THE MANY FACES OF JULIA
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
SEPTEMBER 20, 2018


I’M IN A QUANDARY ABOUT JULIA SALAZAR, WHO HAS JUST “TROUNCED” A MORE MAINSTREAM DEMOCRAT IN NEW YORK SEN. MARTIN DILAN. SHE IS A VERY ATTRACTIVE WOMAN WHO HAS, SOME SAY, FALSELY REPRESENTED HERSELF AS BEING FROM POOR IMMIGRANTS IN COLOMBIA AND A JEWISH CONVERT. SHE HAS BEEN ON THE ACTIVIST SCENE FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS IN QUITE A NUMBER OF PLACES AND GROUPS, AND DOING A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT THINGS.

SHE CLAIMED POVERTY, BUT HER FAMILY WAS QUITE COMFORTABLE FINANCIALLY IT APPEARS. I HAVE PLACED BELOW TWO ARTICLES, TWO PRETTY MUCH TRASHING HER, AND ANOTHER SHOWING WHERE SOME OF THE STORY VARIATIONS THAT SHE HAS TOLD MAY HAVE COME FROM. I PROBABLY WON’T HAVE TO DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT TO VOTE FOR HER UNLESS SHE GETS TO THE PRESIDENCY, SO I WILL FOR NOW SIMPLY WATCH HER WITH INTEREST. SHE WILL UNDOUBTEDLY BE LABELED BY REPUBLICANS AND OTHERS AS A “PATHOLOGICAL LIAR,” AS BERNIE SANDERS SAID OF DONALD TRUMP, AND SHE MAY BE ACTUALLY MENTALLY DISTURBED. SHE DOES SEEM TO HAVE TOLD QUITE A NUMBER OF STORIES ABOUT HERSELF THAT ARE IN CONFLICT WITH EACH OTHER AND EVEN WITH DOCUMENTARY SOURCES. WHATEVER HER REASONS, IT DOESN'T LOOK VERY PROMISING. SHE DOES BELIEVE IN PEOPLE HELPING PEOPLE, NOWEVER, AND THAT'S WHAT I LIKE. WHAT'S DISTURBING IS THAT EARLIER SHE HAD ALLIED HERSELF WITH CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC VIEWS. WITHOUT PLAYING PSYCHIATRIST, I DO WANT TO KNOW WHO AND WHAT SHE REALLY IS, BECAUSE OUR LEADERS HAVE TO BE SOLID ENOUGH TO DEPEND ON.

EVEN IF SHE IS NOW ARRIVED SAFELY ON THE LEFT OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM AS A DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST, WHICH IS A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY WHICH I DO THINK WE SHOULD BE APPROACHING, SHE SEEMS UNSTABLE TO ME AND I HOPE SHE DOESN’T GET INTO SOME PUBLIC SCANDAL DURING HER SERVICE IN THE STATE SENATE, AS TRUMP TENDS TO DO, ESPECIALLY OF A CRIMINAL NATURE. SHE IS NOTHING IF NOT FASCINATING, HOWEVER, AND SHOWS CONSIDERABLE ENERGY. THE DEMOCRATS CAN USE ENERGY. SEE THE SEVERAL ARTICLES BELOW.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Julia-Salazar-Democratic-Socialist-beats-incumbent-in-New-York-senate-primary-493211171.html
Another Socialist Victory: Julia Salazar Wins NY Senate Primary
There is no Republican candidate running in the district in the general election, virtually guaranteeing her the seat
By Deepti Hajela
Published at 9:49 PM EDT on Sep 13, 2018 | Updated at 1:56 AM EDT on Sep 14, 2018

Democratic socialist Julia Salazar overcame intense scrutiny of her personal life Thursday to win the Democratic primary for a state Senate seat in Brooklyn while voters throughout the state punished a group of incumbent Democratic legislators they perceived as too friendly to Republicans.

Salazar, a 27-year-old first-time candidate, handily defeated eight-term incumbent Sen. Martin Dilan in New York's 18th District, joining the ranks of leftist insurgents nationwide who have knocked out mainstream Democrats.

