The history of Judaism in Mexico generally reflects that of Jewish communities in Europe and the Mediterranean. In Iberia, Sephardic Jews lived relatively freely until the late 14th century, when Catholic authorities brought about mass conversions. Many converted (or appeared to), becoming known as Conversos. In 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Aragon ordered the expulsion of non-Christians from the Peninsula, mostly targeting Muslims and unconverted Jews.
Conversos were almost certainly among the early migrants from Spain to what is now Mexico; though given Catholic oppression, Judaism was not practiced in the open. As Jewish populations in Europe fluctuated throughout the centuries, based on local tolerance and trends, migration to the Americas continued to reflect these shifts. Mexico, like Europe, was affected by the rise and policies of the Ottoman Empire. The late 19th century saw a mass exodus from Ottoman-conquered territories, including present-day Lebanon and Syria.
Many of these emigrants settled in Mexico, where they are commonly called Libaneses. While the majority were Christian, Jewish migrants from the Middle East, known as Mizrahi, established Mexico’s first openly Jewish community in the late 1800s. In the early 20th century, further Jewish migrations followed, mainly Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe fleeing antisemitism and pogroms, which culminated in the Holocaust.
This heritage is reflected in the synagogue’s centerpiece, the aron qodesh, which houses the Torah; it is modeled after one in Lithuania at the request of the donor who provided the land. The temple, called Nidje Israel, was established in 1941 as a place of worship for the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi community, distinct from the Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking Mizrahi.
The official name of Justo Sierra comes from its location on a street named after the Mexican intellectual and writer who advocated for public education but had no known connection to Judaism. The synagogue’s construction features a double facade—the Justo Sierra one being that of the Colonial building that once stood there, and the synagogue that was built in Art Deco style popular at the time. Within the temple, a piece of rubble from its sister Nidjei Israel Synagogue, which collapsed in the 2017 Mexico earthquake, is on permanent display.
Like in many other places around the world, Jewish communities in Mexico face antisemitism and stereotypes, especially when it comes to perceptions of Israel’s foreign policies. During the Israel-Palestine war of the mid-2020s, Mexico’s government supported South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
In 2024, Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum, its first female president, and the first with known Jewish ancestry. As a member of the left-leaning Morena party, however, she has largely supported the Palestinian cause. This stance, and the apparent fact that she is non-practicing, has sparked conflicting views on her Jewish identity, both within and beyond Mexico’s Jewish community. Her presidency serves as a reminder of the significance of the Jewish community in the country’s history—from this synagogue to the nation’s highest office.
The Trump administration’s attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives got some initial support from various Even the Liberal types, who thought that the attacks were aimed at pointless HR Power Point presentations, featuring upper class white consultant grifters talking about white privilege for $500 an hour.
The real target has turned out to be quite a bit broader:
The US defense department webpage celebrating an army general who served in the Vietnam war and was awarded the country’s highest military decoration has been removed and the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address.
On Saturday, US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message. The URL was also changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.
Now to be scrupfair, Gen. Rogers seems to have had something of an attitude about supposed racism in the military. Some of his comments during his long career — he was at the time the highest-ranking black member of the Armed Forces ever to receive the Medal of Honor — could even be described as uppity:
By 1954, after Rogers had been denied a path to becoming a chemical engineer with the Army, he submitted his resignation, in part because of a “‘clear pattern’ of discrimination…He could count on being the ammunition officer or the supply officer, but not the battery executive officer which he called ‘the cream-of-the-crop assignment.'”[His commanding officer declined to accept his resignation, telling him he had the makings of a good officer.[ He was promoted to captain, after which he noticed his commanders had started reliably assigning him work he enjoyed doing. He decided to stay with the Army for the time being, although he observed that until the mid-1960s reports on personnel performance included statements like “So-and-So is the finest black captain I know. . . .As a two-star general in 1975 he told a reporter, “We still have and will have what the Defense Department describes as institutional racism. [Discrimination] happens. It’s there. In many cases, it’s inadvertent. In some cases, it’s deliberate. We’re never going to eliminate racism in the Army. As long as we do everything to reduce it, we’re making some legitimate progress.
