Claudia Sheinbaum will be North America’s first Jewish head of state. What will it take to elect a second?
Mexico’s first Jewish woman faces a steep battle to have her identity not just accepted, but incorporated, in her politics
Mexican President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum celebrated her victory earlier this week. Photo by Photo by Manuel Velasquez/Getty Images
This week, Mexico elected a Jewish woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Why does it still feel so impossible to imagine the U.S. doing the same thing?
While Mexican cultural hegemony might be very different from the United States, Mexico’s secular Jewish communities, like the one in which Sheinbaum grew up, share many commonalities with ours. There is a long history of Jewish women and progressive politics in Mexico — as there is in the U.S. Yet, in both countries, the question lingers: To what extent can one truly thrive in politics as a Jewish woman?
If recent patterns hold, Sheinbaum will likely face a tough jury as both the first Jew and the first woman to lead the country — and the first Jewish head of state in North America.
Since the 1990s, a number of South and Central American nations, including Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Brazil, Costa Rica and Panama, have elected women as their presidents. Like many of these women, Sheinbaum can trace her electoral success, in part, to the mentorship of a male colleague — in her case, her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, under whose presidency she served as Secretary of the Environment — a paradigm that currently does not seem to exist in the U.S., with the possible exception of Vice President Kamala Harris.
But while Sheinbaum is far from the first woman to be elected president of a Latin American nation, Mexico is currently riddled with paradoxes when it comes to gender.
On the one hand, violence against women continues to grip the country, with more than 3,000 women murdered every year, many times with impunity for the perpetrators.
On the other, the nation ruled in 2021 that making abortion illegal was unconstitutional. (For those keeping score — which is to say, every feminist — the following year, the United States Supreme Court handed down the opposite ruling.)
Confronting those paradoxes as the first woman president of a country would be enough of a challenge. But on top of it, as was widely noted in the context of Sheinbaum’s candidacy, her experience as the grandchild of Jewish refugees to Mexico does not hold the same political capital in Mexico as being mestizo — mixed race, usually Indigenous and European — or Indigenous.
Yet, canonical ideas of mestizo national identity have in fact incorporated Jewishness.
In a widely-read 1925 essay, “The Cosmic Race,” the influential Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos celebrated the mixture of European, Asian, Indigenous, and African races that made up the Mexican — and, to some extent, Latin American — “race,” noting that, “Judaic striae can be seen that have hidden themselves in Castilian blood since the days of the cruel expulsion.” Yet in Jewish Mexican culture, as in many other Jewish communities around the world, the pressure to assimilate and become “less Jewish” is one that must constantly be resisted.
In the 1994 Mexican film Like a Bride, the Ashkenazi Jewish protagonist tells her lifelong Sephardic friend about an isolated Jewish community she is studying as an anthropologist. That community, she exclaims, has been in Mexico since the 16th century and “are still Jewish!” The film’s characters explicitly rejected, over 30 years ago, a narrative in which Jewishness is relegated to one’s background — demonstrating, as they did, how radical it was to bring Jewish values and experiences into the living present.
Sheinbaum’s family background is one of culturally Jewish but atheist progressive activists. A similar background has defined the past century of Jewish communities in Mexico, many of which were built by European Jews who, fleeing pogroms and the Nazis, brought with them socialist values that they would seek to foster in their lives in Mexico.
But such connections between Jewish values and political action in countries of refuge are often downplayed or even contested.
Sheinbaum herself has not made much of her Jewish identity in her political life. She has often described the family in which she was raised as not particularly observant. Yet Sheinbaum is also only the second Jewish head of state throughout all of Latin America. So, no matter what kind of Jewish political leader she is, the fact that she identifies as Jewish is material to her public profile.
Perhaps nothing made that materiality clearer — or better defined the challenges Sheinbaum will face in incorporating it into her presidency — than the right-wing former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, dismissing Sheinbaum as a “Bulgarian Jew.” The differences in heritage between Sheinbaum and Fox are not so great: Fox, himself, is the grandchild on his father’s side and child on his mother’s of immigrants to Mexico. The connotation of his words was clear: Jewish immigrants are different, and their descendants will always be outsiders, and not truly Mexican.
He later apologized to the country’s Jewish population. But he’d already made Sheinbaum’s Jewish identity, and the Jewish identity of more than 100,000 Jews in Mexico, a political question.
This is the paradox of Mexican politics. It is a place in which the children and grandchildren of immigrants can have extraordinary opportunities to rise to political stardom, much more freely than they often can in the U.S. And, at the same time, it is a place in which questions of which kinds of immigrants count as truly Mexican remain under serious debate.
Sheinbaum’s victory shows one way that debate might resolve, and with it, suggests what it might look like for American societies — both in Mexico and the U.S. — to make space for Jewish people to bring Jewish values explicitly to bear on politics.
“My heritage as a Jew and my occupation as a judge fit together symmetrically,” the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2004: “The demand for justice runs through the entirety of Jewish history and Jewish tradition.” She then proudly shared that the words “Zedek, zedek, tirdof” adorned the walls of her chambers.
Ginsburg’s words, and the lasting legacy that she left on politics, lay bare the benefits — for all genders, races, and religions — of Jewish values informing political leaders. What would it look like if it were the norm for Jewish women to invoke such values — rather than feel compelled to eschew their identities — in their political lives?
The United States touts itself as the land of opportunity. The poetry of Emma Lazarus, the granddaughter of Sephardic immigrants, is cast on the Statue of Liberty, described in “The New Colossus” as a beacon for “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.” And yet the idea of any woman or Jewish person, let alone a Jewish woman, being elected president of this nation feels far off in the future.
Lazarus dubbed the Statue of Liberty “Mother of exiles.” In our southern neighbor, a Mexican-born daughter of exile has triumphed. But what does the future hold for U.S. daughters of exile?
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