The group said that Representative-elect George Santos would be barred from its events, but it stopped short of calling for him not to serve in Congress.
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George Santos at a Republican Jewish Coalition event in Las Vegas last month. Mr. Santos said that he “never claimed to be Jewish” and instead was “Jew-ish.”
The country’s most prominent group of Jewish Republican political donors said Tuesday that it was “disappointed” that Representative-elect George Santos had misrepresented himself as Jewish, and that it would bar him from its events. But the group, the Republican Jewish Coalition, stopped short of calling for him unfit to serve in Congress or demanding his ouster.
Mr. Santos, a Republican who was elected last month to represent a New York district that includes much of Long Island’s North Shore, has been embroiled in a widening scandal over misstatements and lies he told about his education, employment and finances.
He also claimed repeatedly to be a descendant of European Jews who fled to Brazil to escape the Holocaust and said that while he was religiously Catholic, he also identified as a nonobservant Jew. He described himself as a Jew on the campaign trail in a heavily Jewish district and regularly attended events with rabbis and other leaders of the religious community.
But in an interview with The New York Post published Monday, he said that he “never claimed to be Jewish” and was instead “Jew-ish.” He also denounced reporting that said he misled voters about his Jewish ancestry.
Matt Brooks, the coalition’s executive director, said in a statement that Mr. Santos had “deceived us and misrepresented his heritage” and that he “will not be welcome at any future R.J.C. event.”
Mr. Santos, 34, was a featured speaker at the coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas last month. On Dec. 18, he was a featured guest, along with Representative Lee Zeldin, at a Hanukkah party thrown by the group on Long Island. The New York Times investigation into his background was published the next day.
A spokesman for the R.J.C. said that no one at the coalition could recall a previous instance of an elected official falsely claiming to be Jewish.
The coalition, which spent at least $3 million to help G.O.P. candidates in the midterm election through its political arm, the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund, did not make any contributions to Mr. Santos before his victory. But a spokesman confirmed that the group sent Mr. Santos $5,000 earmarked for “debt retirement” after his election.
Norm Coleman, the former Minnesota senator who now serves as the R.J.C.’s chairman, called Mr. Santos’s statements “shameful” in an email. “I anticipate he will have very short tenure in the United States Congress,” he added.
The group’s Democratic counterpart, the Jewish Democratic Council of America, took a harder line, calling on Mr. Santos “to not take the oath of office” in a post on Twitter and challenging the R.J.C.’s integrity for not doing the same.
The R.J.C. has taken a tougher stance on perceived affronts to the Jewish community before.
It repeatedly demanded that Congress remove Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, from her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee for remarks about Israel and Israeli politics that the group termed “antisemitic tropes.”
The coalition also condemned Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia in 2021 for making antisemitic comments on social media, and called her out a second time — along with Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona — for speaking at a white nationalist conference.
Gabriel Groisman, the former mayor of Bal Harbour, Fla., and a member of the coalition’s board of directors, said he had met Mr. Santos at the Las Vegas event and had been excited that a Jewish Republican was elected to the New York delegation in Congress, but called the recent revelations “extremely offensive.”
He went beyond the R.J.C. statement, saying that “the Republican leadership should condemn Santos publicly, and he should not be given any committee assignments.”
“Thankfully, terms in Congress are only two years,” Mr. Groisman added. “Hopefully we can get him out as soon as possible.”
But one of the group’s new board members, Josh Katzen, the president of a Massachusetts commercial real estate firm, pointed to multiple examples of Democrats who were accused of embellishing their records in the past, including Hillary Clinton, who claimed in 2008 that she had to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire during a 1996 trip in Bosnia, and President Biden, who said he finished in the top half of his law school class and attended on a full academic scholarship.
Mr. Katzen, in an email, added: “And I’m supposed to care if, in an age of rabid antisemitism, a politician wants to join my tribe? Not at the forefront of my concerns.”
Source: nytimes.com