Charles Calvin Rogers’s official (for now anyway) Medal of Honor citation:
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Lt. Col. Rogers, Field Artillery, distinguished himself in action while serving as commanding officer, 1st Battalion, during the defense of a forward fire support base. In the early morning hours, the fire support base was subjected to a concentrated bombardment of heavy mortar, rocket and rocket propelled grenade fire. Simultaneously the position was struck by a human wave ground assault, led by sappers who breached the defensive barriers with bangalore torpedoes and penetrated the defensive perimeter. Lt. Col. Rogers with complete disregard for his safety moved through the hail of fragments from bursting enemy rounds to the embattled area. He aggressively rallied the dazed artillery crewmen to man their howitzers and he directed their fire on the assaulting enemy. Although knocked to the ground and wounded by an exploding round, Lt. Col. Rogers sprang to his feet and led a small counterattack force against an enemy element that had penetrated the howitzer positions. Although painfully wounded a second time during the assault, Lt. Col. Rogers pressed the attack killing several of the enemy and driving the remainder from the positions. Refusing medical treatment, Lt. Col. Rogers reestablished and reinforced the defensive positions. As a second human wave attack was launched against another sector of the perimeter, Lt. Col. Rogers directed artillery fire on the assaulting enemy and led a second counterattack against the charging forces. His valorous example rallied the beleaguered defenders to repulse and defeat the enemy onslaught. Lt. Col. Rogers moved from position to position through the heavy enemy fire, giving encouragement and direction to his men. At dawn the determined enemy launched a third assault against the fire base in an attempt to overrun the position. Lt. Col. Rogers moved to the threatened area and directed lethal fire on the enemy forces. Seeing a howitzer inoperative due to casualties, Lt. Col. Rogers joined the surviving members of the crew to return the howitzer to action. While directing the position defense, Lt. Col. Rogers was seriously wounded by fragments from a heavy mortar round which exploded on the parapet of the gun position. Although too severely wounded to physically lead the defenders, Lt. Col. Rogers continued to give encouragement and direction to his men in the defeating and repelling of the enemy attack. Lt. Col. Rogers’ dauntless courage and heroism inspired the defenders of the fire support base to the heights of valor to defeat a determined and numerically superior enemy force. His relentless spirit of aggressiveness in action are in the highest traditions of the military service and reflects great credit upon himself, his unit, and the U.S. Army.
USA Trans Flag (Remixed) Original Design By USER:DI (THEY-THEM)/Creative Commons
Three weeks ago, one federal Judge Ana Reyes epically scorched President Bone Spurs’ lawyers’ butts in court in the case of Talbott v. Trump, which challenges his and Secretary of Defense Beerhole’s hateful, fact-free Executive Order and memo to exclude transgender people from military service.
That hearing went so badly for the government that Chad Mizelle, the chief of staff for US Attorney General Pam Bondi, immediately trotted to file a complaint at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that Judge Reyes was too mean to their poor, unprepared lawyer, and had the audacity to ask him questions about animus.
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Now that Hegseth has released guidance on this policy, Wednesday was another hearing on the question of, as Judge Reyes put it, “whether the military under the equal protection rights afforded to every American under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, if the military […] can do that and targeting a specific medical issue that impacts a specific group that the administration disfavors.”
The DOJ showed up with a new, different lawyer this time, Jason Manion, who looks like he is 15 years old. And over the five or so hours of the hearing that ensued, he did not fare much better than Wahoo Jason Lynch did at the last hearing. Lawyers for the plaintiffs spoke for less than five minutes, and the rest of the time was DOJ lawyers getting their asses handed to them.
First of all, Judge Reyes wondered, how does the government plan to define the people who exhibit “symptoms of gender dysphoria,” which is mighty vague? Turns out the government has no guidance on that.
And, why is the government only concerned about hormone therapy for trans people, but not for any other service members who receive hormone therapy? Or take other prescribed medications, like insulin for diabetes or whatever?
“Identify for me a single other time in recent history where the military has excluded a group of people for having a disqualifying issue, because I can't think of one,” she noted. “If we were targeting actual medical issues, you wouldn't be specifically targeting transgender individuals.”
And just how many people are there serving in the military with gender dysphoria, anyway? Government lawyers did not know. “Not only do you not have the data, you have no access to get the data because the military does not track people by gender identity,” she noted. Yeah, it’s kind of hard to find evidence that trans people are single-handedly bringing down the entire US military with their disruptive pronouns, when the government does not know how many of them there even are, or how they even define who they are.
She asked government lawyers questions about three reports that the policy cited and “egregiously misquoted,” and the DOJ's position on whether or not she should rely on Hegseth's representation of them. But oops, turns out that the lawyers had not even read the reports in their own filing.
The judge was not pleased with this, and asked, if the government had cited a Beyoncé album in their anti-trans policy, would the attorney demand she ignore common sense and just listen to the album? Manion sputtered back, “I don't think you need to know the answer in regards to your Beyoncé question."
But this ain’t a Beyoncé album, it is the law, and so court was paused for half an hour so the lawyers could read what they were attempting to defend. Then the judge and lawyers painstakingly went through the studies Hegseth cited together.
