Since mid-November, thousands have taken to Mexico’s streets to protest insecurity under the government of progressive president Claudia Sheinbaum. Many of their demands were framed around the assassination of Carlos Manzo, the mayor of Uruapan, Michoacán, who was shot eight times while posing for photographs with children during a Day of the Dead celebration on Nov. 1.
The events have been described as “Gen Z Protests,” but as Sheinbaum noted, young people seemed vastly underrepresented in the marches, the latest of which was held on Sunday in Mexico City — leading some to argue that the Gen Z voice got “co-opted” by elders and that Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first woman and first Jewish president, is being unduly blamed for a problem she inherited from her male predecessors. Some protests were additionally controversial because they became violent; at one of them, over one hundred people were injured.
Controversy has also ensued because some protestors were explicitly antisemitic and sexist. Crowds chanted fuera la judía, or “out with the Jew,” while a man with a megaphone shouted that Sheinbaum’s Jewishness renders her ineligible to be president. One Guadalajara protester wore a shirt with a swastika on it, and the words puta judía, or “Jewish whore,” were spray painted on a Mexico City building. One sign called the president “Mexico’s maid.”
The protests were supported by a number of right-wing, antisemitic political figures in Mexico, including former president Vicente Fox. During the 2024 presidential election, Fox retweeted that Sheinbaum — who was born and raised in Mexico — was a “Bulgarian Jew” and that Xóchitl Galvez, her right-leaning opponent, was “the only true Mexican” in the race. The marches transpired shortly after Sheinbaum was sexually assaulted in public by a man who groped her before cameras, inspiring some right-wing critics to blame Sheinbaum herself for her alleged failure to secure Mexico.
It is tempting to downplay these hateful displays as fringe. After all, the protests were, at least in principle, responses to crucial security concerns. And there was some Gen Z presence at the marches, and some other groups, like mothers searching for their disappeared loved ones, marched peacefully.
Nevertheless, such hateful displays are part of a widespread and dangerous, if not entirely conscious, effort to oppose Sheinbaum’s progressive reforms by drawing borders around Mexican identity.
Nevertheless, such hateful displays are part of a widespread and dangerous, if not entirely conscious, effort to oppose Sheinbaum’s progressive reforms by drawing borders around Mexican identity.
To understand why, consider French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 work “Anti-Semite and Jew.” Sartre argued that antisemitism is manifested by people with varying attitudes toward Jews: from the unbridled antisemite who finds Jews “disgusting,” sexually assaults Jewish women and vandalizes synagogues, to the restrained antisemite who doesn’t attack Jews but would never “lift a finger” to help them.
Sartre argued that antisemitism is a “passion” through which antisemites lay claim to a country’s “true” national identity. Antisemites, he claimed, can recognize the intelligence and accomplishment of individual Jews — like that of climate-scientist-turned-president Sheinbaum — because the antisemite, “rooted in his providence, in his country…benefited from ancestral wisdom, guided by ancestral customs, [feels he] does not need intelligence.”
The Jew, according to Sartre, is a mere tool for asserting the antisemite’s place in their imagined political community. He famously said: “if the Jew didn’t exist, the antisemite would invent him.”
The antisemite’s impact on broader society depends on what Sartre called “the temperature of the community.” It spikes during uprisings, when anger and repression of minorities become the “social bond.” Antisemitism becomes anti-intellectualism and a desire to submit to one “true authority.” In Sartre’s words: “question any one of those turbulent young men who… beat up the Jew in a deserted street: he will tell you that he wants a strong authority to take from him the crushing responsibility of thinking for himself.”
Sartre’s account can be applied to the antisemitism of Mexico’s recent marches. In showing that antisemitism is manifested on a broad spectrum, it raises concerns about those who would willingly march alongside swastika-clad protestors and others promoting hate. Sartre’s observations also illustrate how some protestors used antisemitic “opposition” to Sheinbaum as a means for asserting their own status as “true Mexicans.”
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Mexican identity is often described in terms of mestizaje, which Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos described as a virtuous “blending” of races, including Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and European colonizers. Vasconcelos’s account has been critiqued by many Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities, who argue that they get denied the status of “true Mexicans” because they are deemed insufficiently “mixed” with so-called European blood.
Tellingly, as scholar Ilan Stavans has pointed out, Vasconcelos was a passionate antisemite who excluded Jews from his normative vision of Mexican identity. In dismissing Sheinbaum as a Jewish woman, protestors “create her” as a Jew, which allows them to establish themselves as truly Mexican.
The lazy prejudice on display — coupled with calls by some protestors for Donald Trump to “save Mexico,” despite the danger Trump’s immigration policies pose to Mexicans on both sides of the border — serves to showcase anti-intellectualism and a desired submission to authority that are, for Sartre, interwoven with antisemitism.
Sartre’s analysis shows that the authority the antisemite craves is invariably masculine. On top of this, the lived experiences of Jewish women are often concealed by what Jewish feminists have called a “politics of Jewish invisibility.” All this makes Sheinbaum’s path breaking presidency particularly unsettling to sexist antisemites.
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I want to be clear: I don’t want to inadvertently stigmatize free speech, an issue that is particularly concerning when accusations of antisemitism are being weaponized to punish Palestinian rights advocates. My aim is not to undermine protest for just causes. But the existence of weaponized antisemitism makes diagnosing and condemning its real manifestations — in protests, in politics and in sacred Jewish contexts like the recent Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, where 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting — incredibly important.
The murder of Carlos Manzo was an indisputable tragedy. And Mexicans have every right to publicly demand security in their country. But sexist antisemitism undermines the power of these important messages, giving those opposed to increased security a rhetorical distraction from a vital issue. And it seriously harms Mexicans deemed out of mestizaje’s scope, including Mexican Jewish women like Sheinbaum.
Sartre argued that for the antisemite, “there is no question of building a new society, but only of purifying the one that exists.” Sadly, many protesters turned the universal need to build secure communities into a despicable politics of racial purity.