Track All NY Primary Results: Gov, AG Top Hot-Button Races
There is no Republican candidate running in the district in the general election, virtually guaranteeing her the seat.

Her victory came on a night when primary voters also took their revenge on a splinter group of Democratic state senators who broke with the party to join a group that supported Republican control of the chamber.

Top Tri-State News PhotosTop Tri-State News Photos

Despite a political deal earlier this year to end the schism, six of the eight members of the now-defunct Independent Democratic Conference were ousted in party primaries Thursday - a sign that liberal voters in New York are unwilling to tolerate collusion with Republicans in the age of President Donald Trump.

Those insurgent victories were a consolation prize for candidates at the top of the left-wing's ticket in the state's primary.

Cuomo Defeats Nixon in NY Gubernatorial Primary; Hochul Wins
"Your victories tonight have shown that the blue wave is real and it's not only coming for Republicans, but for the Democrats who act like them," said Cynthia Nixon, who lost her bid to unseat Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Dilan, 67, was not among the renegade Senate Democrats, but he represented a district that has gone through major changes, with longtime residents being pushed out by rising rents and an influx of mostly white, wealthier newcomers.

Letitia James Wins Primary for NY Attorney General: AP
Salazar built a grassroots campaign to unseat him on the grounds that he hadn't done enough to help the poor or stop gentrification.

"This is a victory for workers," Salazar said to her supporters at a party on Thursday night, according to The New York Times. "This is a victory for all of you, who every day have knocked on doors and have had meaningful conversations with our neighbors about these issues."

On social media, she tweeted, "Tonight's victory is not about me. Tonight's victory is about New Yorkers coming together and choosing to fight against rising rents and homelessness in our communities. Together, we will build a better New York."

Salazar's campaign began attracting wide attention after fellow democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scored a surprise win in June's congressional primary over U.S. Rep. Joseph Crowley in New York.

But in recent weeks, the race became a soap opera as reporters dug into her background.

Salazar faced criticism for saying she was an immigrant from Colombia who struggled financially growing up when she was actually born in Florida and had hundreds of thousands of dollars in a trust fund. She was scrutinized, too, over a political and religious conversion during her years at Columbia University, where she transformed from an anti-abortion Christian Republican to a hard-left Jewish Democrat.

One group revoked its endorsement after learning Salazar hadn't graduated from Columbia, as she said on its survey.

Salazar said she "inadvertently misrepresented" her family's history and chalked up some biographical discrepancies to mistakes by her staff.

Then, reporters revealed that in 2011, when she was in college, Salazar was accused of attempted bank fraud by the estranged wife of a famous neighbor in Florida, former New York Mets player Keith Hernandez.

Salazar was arrested but not prosecuted. She later filed a lawsuit accusing Hernandez's wife, Kai Hernandez, of trying to frame her because she erroneously believed she was having an affair with her husband. Kai Hernandez settled the lawsuit for $20,000.

Two days before the election, a conservative news site, The Daily Caller, told the Salazar campaign it was about to publish a story identifying her as a woman who had anonymously accused a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of sexual assault.

Saying she didn't want to be "outed" against her will, Salazar tweeted about it, saying the Netanyahu aide, David Keyes, had bullied her into an unwanted sex act.

Keyes called it a false allegation "made by someone who has proven to be repeatedly dishonest about her own life," but after additional women came forward with accusations, including a Wall Street Journal reporter, he took a leave of absence. At least four female Israeli lawmakers called upon Netanyahu to suspend Keyes.

Dilan was first elected in 2002 and was a member of the state Senate Democratic Conference's leadership. He spent 10 years in New York's City Council before being elected to the Senate.

Thursday's primary was a difficult one for the former IDC members, all eight of whom faced primary challenges, even after Cuomo brokered a deal earlier this year to reunify Senate Democrats.

The schism was little noticed outside Albany until Trump's election galvanized liberals.

