Latino Jews Respond to Trump
“You are not Latina,” Tanya Arditi Saavedra’s stepfather once told her. “You are Jewish! You will never be able to get rid of that.” In this year’s presidential election, however, Saavedra, who works as an associate director of communications at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington, saw an opportunity for both her communities to be aligned. “Here was a presidential candidate that should’ve sounded just as horrible to Jews as he blatantly did to Latinos,” she recalled recently.
Since the election, however, she found herself in deeply combative arguments within her Jewish community about Trump not being “that bad”—including with her own stepfather. “He told me that he thinks my fighting for racial equality is a fake front,” Saavedra recalled. “That I pretend to fight for Latinos and other races.”