Ocasio Cortez Jewish
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a Jewish group in New York she is Jewish, too. The 29-year-old former bartender claimed for the first time publicly on Sunday that she has Jewish ancestry while speaking during a Hanukkah event in her home borough of Queens.
- “One of the things that we discovered about ourselves is that a very, very long time ago, generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has rebuffed requests to meet with New York’s prominent Jewish leaders. The heads of both the Jewish Community Relations Council and the New York Board of Rabbis said they’ve sought sit-downs with the first-term “Democratic socialist” congresswoman — to no avail. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was raised as Catholic, claims she actually has Jewish roots that span back 500 years to the Spanish Inquisition. The congresswoman-elect made the ancestral connection. Ocasio-Cortez’s hostility and tokenizing of the Jews resurfaced again recently as she agreed to — and then canceled — her appearance at Americans for Peace Now memorial of late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. To be clear, this is an organization as far left as you can go without calling for the full dismantling of the state of Israel.
In a pre-election interview with the National Catholic Reporter, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cited as of particular importance to her the New Testament tale of Jesus entering the Second Temple and overturning the tables of the moneychangers. While mentioning this very well-known episode is hardly evidence of antipathy toward Jews, it’s worth noting how often it was historically wrapped up with anti-Semitism. Menachem Wecker explains:
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