Biaggi Defeats Klein in District 54 Senate RaceBiaggi Defeats Klein in District 54 Senate Race

Alessandra Biaggi defeated Jeffrey Klein in the District 34 Senate race. Ray Villeda reports.(Published Friday, Sept. 14, 2018)
Among those losing their races was Bronx Sen. Jeff Klein, the former IDC leader and current No. 2 in the state Senate. Klein lost to Alessandra Biaggi, an attorney who has worked for Cuomo's and Hillary Clinton's campaigns.

"New York voters rejected weak, corporate Democrats for bold progressives with strong, economic-populist messages who will fight for working families," said Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group that supports and endorses candidates.

The Democratic leader in the state Senate, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who supported the former IDC candidates, said voters had "made it clear that this is a new day and politics as usual are no longer acceptable."

But voters also decided to support another breakaway Democrat, Brooklyn Sen. Simcha Felder. Felder was not an IDC member but also voted with the Republicans, letting them remain in control even though Democrats outnumbered them in the Senate by one seat.

Felder beat challenger Blake Morris in the Democratic primary.

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THIS IS ANOTHER STORY FROM THE RIGHTIST SOURCE WASHINGTON EXAMINER WHICH, IF TRUE, IS CONCERNING. IT IS LABELED AS “OPINION” AND NOT NEWS, BUT UNLESS IT IS FABRICATING ALL OF ITS’ FACTS, IS QUITE STRANGE. THIS KIND OF THING MAKES ME AWARE THAT A HABIT LIKE GETTING OUR NEWS OFF OF FACEBOOK CAN REALLY DAMAGE OUR GRASP OF THE POLITICAL SITUATION. ANYBODY CAN CLAIM TO BE SOMEONE ELSE AND IT MAY GO UNDISCOVERED. ON THE OTHER HAND, THIS EXAMINER STORY MAY ACTUALLY HAVE COME FROM A RUSSIAN TROLL FARM SOURCE WITH THE SOLE INTENTION OF DEFEATING HER AND ALL LEFT LEANING PEOPLE, LIKE SO MANY OF THE FAR RIGHT STORIES. IT DOESN’T HAVE LOTS OF MISSPELLINGS AND STRANGE SENTENCE CONSTRUCTIONS, THOUGH.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/new-york-socialist-candidate-defeats-sitting-democratic-state-senator-after-fabricating-most-of-life-story
Liar, liar: NY socialist candidate defeats sitting Dem state senator after fabricating most of her life story
by Emily Jashinsky
| September 14, 2018 01:41 PM

Having won her primary last night, Julia Salazar is now essentially guaranteed a seat in New York's state Senate, as she has no Republican opponent. And as a politician, she is uniquely qualified.

That's because Salazar faked her own biography, almost from top to bottom. And more importantly, she managed to get away with it!

Per a Friday report in Fox News:

Maryland's Larry Hogan: 'I govern from the middle'

The 27-year-old first came under scrutiny last month when the online magazine Tablet reported that, contrary to her claims of being an immigrant from Colombia who struggled financially, Salazar actually was born in Florida and had hundreds of thousands of dollars in a trust fund. The magazine also questioned Salazar's political and religious transformation from a Republican, anti-abortion Christian to a hard-left, Jewish Democrat during her years at Columbia University. One group revoked its endorsement after learning Salazar hadn't graduated from Columbia, as she said on its survey.

Salazar's time at Columbia was as recent as 2013, meaning her swing from a conservative who appeared on Glenn Beck's show to a democratic socialist was suspiciously rapid. Her own brother has even stepped forward to question the candidate's claims about their family's financial struggles and travels to Colombia.

But wait, there's more. The Fox report continues:

Scrutiny of Salazar became more intense when Tablet* published a follow-up report detailing her 2011 arrest over accusations of bank fraud by the estranged wife of a famous neighbor, former New York Met Keith Hernandez. Salazar was not prosecuted and later sued Hernandez's wife, Kai Hernandez. Salazar claimed Kai Hernandez was trying to frame her because the woman erroneously believed Salazar was having an affair with her husband. Kai Hernandez settled the lawsuit for $20,000.

