander who turns up unexpectedly. McCann brings a strangely mannered intensity to a role that is already a caricature.
Zangwill’s characters represent a spectrum of early 20th-century attitudes. Ravendal and Davenport, brutal in different ways, both give free rein to their antisemitism. Frau Quixano (played by a bewigged McCann) and Mendel Quixano (J Hernandez, appropriately world-weary) reflect the resistance of older immigrants to assimilation — and especially to its culmination in interfaith romance.
The Melting Pot is deadly serious at times, larded with apocalyptic symbolism and images of Jewish suffering. But it also has its share of comedy, including the maid Kathleen’s gradual embrace of Jewish traditions and some playful digs directed at critics.
It is up to David, the musical prodigy, to articulate the famous message at the play’s core. Early on, he declares his fealty to a new American ideal:
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! …A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American. The real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you — he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.
David returns repeatedly to this soaring rhetoric, lauding American greatness born of industrial-grade homogenization, and seeking to embody it in his symphony.
The original play ended exuberantly, with both love and David’s melting pot vision of “the glory of America” conquering all. Bernstein’s adaptation, with its insistence on relevance, duly complicates that vision. He wraps the action with supporting characters challenging David’s view of American harmony, and with the future of the betrothed couple clouded in doubt.
The Melting Pot runs at the Arch Street Meeting House, 320 Arch St., Philadelphia, through Nov. 8.
The post How a Jewish play from 1908 enshrined the idea of America as a cultural ‘melting pot’ appeared first on The Forward.
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‘I wanna blow up a synagogue’: Online posts lead to hate crime charge against Utah man
(JTA) — A Utah man accused of possessing explosive devices, searching online for nearby synagogues and making online threats to kill Jews is due in court Friday to face charges including attempting to commit a hate crime.
A federal grand jury indicted Skyler AJ Rose, 22, on Wednesday, the Department of Justice said in a release.
Rose allegedly made threats on social media, including “I wanna blow up a synagogue,” leading the FBI to join the Ogden City Police Department in a search of his home, where they allegedly discovered six pipe bombs, two rifles and ammunition.
A review of a cellphone seized from the home allegedly showed that Rose had searched online for a nearby synagogue, according to the Department of Justice.
The charges Rose faces include possession of an unregistered destructive device, threats to kill and injure people and to destroy a building, and attempting to commit a hate crime.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘I wanna blow up a synagogue’: Online posts lead to hate crime charge against Utah man appeared first on The Forward.
