“Israel strongly condemns the antisemitic and sexist insults directed at the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo,” Sa’ar posted on X.

By JNS

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Sunday condemned antisemitic graffiti targeting Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum after violent protests erupted in Mexico City over the weekend.

During Saturday’s demonstrations outside the National Palace, protesters spray-painted the words “Jewish whore” on the gates of the presidential residence, according to local reports.

The slur referred to Sheinbaum, the country’s first female and Jewish president.

“Israel strongly condemns the antisemitic and sexist insults directed at the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo,” Sa’ar posted on X.

“There is no place for that kind of attack in political discourse. All forms of antisemitism, in any context, must be unequivocally rejected.”

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Sheinbaum’s inauguration caps an unlikely four-decade climb that has taken the daughter of activist academics to the presidential palace.

By The Algemeiner and Reuters

When Claudia Sheinbaum takes her oath of office on Tuesday, formally becoming Mexico’s first Jewish woman president, she will adopt a new government logo that nods to the aspirations of young girls.

“A young Mexican woman will be the emblem of Mexico’s government,” Sheinbaum wrote a day earlier in a post on social media, unveiling the logo showing a young woman in profile hoisting a Mexican flag, her hair pulled back into a ponytail not unlike the incoming president’s signature look.

Sheinbaum has embraced her historic feat in one of Latin America’s more socially conservative countries, which until now has been ruled by a series of 65 men since winning its independence from Spain two centuries ago.

The former mayor of the sprawling Mexican capital, Sheinbaum has been bolstered by the popularity of outgoing leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, her political benefactor going back nearly a quarter century.

But as the former climate scientist steps out of her predecessor’s shadow to lead the world’s largest Spanish-speaking nation, Sheinbaum will also face doubts and opposition from critics alarmed by the outgoing president’s 11th-hour reform drive.

Enacted last month, the reforms included a judicial overhaul that will over the next three years replace all of the country’s judges with new jurists elected by popular vote.

“Our hard-won democracy will be transformed, for all practical purposes, into a one-party autocracy,” wrote former President Ernesto Zedillo in a Sunday guest essay for Britain’s Economist Magazine.

Critics of Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum fear their ruling Morena party has too much power, and that democratic checks on executive power will be undermined.

The judicial overhaul’s implementation will fall to Sheinbaum, who will also face a widening government budget deficit that could crimp popular welfare spending and costly crime-fighting initiatives at a time when the economy is only expected to grow modestly.

The 62-year-old Sheinbaum promised continuity on the campaign trail, and now faces the balancing act of advancing Lopez Obrador’s state-centric economic polices, especially over natural resources such as oil and minerals, while also making progress on issues seen as his weak points like the environment and security.

She also makes history as the first president of Jewish heritage in the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country.

A BIGGER LANDSLIDE

Sheinbaum’s inauguration caps an unlikely four-decade climb that has taken the daughter of activist academics to the presidential palace.

Six years ago, she made history as Mexico City’s first elected woman mayor. Until she stepped down last year to run for president, Sheinbaum was known as a data-driven manager, winning plaudits for reducing the megacity’s homicide rate by half, by boosting security spending on an expanded police force with higher salaries.

She has pledged to replicate the strategy across Mexico, where drug cartels exert widespread influence.

Sheinbaum has also promised to continue generous social spending on old-age pensions and youth scholarships, even though the government’s 2024 fiscal deficit is estimated at nearly 6 percent of gross domestic product.

While she has expressed interest growing renewable energy projects, she has also said she will ensure the dominance of Mexico’s state-owned oil and power companies while opposing any privatizations.

In 1995, Sheinbaum earned her doctorate in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and then pursued an academic career, including a stint on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which later shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore.

She launched her political career in 2000, when Lopez Obrador, then-Mexico City’s newly elected mayor, tapped her to be his environmental chief, tasked with improving the smoggy capital’s air quality, highways and public transport.

Sheinbaum served as the chief spokesperson for Lopez Obrador’s first campaign for president in 2006, which he narrowly lost.