It's all very strange. Nevertheless, the Democratic Socialists of America seem to have figured out how to get their affiliated candidates elected around New York City. Salazar trounced a 16-year incumbent in Thursday's Democratic primary. More than 20,600 of the 35,000 votes cast were fer her, amounting to an 18-point margin of victory over Martin Dilan.

Salazar is part of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party. Of course, there's some irony in an insurgent, anti-establishment candidate being just as dishonest as your average lying politician. Whatever brings the revolution sooner.


THIS IS THE TABLET ARTICLE ATTACKING SALAZAR WHICH WAS MENTIONED ABOVE. THE TABLET, BEING A JEWISH PUBLICATION, MAY BE INCENSED SPECIFICALLY OVER THE POSSIBILITY THAT SHE FALSELY CLAIMED A CONVERSION TO THE JEWISH FAITH FOR HER OWN POLITICAL OR PERSONAL REASONS. I CAN UNDERSTAND THAT, THOUGH THAT KIND OF GROUP AGAINST GROUP ANIMUS IS THE GASOLINE THAT IS FUELING OUR WAR OF EMOTIONS SINCE THE TRUMPITES CAME TO TOWN.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/270095/julia-salazar-arrested-2011
Curtain GradientTabletTablet
UNITED STATES
State Senate Candidate Was Arrested in 2011 on Suspicion of Criminal Use of Personal Information
Police reports describe Julia Salazar attempting to impersonate Kai Hernandez, a family friend and then-wife of baseball star Keith Hernandez
By Yair Rosenberg

Julia Salazar, the Democratic Socialist candidate running for New York state Senate, was arrested in 2011 on allegations of fraudulently attempting to access the bank account of Kai Hernandez, a family friend and then-wife of baseball star Keith Hernandez. The incident is chronicled in police reports, court records, and audio files, all of which have been obtained by Tablet. The key evidence: phone call recordings made by UBS Bank of an individual posing as Ms. Hernandez in an effort to access her account. Despite the arrest, she was ultimately not charged.

On Dec. 14, 2010, after being played the recordings by her banker, Kai Hernandez said she recognized Salazar as the voice on the phone and subsequently filed a police report. Charles Weinblatt, the Tequesta, Florida, Police Department detective assigned to the case, interviewed Salazar on March 23, 2011, and immediately identified her as the speaker on the calls, placing her under arrest. This week, he reaffirmed his conclusion that Salazar was the perpetrator, in an interview with Tablet.

Tablet has acquired the recording of the calls made to the bank, allegedly by Salazar, and they are reproduced in the story below, with sensitive information redacted.

Requests for comment on Salazar’s arrest history were sent early this morning to both Salazar’s campaign address and her deputy campaign manager. Email tracking software indicates that both requests were read multiple times within an hour of receipt, and in the hours following, but no response was received.*

***

On Dec. 14, 2010, Kai Thompson Hernandez received a phone call from her financial adviser at UBS, Mark Zeller. He informed her that earlier that day, an unknown caller had repeatedly attempted to access her account. As Detective Charles Weinblatt recounts in his arrest report, in the first call, the caller correctly provided Hernandez’s date of birth, the last four digits of her social security number, her UBS account number, and UBS Online Services user name. With this information, the caller was able to add another email address to the account, and receive a new temporary password there.

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According to the police report, approximately 40 minutes later, the individual claiming to be Hernandez again called UBS, this time asserting that she could not log in to her account because she had been stymied by its security questions. The caller said she had plugged in where she had gone to high school, but the answer had not been accepted by the system. The UBS service representative then transferred the call to one of Hernandez’s financial advisers for the purposes of positive identification—following which the caller abruptly hung up.

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Some 10 minutes later, per the report, UBS received another call from the same individual, again claiming she was having trouble accessing her account. The call was again transferred to the financial adviser, and again the individual terminated the call.

