Claudia Sheinbaum didn’t just make history when she was elected Mexico’s first female president.
She will also be the first Jewish president in a country with one of the largest Catholic populations in the world. Though she’s not religiously observant, Sheinbaum identifies as culturally Jewish and has spoken about her heritage in the past.
“I grew up without religion. That’s how my parents raised me,” Sheinbaum, 61, said in 2018 at gathering hosted by a Jewish organization in Mexico City. “But obviously the culture, that’s in your blood.”
Her 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.
Tessy Schlosser, a historian and director of the Mexican Jewish Documentation and Research Center in Mexico City, said that for Mexicans of Jewish heritage, approval and expectations of Sheinbaum’s government seem to align more with “her personal political preferences than with her Jewish ancestry.”
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NBC News
