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, 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 Arab activists posted images of Sheinbaum wearing an Arab 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.
Barry Shaw is at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.