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An hour later, the police record states that Hernandez received a call from Zeller, who played the recorded calls for her. Hernandez verified that she had not made them, and also that she recognized the voice of the person who did. Two days later, she filed a report at the Tequesta Police Department, in which she named Julia Salazar as the perpetrator. Hernandez testified that she had been a close friend of Salazar’s mother, Christine, and had known Julia since she was 9. Julia had house-sat for Hernandez on several occasions, including for the entire month of September 2010, which Hernandez said would have given her access to the personal information used in the bank calls.

“Julia identified herself as me and rattled off my personal information without any hesitation,” Hernandez said in her sworn statement to the police on Dec. 16. “If she had only known the name of my high school, she would have had complete and unobstructed access to my financial information.”

Several months later, when Salazar was back in Florida on break from Columbia University, she was called into the Tequesta Police Department, where—after listening to her speak in an interview—Weinblatt came to believe she was indeed the fraudulent caller, and arrested her. Salazar was fingerprinted and had her mugshot taken. “On today’s date (3/23/11),” Weinblatt wrote in the arrest report, “I interviewed the Def. at PD. I also was immediately able to determine that the voice on the three taped conversations was that of the Def.”

“Based on the facts herein,” he closed, “your affiant believes probable cause exists to charge the Def. with Criminal Use of Personal Information.” Weinblatt, a 23-year veteran of the Tequesta police who retired in 2016, reaffirmed this conclusion to Tablet. “I arrested her, so obviously I felt like I had enough probable cause to prove a case,” he said this week.

(Salazar Arrest Report, March 23, 2011)
(Salazar Arrest Report, March 23, 2011)

Ultimately, Salazar was not charged, likely because “a voice ID is not enough for the state attorney’s office,” said Weinblatt. “There may have been sufficient evidence to arrest her, but the state attorney’s office felt that there was not a likelihood of conviction based on a voice ID, I would assume, so the charges were not filed.” (The state attorney at the time, Michael F. McAuliffe, could not be reached for comment at press time.) In addition, no money had been stolen, since the caller had not been able to access Hernandez’s account, likely reducing the priority and urgency of the case. Salazar later returned to Columbia University.

***

Ironically, the only reason Salazar’s arrest survives in the public record is because of Salazar herself. The Tequesta Police Department is small, and does not typically retain such records beyond a five-year period. Today, the department can find no files or documentation related to the Salazar case. But in March 2013, two years after the incident, Salazar sued Kai Hernandez for defamation in Palm Beach County’s Fifteenth Judicial Circuit. As evidence, she provided both the original police report filed by Hernandez and the arrest report filed by Weinblatt, thus preserving the documents in the public record.

Salazar alleged that the 46-year-old Hernandez, acting in malice, had actually impersonated the 19-year-old Salazar on the phone to her own bank, setting in motion the arrest that had since marred Julia’s emotional and professional well-being. Salazar denied any wrongdoing.

The claimed conspiracy, as noted by the first judge assigned to the case in a hearing, was quite novel. In Salazar’s final version of the events, Hernandez had (a) called her own bank, (b) imitated Salazar’s voice, (c) created a new password, (d) deliberately flubbed a security question, (e) waited for the bank to call her with the recordings of her own calls, and then (f) gone to the police with her meticulously self-manufactured evidence. Both sides retained voice analysts to support their contentions.

salazarvoice1salazarvoice2
After her initial complaint was dismissed, Salazar amended it and made several other allegations against Hernandez, including claiming that Kai had told the police that Julia was having an affair with her husband Keith. No such statement appears in the police reports, though Weinblatt’s recollection is ambiguous. “Something like that sounds vaguely familiar because there was some back and forth, but I can’t specifically say I recall that,” he said. “The only thing I can say is that the arrest was not predicated on the fact of what Kai Hernandez said, beyond leading to Salazar, and then me making the identification by voice… probable cause had to be developed against Salazar, not just based on what Hernandez said.”

