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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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Homeland Security hires social media manager whose posts raised alarm for promoting ‘white-nationalist rhetoric’
(JTA) — The Department of Homeland Security has hired a new digital communications director whose social media content for the Labor Department reportedly raised alarm bells inside the department and beyond for promoting white supremacist rhetoric.
Peyton Rollins began his new role at Homeland Security this month, The New York Times was the first to report this week. Tricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security spokeswoman, did not confirm the move to the newspaper, but Rollins’ LinkedIn profile shows that he began working at the department this month.
Rollins, 21, has been identified as the staffer responsible for posts at the Labor Department that have been decried as making veiled antisemitic and racist allusions. He also claimed credit for a large banner of President Donald Trump’s face that was hung from the Labor Department’s headquarters, which its critics said echoed fascist stylings.
During Rollins’ time at the Labor Department, its social media pages have featured a range of slogans including “the globalist status quo is OVER,” “PATRIOTISM, NOT GLOBALISM” and “Patriotism will Prevail. America First. Always,” which featured an image of an American flag with 11 stars, the number that appeared on some Confederate flags.
One post on X in November, which featured the phrase “Americanism Will Prevail,” spurred hundreds of negative comments because it appeared to use the same typeface used on the original cover of “Mein Kampf.”
Staffers at the department were alarmed, according to the New York Times. “We’re used to seeing posts about things like apprenticeships, benefits and unions,” a former employee, Helen Luryi, told the newspaper. “All of a sudden, we get white-nationalist rhetoric.”
In his new role, Rollins will oversee the Homeland Security social media accounts, including its X account which has been accused of tweeting antisemitic dog whistles.
Rollins joins a growing list of hires under the Trump administration who have faced allegations of promoting extremist rhetoric.
In March, DHS hired speechwriter Eric Lendrum, who has previously promoted the “Great Replacement” theory and likened conservatives in the United States to Jews in Nazi Germany. In May, the Pentagon also appointed Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly echoed antisemitic rhetoric online, as its press secretary.
Last year, the appointments of Darren Beattie as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in February and Paul Ingrassia in May to a senior legal role drew criticism for the pair’s relationships with white supremacists.
The post Homeland Security hires social media manager whose posts raised alarm for promoting ‘white-nationalist rhetoric’ appeared first on The Forward.
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The Israeli government wants you to stop calling Oct. 7 a ‘massacre.’ Yes, really.
The Oct. 7 attack was a massacre. But Israeli authorities would prefer you not call it that.
The Prime Minister’s Office demanded that a bill establishing a national memorial for the incursion remove the term “massacre” from its title, with Minister Mickey Zohar explaining that since Israel is “strong,” no one can “massacre the people of Israel.”
In other words: To accurately describe what happened when Hamas struck Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 —killing almost 1,200 and kidnapping 251 hostages — is unpatriotic, signals weakness, and is, somehow, leftist.
This is not really a matter of semantics. It’s an attempt to control language in order to distort reality. And it’s tied to the Netanyahu government’s vast project of evading accountability for the many military and political failures that contributed to the horrors of Oct. 7.
Their method is time-tested. Early versions of it appear in classical sources, in which rulers often rename actions to soften their meaning.
King Saul masks disobedience as a religious act. King David cloaks the fact that he planned the death of his romantic rival Uriah in the language of war.
Ancient Greeks observed that political conflicts alter not only reality but also the meaning of words. Thucydides described how during civil strife, recklessness was called courage, moderation was branded as weakness, and caution was treated as betrayal, illuminating how language could be inverted to serve passion and polarization.
In ancient Rome, the phenomenon assumed a more formal character. The emperor Aurelian gave himself the title restitutor orbis, meaning “restorer of the world”; he framed a series of brutal conflicts he embarked on to reunite the Roman empire as an act of correction, rather than conquest. It was a formulation that wrapped violence in a mantle of legitimacy and proper governance.
As political systems evolved, so did linguistic sophistication. During the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror was overseen by a body called the Committee of Public Safety. The Nazi regime called its deportations of Jews to concentration camps “resettlement” and described some executions as “special treatment.” Stalin did not cause famine; there were “grain procurement difficulties.” Mao Zedong did not preside over catastrophe; he launched a “Great Leap Forward.”
