Last week, the Tablet ran a piece thoroughly exposing Julia Salazar, a DSA congressional candidate in New York, as having misrepresented herself as Jewish and an immigrant. Salazar responded by accusing the Tablet of practicing “race science” and began babbling nonsense.
Despite having claimed to be an immigrant, she had to admit that she had been born in Miami. And despite her claims of being raised Jewish, she came from a Catholic family, became a pro-Israel Christian activist and then at some point became an anti-Israel leftist claiming to be Jewish. She allegedly claimed to have undergone a Reform of Conservative conversion. None of which is relevant because she had claimed to have been raised Jewish. Like her claim to have been a Colombian immigrant, that was a lie.
And the media, especially the lefty Jewish sectors of it, have been eager to help whitewash Salazar. The usual pattern is to interview her, toss her a few softballs, allow her to tell her current version of the story with no real challenges.
But Jewish Currents hit a particular new low. Let’s start with the closing of the interview with Jacob Plitman.
Full disclosure: I overlapped with Julia during her short time in J Street U, and gave her campaign $50 a few months ago.
Fake news is very fake these days, but is it too much to ask not to have a scandal ridden candidate caught in a series of lies be interviewed by a supporter of her campaign?
Couldn’t Jewish Currents have dug up an anti-Israel lefty who hadn’t contributed to her campaign to ask her softball questions?
Plitman introduces Salazar with assorted lies and nonsense. “Salazar especially interesting is that she emerged directly from the Jewish community’s own rejuvenated left.”
Salazar emerged from the pro-Israel right as a Christian activist. But what are facts anyway. Meanwhile Julia Salazar has another version of her infinite biography.
“My parents gave me an intellectual interest and spiritual interest in both Christianity and Judaism. My dad would talk about his dad being Sephardi, and then he would talk about it as a spiritual and geographical connection.“
Here’s Julia’s brother. Again.
When reached by phone, Alex Salazar, the candidate’s older brother and the operator of a number of Florida mango farms, said that one of their father’s brothers was a Jesuit priest. (He also seemed to know very little about her campaign and seemed surprised when I told him she stood a good chance of winning.) “There was nobody in our immediate family who was Jewish … my father was not Jewish, we were not raised Jewish,” he said.
But of course her supporter at the Jewish Current gives her a pass and tosses her some more softballs.
JP: The Tablet piece also focused significantly on your personal history, your family, and your history in the US, and what appear to be competing versions of that story. After the piece was published, journalist Emma Whitford tweeted out a snippet from an interview with you where you spoke about being born in Miami but traveled often due to your parents’ employment, eventually spending a lot of time in Colombia. You also told this same version of the story to me in an unpublished interview with Jewish Currents in April. Can you clarify this story generally, and explain how did this narrative of your birth in Colombia begin, and why you appear to have repeated that to Jacobin and elsewhere?
JS: I was born in Miami and we didn’t all have permanent residence in the US. My mom is American and my dad was not. This isn’t a focus of mine and it’s not a focus of the campaign. Other people are much more interested in it than I am, they want to represent that I am an immigrant, and whatever their understanding of that is. So the answer is: I grew up between Colombia and South Florida.
JP: But what accounts for the different narratives of where you were born?
JS: No one on my team had been a staff person on an election before. We have a dedicated staff of three people. We don’t have consultants, which I’m proud of, and we don’t have a [communications] director. And we’ve been running a truly grassroots campaign. None are communications professionals. And nobody has ever been a full time staffer working with press on a campaign before their time on my team.
Julia’s efforts to blame her lie about being an immigrant on a staffer are nonsense. She made the claim repeatedly in person. Here she is telling the lie on video.
But it’s okay. Jewish Currents has no standards. And will happily carry water for a BDS anti-Semite trying to appropriate Jewish identity.
More campaigning on your “identity” as an “immigrant.”
“I immigrated to this country with my family when I was very little. In Colombia, my mom raised me as a single mother…” 0:37 seconds in. (HT to @liquidpaprtrail for the vid.)https://t.co/vHptsYBO3Phttps://t.co/FkBaJEk3HT pic.twitter.com/JhD818WlKw
— pplswar (@pplswar) August 25, 2018
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