The defamation suit dragged on for four years, and was set to go to jury trial in May 2017, when it was finally settled in March. Hernandez had been battling cancer and autoimmune disease, and could not afford to continue the process. Her insurance handled the payout. Lynne Ventry, Hernandez’s lawyer, told me, “if Kai hadn’t gotten ill, we could have tried this case and won this case, I truly believe that, but there comes the cost of her health, and her situation was such that if they’re [the insurance] gonna pay her money, let them pay her money.” She added, “I truly believe she [Salazar] is the voice on that call.” In a statement to The Daily Mail that went live as this piece went to press, Salazar’s lawyer Adam Hecht said about the suit, “Kai Hernandez’s bizarre and fraudulent attempts to defame and victimize Julia were recognized as baseless by the authorities, who declined to file charges, and this matter was resolved with a monetary settlement in Julia’s favor. We have no further comment on this.”

Why did Salazar go to such lengths in this case? The first version of her complaint, before she amended it to include other personal allegations involving Kai and Keith Hernandez, offers a clue:

Plaintiff was humiliated by being handcuffed, being finger-printed, and having to pose for mug shots, which are still public record and accessible through the internet and via other means…

Plaintiff has suffered and will continue to suffer in the future impairment of reputation, health, shame, humiliation, mental anguish, hurt feelings, aggravation or activation of an existing condition, medical expenses, lost earnings and lost earning capacity.

Ventry agreed that reputational impact appeared to be a prime motivator for Salazar. “I think she got herself in too deep, to be honest with you,” she said. “I think she was upset because when you Googled her name, her mugshot came up, and she was all freaked out … She was just bent out of shape because it was showing up and it was affecting her reputation.”

Whether intended or not, the suit also had the effect of suppressing public discussion of Salazar’s arrest. During the reporting of this piece, multiple sources familiar with the case declined to go on the record, citing a fear of litigation. Hernandez herself likewise refused to comment for the piece.

Meanwhile, one year after settling the suit, Salazar filed papers to become a candidate for state Senate in New York.

***

Thanks to the populist insurgency in today’s Democratic politics, from New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Florida’s Andrew Gillum, Salazar’s campaign has drawn outsize attention as a potential progressive harbinger. She has campaigned with and been endorsed by New York’s leading leftist lights: Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, attorney general candidate Zephyr Teachout, and Ocasio-Cortez herself. With that attention, however, has come media scrutiny—and that scrutiny has revealed Salazar’s repeated efforts to obscure and even fabricate her past.

In a report last month, Tablet’s Armin Rosen documented how, although Salazar had described herself as a Colombian immigrant in multiple public fora, she was actually born in Miami to a naturalized Colombian father and an American mother. (Profiles in both New York Magazine and The Intercept similarly mischaracterized her as an immigrant.) Additionally, while Salazar has repeatedly claimed that she grew up “working class,” her brother Alex told City & State, “We were very much middle class. We had a house in Jupiter along the river, it was in a beautiful neighborhood.” Salazar’s mother bought used cars for both Julia and her brother, and covered her daughter’s insurance until she was 18. Finally, Salazar’s transformation at Columbia from a right-wing Christian pro-life and pro-Israel activist to an anti-Zionist socialist Jew, which she did not initially disclose during her campaign, has likewise provoked intense debate.

As Ben Adler and Zach Williams of City & State put it, “Overall, Salazar seems to have a penchant for using even tenuous claims to belonging to several historically oppressed groups for maximum political leverage.” On top of all this, a New York Times report published on Wednesday found that Salazar had not actually graduated Columbia University, despite her campaign implying that she did on her website and to reporters.


(((kweansmom)))
@kweansmom
Replying to @swamp_watcher and 3 others
So she has neither a birth certificate from Colombia, nor a diploma from Columbia?

37
8:01 PM - Sep 5, 2018
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For her part, Salazar has attacked journalists who have exposed her past. After Rosen published his report in Tablet, Salazar accused Tablet of practicing “race science” and claimed that he had deceived her brother on the phone, when in fact Rosen had clearly identified himself and his publication.

