Claudia Sheinbaum Elected Mexico’s First Female Jewish President
Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, won a landslide victory on Sunday to become Mexico's first female Jewish president.
Sheinbaum, won the presidency with 58.3% of the vote, according to the latest results, to defeat opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez.
“For the first time in the 200 years of the republic, I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” Sheinbaum told supporters to chants of “president, president.”
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Sheinbaum is also a Jew in a country that is 78% Catholic, making it the biggest Catholic majority nation in the Western Hemisphere. Mexico is also home to 40,000 Jews. The majority of them live in the capital Mexico City. While her faith remained a marginal aspect of the race — which was instead dominated by the country’s high crime rates and immigration — it nonetheless came up in good and bad ways.
“I do not arrive alone,” he said of the win. “We all arrived.”
Sheinbaum will start her six-year term on Oct. 1.
Sheinbaum, who rarely speaks about her faith, said in 2018 that she was proud of her Jewish origins.
The 61-year-old scientist-turned-lawmaker has pursued a strategy that keeps her religious background “hidden” without denying it, journalist Pablo Majluf, who is Jewish, wrote in a recent op-ed on the subject for the Etcetera newspaper.
In fact, one main reason Sheinbaum, leader of the Morena left-wing party, downplayed her faith was the antisemitism that was evident throughout the race.
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox, for example, was forced to apologize for posting on X last year that between Sheinbaum and Xóchitl, “the only Mexican is Xóchitl.”
Wikipedia Commons photo
Despite the incendiary rhetoric from some of her political opponents, it should be noted that Sheinbaum is not Mexico’s first president with a Jewish connection. Former Mexican presidents with Jewish roots have included Salinas de Gortari and Plutarco Elías Calle.
Sheinbaum’s most famous reference to her faith came in 2018 during a speech she made at a Jewish community event as mayor of Mexico City. Although she did not call herself Jewish, she did say that both her parents were “of Jewish origin.”
Like many Jews living in Mexico, Sheinbaum is largely secular. Nonetheless, she has been spotted in the past making the sign of the cross in public.
“I grew up without religion, like my parents, but clearly in the [Jewish] culture,” she said.
Sheinbaum added: “I am Mexican … but I’m very proud of my origins” — her grandparents originally hailed from Bulgaria and Lithuania.
Her Ashkenazi grandparents on her father’s side emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the 1920. Sheinbaum’s maternal Sephardic grandparents immigrated to the same city from Bulgaria during World War II to escape the Holocaust.
During the campaign, Galvez, a right-wing populist, revealed a photo of Sheinbaum wearing a skirt decorated with a painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Catholic icon in Mexico.
“You have the right not to believe in God; it is a personal issue, but you don’t have the right to use Mexicans’ faith for political opportunism,” she said. “That’s hypocrisy.”
Sheinbaum rebutted those claims in an interview with Imagen Noticias, a Mexican TV channel, by saying, “I am a woman of faith and of science,” then accused Galvez of “forgetting the separation of church and state.”
In the end, religion may not have mattered at all. Isaac Ajzen, director of the Diario Judio Jews news site, said that the election will likely appeal to a large contingent of female voters — since both leading candidates are women — and that many Jews will vote “according to policies” and not faith.
Zyanya Mariana, a Mexican writer, publicly endorsed Sheibaum in a recent X post — and did not shy away from religion.
“Claudia Sheinbaum is a woman, super hardworking and Jewish,” she wrote. “Three attributes that can only be beneficial for this country.”
Clemente Lisi is the executive editor of Religion Unplugged. He previously served as deputy head of news at the New York Daily News and a longtime reporter at The New York Post. Follow him on X @ClementeLisi.