In 2015, she was elected to run Mexico City’s largest borough, Tlalpan, and became the capital’s mayor three years later. That was the same year that Lopez Obrador’s third bid for the presidency ended in his own triumph, winning by a margin of more than 17 million votes.

Last June, Sheinbaum bested her mentor’s margin of victory, polling more than 19 million votes ahead of her closest competitor, who was also a woman.

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She not only de-emphasizes her Jewish identity but during her campaign, she was seen wearing a crucifix.

By Barry Shaw, Israel Institute for Strategic Studies

Mexico voted in a new female Jewish President, but is Claudia Sheinbaum good for Israel?

She celebrates her grandfather, who escaped Lithuania where he was expelled for being “a Jew and a communist.” She praises her mother and father not for raising her as a Jew but for “loving Mexico and its history.”

In November 2023, she married Jesús Tarriba who is not Jewish.

She not only de-emphasizes her Jewish identity, but during her campaign, she was seen wearing a crucifix hanging off a string of Catholic prayer beads.

She is clearly a life-long left-wing Socialist politician and she identifies more with Jews who have been active in political activism than biblical or Israeli Jewish heroes.

In Mexico, 0.1% identify as Jewish. Even so, anti-Semitic political rivals have attacked her both as a Jew and as a foreigner.

In Mexico, Sheinbaum wants to be identified for her politics not her ethnicity, So what are her politics, and how does this clash with her ethnicity?

When Israel was forced to wage a previous war against Hamas in 2009, after being under a constant rocket bombardment and terror incursions from Gaza into Israel, Sheinbaum expressed herself in a letter to the editor of La Jornada, a Mexico City newspaper, she said:

“Because of my Jewish origin, because of my love for Mexico and because I feel like a citizen of the world, I share with millions the desire for justice, equality, fraternity and peace, and therefore, I can only see with horror the images of the state bombings”.

“No reason justifies the murder of Palestinian civilians. Nothing, nothing, nothing, can justify the murder of a child.”

She was silent about Israeli children.

Following her election on Monday, several pro-Palestinian activists posted images of Sheinbaum wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, and posing with an unidentified man wearing a t-shirt that says Palestine.

Israeli opinion is still out on Sheinbaum, but the evidence that Mexico will move closer to Israel under a Jewish president does not look promising.

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Though Sheinbaum will be the country’s first Jewish president, she is not involved in her faith in any meaningful way.

By Troy Osher Fritzhand, JNS

Mexico has elected its first female and first Jewish president by a landslide, according to preliminary data from the country’s election board.

According to the most recent sample data, former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, the protege of current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, had received 58.3-60.7% of votes, versus the next best with around 27%.

Her opponents had called to concede, she told reporters after the preliminary results were released.

“I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” she said, according to AP. “We have demonstrated that Mexico is a democratic country with peaceful elections.”

Though Sheinbaum will be the country’s first Jewish president, she is not involved in her faith in any meaningful way, experts told JNS last week.

“She’s not a product of the Mexican Jewish community,” said Dalia Wassner, director of the Jews of the Americas initiative at Brandeis University. “She is a descendant of Jews that immigrated to Mexico, but she herself did not participate in the Jewish community.”

“Certainly she does not, as an adult, have any kind of involvement or affiliation at all,” she added.

Dina Siegel Vann, a native of Mexico City and director of the American Jewish Committee’s Belfer Institute for Latino and Latin American Affairs, told JNS that Sheinbaum is not only unaffiliated with the community but also is not a ritually observant Jew.

In her victory tweet, Sheinbaum wrote, “Thank you Jesus…for accompanying me.”

Both Sheinbaum and López Obrador share populist, left-wing politics, but unlike some other Latin American leaders, neither has made Israel and the war against Hamas in Gaza central to their rhetoric.

Siegel Vann told JNS that Sheinbaum was likely to continue López Obrador’s Israel policies, which have included giving the Jewish state a cold shoulder diplomatically and backing the “genocide” case against Israel at the International Court of Justice but stopped short of breaking diplomatic ties.

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