Since then, Alex Salazar has apparently fallen for the same deception several times, as he has repeated his refutations of Julia’s biographical claims to reporters at the New York Times, City & State and Vox.

***

The Democratic primary for New York state Senate District 18 will take place on Sept. 13. Salazar has spent the last several months telling its voters an inspiring story about a working class immigrant who worked her way through college while standing up for the oppressed. A different story emerges from allegations made by Kai Hernandez and the police records, court documents, and recent journalism surrounding Salazar.

In just over a week, New York voters will decide which of these two vivid and remarkable stories they find more compelling.

***

* After publication, we received the following statement from Adam Hecht, a lawyer for Julia Salazar: “Kai Hernandez’s bizarre and fraudulent attempts to defame and victimize Julia were recognized as baseless by the authorities, who declined to file charges, and this matter was resolved with a monetary settlement of $20,000 in Julia’s favor.”

***

You can help support Tablet’s unique brand of Jewish journalism. Click here to donate today.

Yair Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.



https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/269094/who-is-julia-salazar
WHO IS JULIA SALAZAR?
The complex personal history and views of an increasingly competitive New York state Senate candidate for Brooklyn
By Armin Rosen
August 23, 2018 • 5:38 PM

It’s impossible to walk around New York state Sen. Martin Dilan’s north Brooklyn district without seeing his 27-year-old opponent peering out from the storefronts on Knickerbocker Avenue, or gazing confidently from the cover of the Indypendent newspaper, available from a box right next to the heavily trafficked Bogart Street exit of the Morgan stop on the L train. The candidate and her volunteers have been knocking on doors every single day since July, and her flyers are strewn across the entryways of condos, industrial lofts, and vinyl-sided row houses—she is aiming for not just the entire socio-economic spectrum of Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Bed-Stuy, but seemingly every last clutch of physical space along with it.

Julia Salazar has earned media attention that most state senate primary candidates could only dream of, including serious treatment in The New Yorker, and friendly profiles in New York magazine, The Forward, The Intercept, and Vice. Seemingly everyone in a half-mile radius of Maria Hernandez Park knows who Salazar is, while Dilan, who has served in the state Senate for the past 16 years, toils in obscurity. Of course, there’s a lot of the district, which includes significant Puerto Rican, Polish, Mexican, and Hasidic communities, that doesn’t fall within gentrifying central Bushwick. Although Dilan has a solidly liberal record and a durable base of support outside of Salazar country, he seems especially vulnerable if there really is an anti-incumbent wave building. In 2016, Dilan’s primary challenger was a local activist who admitted to abusing one of her own children in court testimony that became public two months before election day. She got 42 percent of the vote, along with 13 percent in the general.

The state Senate is one of the most reviled institutions in New York government—for years, a group of centrist Democrats has effectively caucused with upstate Republicans with the tacit support of Andrew Cuomo, New York’s polarizing Democratic governor and a master triangulator. Salazar is a leftist running on a pledge to end Albany’s rotten status quo. She’s scored endorsements from every major figure in New York’s post-Trump bumper crop of left-wing political voices, including Cynthia Nixon, Zephyr Teachout, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along with the endorsement of more establishment figures, like 13-term north Brooklyn congresswoman and former Congressional Hispanic Caucus leader Nydia Velazquez.

Salazar’s campaign reflects the New York branch of the Democratic Socialists of America’s organizing strength. DSA activists served as Ocasio-Cortez’s ground force in her stunning primary upset over House Democratic Caucus chair Joe Crowley this past July. A win for Salazar, who has been active in the DSA since 2016, would prove that Ocasio-Cortez’s triumph wasn’t a one-off and establish the group as a very real threat to New York’s standing political elite. The citywide DSA has made Salazar’s election one of its top priorities: A July 23 open letter arguing against the New York City DSA’s prospective endorsement of Cynthia Nixon’s gubernatorial bid noted that the organization has “already endorsed three resource-intensive campaigns in New York City, including … our endorsement and field operation for DSA member Julia Salazar’s run for state Senate.” One of their own activists stands a better-than-decent chance of becoming one of 63 New York state senators, so it’s fair to say the NYC-DSA’s investment has paid off.

