An apparent language barrier led several English speakers on Monday to mistakenly claim Mexico’s first female president is “a less Jewish Jew” after she thanked her husband for accompanying her to the polls.
Monday, Mexican citizens elected Claudia Sheinbaum, a member of the leftist Morena party, as the nation’s first female president. According to the New York Times, Sheinbaum, a physicist and former mayor of Mexico City, “won a larger share of the vote than any other presidential candidate in decades, and her party and its allies are within reach of claiming big enough majorities in Congress to enact constitutional changes that have alarmed the opposition.”
Sheinbaum will be predominantly-Catholic Mexico’s first Jewish president. The president-elect has previously described her childhood as secular, telling Enlace Judío, a Mexican Jewish organization, “I grew up without religion.”
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"That’s how my parents raised me,: Sheinbaum said in 2018. "But obviously the culture, that’s in your blood.”
According to NBC News, Sheinbaum’s “maternal grandparents were Jews who immigrated to Mexico from Bulgaria before the Holocaust, while her paternal grandparents had fled from Lithuania in the 1920s. Sheinbaum's parents were born in Mexico.”
“While campaigning, Sheinbaum said she considers herself a woman of faith but is not religiously affiliated; perhaps that's why there has been relatively little discussion about her becoming Mexico's first Jewish president,” NBC News reports.
In a Sunday post, Sheinbaum thanked her husband Jesús María Tarriba, writing, “gracias a Jesús, mi esposo, por acompañarme,” which translates to, “thank you to Jesús, my husband, for accompanying me.”
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Scam Economy and Doomed podcast host Matt Binder on Monday noted several English speakers appeared to conflate the name Jesús with Jesus Christ, using their confusion to question Sheinbaum’s Jewish bona fides.
“This is the funniest thing happening on here right now: people claiming the newly elected president of Mexico isn’t really Jewish because she thanked Jesus (she thanked Jesús, her husband),” Binder wrote in a tweet.
Indeed, Binder posted several examples of people questioning Sheinbaum’s Jewish identity including someone who claimed they’ve “never seen a less Jewish Jew than this.”
“Important to note that [Sheinbaum] is not involved in the Jewish community and thanked Jesus for her victory,” Democratic Majority for Israel co-chair Todd Richmond claimed.
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Amherst College Latin American and Latino culture professor Ilan Stavans, who is Mexican and Jewish, defended Sheinbaum’s Jewish identity in an interview with NBC News.
“Sheinbaum, whose descendants immigrated to Mexico escaping poverty and antisemitism, including the Holocaust, grew up in a secular, science-driven household,” Stavans said. “She doesn’t perform her Jewish identity in public.”
View the tweets above or click this link.
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