And what do you know? Studies and reports Hegseth cited as references to show that transgender service members hurt troop readiness and weaken units did not say that at all, and actually said the opposite. Transgender service members were more deployable and had fewer lapses in service than people diagnosed with depression, and they are not automatically excluded from service. The government’s own reports found that transgender individuals receiving gender-affirming care experience “literally no regrets” and “very high levels of satisfaction.”
REYES: You quote the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Do you know who that is?
ATTORNEY: No?
REYES: He's the highest ranking uniformed military member. Feel free to ask the service member behind you if you need to verify.
Burn! And it turned out that again, the general quoted said the opposite: that being trans doesn't in itself impact deployability or unit cohesion.
“Should I defer to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had a stellar military career … or should I defer to Hegseth?” Who has been “secretary of Defense for about 30 days” with “no prior deployment” other than “an early military career … prior to his television career?” OUCH BUT TRUE.
And, she noted, it’s mighty confusing how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's public statements and posts on X contradict all of those studies that he put in his own memo. So Judge Reyes told Manion to secure a written retraction from Hegseth clarifying his public statements by Monday. We’ll keep an eye out for that!
Also, what about the cost and the argument that it’s expensive to treat transgender service members? Well, the government didn’t show up with the numbers on that either, because again, they have not been tracking who these people are, or how many there are of them. The judge asked DOJ lawyers if they knew how much the military spends on Viagra annually. When they couldn’t answer, she told them the US military spent $42 million on Viagra in 2024, and compared that to the $52 million spent on gender dysphoria treatment over 10 years. That’s a lot of drug-induced boners! “It's not even a rounding error, right?"
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is still under orders to try to identify service members who have “a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria,” so that they can be removed from their jobs. Or they can apply for waivers if they can “show 36 consecutive months of stability in their sex assigned at birth without clinical distress or impairment of functioning, that they have never pursued medical transition, and that they are willing to adhere to the standards for their sex,” by which they mean male-identified people serving as women, living in female barracks, and so on. So you can be transgender as long as you aren’t … transgender.
Judge Reyes said she hopes to rule next week on this nonsense, while acknowledging that whatever she does the government will appeal anyway.
“I have no doubt that I am not the last step on this strange journey. I just have to do the best I can with the evidence in front of me.”
In the meantime, though, sure was nice of her to give government lawyers the ass-handing they so richly deserve.
Urartu, a rival kingdom to Assyria in the early 1st millennium BCE, is frequently mentioned and depicted in Neo-Assyrian sources. Among the visual depictions, one curious feature stands out: Urartian figures are often shown wearing distinctive “floppy” hats. These soft, conical caps with drooping peaks appear in Assyrian palace reliefs and have become an identifying […]
Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former employee who published an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator temporarily prohibited the author from promoting or further distributing copies.
Sarah Wynn-Williams last week released “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” a book that describes a series of incendiary allegations of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior by senior executives during her tenure at the company. Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract she signed as a global affairs employee.
Based on Jennifer Szalai’s review, you can see why Facebook didn’t want this to come out:
Wynn-Williams sees Zuckerberg change while she’s at Facebook. Desperate to be liked, he becomes increasingly hungry for attention and adulation, shifting his focus from coding and engineering to politics. On a tour of Asia, she is directed to gather a crowd of more than one million so that he can be “gently mobbed.” (In the end, she doesn’t have to; his desire is satisfied during an appearance at a Jakarta shopping mall with Indonesia’s president-elect instead.) He tells her that Andrew Jackson (who signed the Indian Removal Act into law) was the greatest president America ever had, because he “got stuff done.”
Zuck becoming a full MAGA guy was certainly overdetermined.
Sandberg, for her part, turns her charm on and off like a tap. When Wynn-Williams first starts at Facebook, she is in awe of Sandberg, who in 2013 publishes her best-selling corporate-feminism manifesto, “Lean In.” But Wynn-Williams soon learns to mistrust “Sheryl’s ‘Lean In’ shtick,” seeing it as a thin veneer over her “unspoken rules” about “obedience and closeness.”
Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them, budget be damned. (The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.
Sandberg isn’t the only person in this book with apparent boundary issues. Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-Williams’s manager. A former Marine who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and who was part of the “Brooks Brothers riot” of 2000, which helped bring George W. Bush into office, Kaplan went on to serve as a deputy chief of staff in his administration.
Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband. When she delivers her second child, an amniotic fluid embolism nearly kills her; yet Kaplan keeps emailing her while she’s on maternity leave, insisting on weekly videoconferences. She tells him she needs more surgery because she’s still bleeding. “But where are you bleeding from?” he repeatedly presses her. An internal Facebook investigation into her “experience” with Kaplan cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Despite the restrictions on promotion you can still buy the book, and should consider it!
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