George Orwell identified this mechanism with unmatched clarity in his novel 1984. His fictional government’s “Ministry of Truth” serves the function of degrading language until truth becomes inexpressible, with the slogan “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
The contradictions are deliberate. Their purpose is to train citizens to accept inversion and surrender their independent grasp of reality.
Orwell’s deeper insight was that the corruption of language precedes the corruption of politics. When words lose precision, accountability dissolves. Reality becomes malleable, and loyal followers will believe whatever they are told. If aggression is always “defense,” repression always “order,” and censorship always “responsibility,” there is little limit to what rulers can do.
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut put it even more sharply — beautifully, even — in 1973’s Breakfast of Champions: “In nonsense is strength.”
This phenomenon is not confined to totalitarian regimes. Democracies, too, are tempted to soften language when confronting failure. Even — and perhaps especially — in Israel.
Thus, the killing of civilians becomes “harm to uninvolved civilians,” phrasing that distances attention from human reality. Torture becomes “moderate physical pressure.” Extrajudicial killings become “targeted prevention.”
Set aside the question of whether these measures are ever justified: It’s essential to note that the language itself undergoes distortion for political ends.
The Netanyahu government has a specific goal behind this approach. Avoiding the word “massacre” in describing Oct. 7 fits into its broader strategy of evading responsibility for the disaster itself.
Netanyahu has refused to accept any blame since the first hours after the attack, including by arguing that no investigation into his actions could take place during wartime, while prolonging the war as much as possible. At the same time, his allies attacked the Supreme Court to justify avoiding a state commission of inquiry with real authority.
To refuse to call Oct. 7 a massacre is to suggest it was somehow less brutal or devastating than it was. So let us dispel the nonsense.
A massacre involves the deliberate killing of a large number of defenseless people. It does not imply permanent strategic defeat. It does not preclude a military response afterward. It does not suggest inherent weakness. It describes a specific act: the intentional slaughter of civilians under circumstances in which they cannot defend themselves.
On Oct. 7, 2023, armed Hamas militants invaded Israel and committed a massacre, almost unopposed by Israeli security forces, in a crushing national collapse. Families were shot in their homes. People were hunted down, executed, or burned. Hostages were taken. Most of the victims were civilians. It was hours before the public heard anything from the shell-shocked Netanyahu.
Call it what it was. Truth combined with moral clarity, over time, are a nation’s deepest source of strength. Resistance to accurate language serves to dull the recognition that something profoundly shocking occurred — something that demands deep reckoning and change, not a continuation of the morally bereft and misleading status quo.
The post The Israeli government wants you to stop calling Oct. 7 a ‘massacre.’ Yes, really. appeared first on The Forward.
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ADL retracts Tumbler Ridge shooting antisemitism claim
The ADL published and then retracted a claim that the alleged mass shooter at a school in Canada maintained a social media account with antisemitic posts, a day after it posted the erroneous information on its website.
The organization wrote Thursday at the bottom of an updated page about alleged Tumbler Ridge Secondary School shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar that it had incorrectly concluded that an X account containing the posts belonged to the alleged shooter. Nine people were killed in the shooting, including Van Rootselaar.
“A preliminary investigation uncovered an X account appearing to belong to the shooter. Upon further investigation, that X account has been found not credible. References to it have been removed,” the correction read.
Authorities in British Columbia said they could not speculate on the motive of the shooter.
The ADL, the most prominent U.S. antisemitism research and advocacy organization, had posted the claim Wednesday on its website. The Forward has reached out to the ADL for comment.
The error, from the ADL’s Center On Extremism, comes amid broader changes in the ADL’s approach.
The ADL’s original post said that on Sunday — two days before the attack — an X account connected to Van Rootselaar posted, “I need to hate jews because the zionists want me to hate jews. This benefits them, somehow.”
“The Tumbler Ridge shooter’s X profile photo also featured an image of the Christchurch shooter superimposed over a Sonnenrad, a neo-Nazi symbol, and a transgender pride flag,” the ADL wrote in the original post, referencing an antisemitic mass murder in New Zealand.
It did not link to the profile or include images of it, leaving the claim difficult to verify.
The Center On Extremism is a flagship program that has been overhauled in recent years as the organization has shifted toward a greater focus on fighting antisemitism. In September, it deleted its Glossary of Extremism, which had contained over 1,000 pages of background information on hate groups and ideologies. It said at the time that the entries were outdated.
The post ADL retracts Tumbler Ridge shooting antisemitism claim appeared first on The Forward.