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WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

I’m back from two weeks in Israel, where I was fortunate to have the aisle seat on all my flights. Let’s get your Monday started: Maldives will ban Israelis from entering the country, Louisiana may force public schools to display Ten Commandments, Michael Douglas visits sites of Hamas massacre, dog that saved family on Oct. 7 has died, a new TV series debuts for the 100th yahrzeit of Franz Kafka, and much more.

 THE LEAD STORY

Claudia Sheinbaum celebrates early Monday after being elected president of Mexico. (Getty)

Claudia Sheinbaum handily won the Mexican presidency on Sunday, becoming the first woman and first Jewish person to hold the position.

Family ties: Sheinbaum, 61, had Ashkenazi grandparents who immigrated from Lithuania and Sephardic grandparents who left Bulgaria to escape the Holocaust. She grew up with little religious practice and is not an active member of any of Mexico’s multiple Jewish communities.

Catholic majority: The Jewish background of Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, barely came up during the election. Still, her win marks a departure in a country with one of the world’s largest Catholic populations. At a campaign event in the fall, she drew controversy for wearing a rosary-like necklace with a cross on it.

War in Gaza: The president will also have a chance to decide whether to follow through with her predecessor’s promise to recognize an independent Palestine, a symbolic move that more than 140 countries have already made. Sheinbaum has not commented publicly on the issue. Pro-Palestinian protesters set fire outside the Israeli embassy in Mexico City last week.

Somewhat related: One jalapeño cheddar with schmear — inside Mexico City’s hand-rolled bagel renaissance

ISRAEL AT WAR

A relative of a hostage holds a megaphone Sunday at New York’s annual Israel parade. (Luke Tress/JTA)

The latest…

• Chants of “Bring them home” replaced the traditional  “Am yisrael chai” — Hebrew for “the people of Israel live” — by tens of thousands of marchers and spectators during the annual Celebrate Israel parade that marched Sunday down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

  
  

• Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters on Sunday disrupted the gay pride parade in Philadelphia.

  
  

• New scientific identification tests confirmed that a previously unidentified body killed in Israel on Oct. 7 was that of presumed hostage Dolev Yehud, the IDF said on Monday.

  
  

• Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad registered to run for president in the country’s June 28 election to replace Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash last month.

  
  

• The Maldives, which called last week for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, will ban Israelis from entering the island nation.

“Think what will happen if this moment is lost,” President Biden said on Friday. (Getty)

Opinions…

The proposal for a ceasefire and hostage release President Biden laid out won’t please everyone, writes Rob Eshman, but it’s the best chance to turn a brutal war into a visionary future.

Families of Oct. 7 victims beg for peace, writes Emily Tamkin. By ignoring them, Israel’s government dishonors their loved ones’ memories.

“Nearly eight months after the Oct. 7 terror attack, and more than 76 years after the founding of the Jewish state, how is it that we have not figured out how to talk about Israel with people who disagree?” asks our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren.

Plus…

• A Holocaust museum cut a survivor from its speaker’s list because he’s spoken out publicly against the war in Gaza. Family and friends, he said, have also shunned him.

  
  

• In Safed, a northern Israeli city with deep roots in ancient Jewish mysticism, ordinary citizens are carrying military-grade weapons.

  
  

• Petel, an 11-year-old dog that was credited with saving her family from Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, has died of her wounds.

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ALSO IN THE FORWARD

A scene from Kafka, a new miniseries on ChaiFlicks. (ORF/Superfilm/Nicole Albiez)

A new streaming series tells the story of Franz Kafka’s life, death and conflicted Jewish identity:Our culture critic PJ Grisar calls the show about Kafka, who died 100 years ago today, “handsomely mounted” and reminiscent of the quirky style of director Wes Anderson. “In between the bouts of magical realism, production designed like most everything with a prim geometric — and yes Kafkaesque — flourish,” are episodes focusing on Zionism, faith and Yiddish theater.

Related: How Kafka can help us understand the history of segregation in America

First-person | How I helped bring the story of Hollywood’s Jewish founders to the Academy Museum — where it belongs:A 2021 essay by Sharon Rosen Leib, whose ancestors worked in early Tinseltown, questioned why the new museum erased the Jewish history of the movie industry. It “unleashed a paroxysm of donor and public ire,” she writes. A permanent exhibition opened this spring, which she says “captures the founding Jewish moguls’ humanity with wide-angle nuance and empathy.”

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Elon Musk at a tech conference last year in Paris. (Getty)

💻  Some users of X, formerly known as Twitter, are upset with company owner Elon Musk for implementing a new verification system for creators who get paid on the platform. Why? Because an Israeli biometric data firm was hired to do the verification. (X, X)

🚒  A Jewish firefighter group accused the FDNY of not giving “reasonable accommodations for Orthodox Jews” and excluding the group from joining other ethnic firefighter organizations to design a diversity curriculum. (NY Post)

🎒 Louisiana may soon become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. The GOP-authored bill received final approval and is now headed to the Republican governor’s desk. (AP)

🎷 Frank London — who has worked for decades at the crossroads of jazz and klezmer — is battling cancer. A celebration of his work at an event today in Brooklyn will go on, thanks to fellow musicians. (New York Times)

Shiva calls ➤  Joe Schein, the oldest Princeton alumnus and leader of some of the earliest Jewish services on campus, died at 109 ... David Levy, who served as a member of Knesset for 37 years, died at 86.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

On a solidarity trip to Israel this weekend, actor Michael Douglas met with families of the hostages and visited the sites of Kibbutz Be’eri and the Supernova music festival massacre. He later met with President Isaac Herzog, who gave Douglas a yellow hostage pin and a dog-tag necklace reading, “Our heart is held captive in Gaza.”

Thanks to Jacob Kornbluh and Joshua Mandell for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Beth Harpaz for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected].

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