Claudia Sheinbaum, 62, a scientist who served as the Governor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023, is Mexico’s projected presidential winner with between 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote, according to a statistical sample. She is the first woman and first Jew to serve as President of Mexico.
Yes, but is she going to come stick a tzetle in the Kotel?
According to Wiki, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was born to a secular Jewish family in Mexico City. Her paternal Ashkenazi grandparents emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the 1920s, and her maternal Sephardic grandparents emigrated from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust. She celebrated all the Jewish holidays at her grandparents’ homes.
Fine, fine, but is she going to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza (because this is what we’re all concerned about, aren’t we)?
Sheinbaum ran on the ticket of Morena, formerly the PRD, Partido de la Revolución Democrática (the Party of the Democratic Revolution), which is a social democratic party. The PRD is a member of the Progressive Alliance, a 140-party progressive and social democratic alliance that was established in 2013 in Leipzig, Germany as an alternative to the Socialist International where most Western Labor parties can be found.
According to her campaign, Sheinbaum “firmly supports a comprehensive agreement recognizing Israel and Palestine as sovereign states, with a focus on the United Nations’ role in achieving peace … and she stands in solidarity with Jewish and Palestinian communities amidst the ongoing conflict.”
However, back in January 2009, during the Cast Lead IDF operation in Gaza that followed Hamas and other terrorist groups firing rockets and mortar shells indiscriminately at Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip, Sheinbaum published a letter to the editor of La Jornada, one of Mexico City’s leading daily newspapers, circulation 287,000, stating:
“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.”
In other words, we’re more likely to see Bernie Sanders volunteer on a kibbutz one more time than host Claudia Sheinbaum in Jerusalem any time soon.
In her remarks expressing gratitude to voters, Sheinbaum underscored the significance of the occasion. “For the first time in 200 years of the Republic, I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” she declared to her assembled supporters.
Maybe she’ll go to shul this Shabbat to say gracias?