As with Ocasio-Cortez, who had worked as a bartender in Manhattan less than a year before her primary victory, the value proposition behind a state senator Julia Salazar is only tangentially related to her past accomplishments: Supporters hope she will be a radical departure from the existing political order and expand the public’s self-defeatingly narrow vision of who should represent them.

But Salazar differs from Ocasio-Cortez, Nixon, and the rest of her cohort in one interesting respect: the state Senate candidate is the only one to have emerged from a specifically Jewish corner of leftism. She “comes from a unique Jewish background,” as The Forward put it. “She was born in Colombia, and her father was Jewish, descended from the community expelled from medieval Spain. When her family immigrated to the United States, they had little contact with the American Jewish community, struggling to establish themselves financially.” From early 2016 through May of 2017 she was a Grace Paley Organizing Fellow with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). Her fellowship biography identified her as senior editor of Unruly, the “intersectional blog” of the anti-Zionist and pro-BDS Jewish Voice for Peace’s Jews of Color and Sephardic/Mizrahi Caucus. Her last publicly listed job before running for office was as a staff organizer for JFREJ, which is a New York-based left-wing social and activist organization—Salazar was working with the group when it decided to honor the controversial activist Linda Sarsour with one of their annual Risk-Taker Awards.

Going in reverse chronological order, Salazar has also been a contributor to Mondoweiss, an IfNotNow demonstrator, a Bridging the Gap fellow through Brooklyn College Hillel, a World Zionist Organization campus fellow, a co-founder of the Columbia University chapter of J Street, an AIPAC Policy Conference student attendee, and founder of the university’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI) chapter. For much of the five years leading up to her campaign, Salazar dedicated herself to explicitly Jewish causes, often in a professional capacity. If she wins, her identity as a politically radical working-class Jewish immigrant will have helped take her to a position of formal power and authority. Based on interviews with former acquaintances and an examination of her writings, social media postings, and publicly available documents, it is an identity that is no less convincing for having been largely self-created.

***

Social media postings, various articles, and the recollections of people who knew her at Columbia University show that in her early 20s Salazar was a right-wing pro-Israel Christian. In 2012 and into 2013, she was the president of Columbia Right to Life, the campus’s leading anti-abortion group. It was a position she took seriously. In October of 2012, Salazar hailed the university’s decision to end a supplemental program funded through student fees that paid for abortions, while also decrying that students were never informed that they were underwriting abortions through these fees. When a version of the fund was re-introduced, Salazar wrote an April 2013 op-ed in the Columbia Spectator wondering why there wasn’t similar help for students who decided not to terminate their pregnancies: “It is unacceptable for the University to provide support for students who have abortions while simultaneously failing to provide resources to accommodate those who keep their baby … we appear to imply that a ‘pro-life’ pregnant woman does not deserve the same rights as the woman who chooses to abort.”

In January of 2012, Salazar appeared on conservative firebrand Glenn Beck’s online show, where she was interviewed from Christians United for Israel’s annual Student Advocacy Leadership Training in San Antonio, Texas. “The anti-Israeli professors at Columbia—how many are there do you think?” asked Beck, who had proclaimed that some of the university’s faculty were “Muslim Brotherhood and communist” just moments earlier. “I think there are probably several,” Salazar replied. “They are using the classroom as their podium to spread lies about the State of Israel, to delegitimize the State of Israel, and to spread propaganda to Columbia students.” (On her campaign website, Salazar touts her “decade of experience as a local community organizer,” a period that includes her time as an activist with Columbia Right to Life and CUFI.)

By all appearances, the 21-year-old Salazar had both the politics and religious beliefs of a conservative Christian. In a series of tweets preserved by pro-Israel activist Hen Mazzig, Salazar quotes a pastor at Apostles Church in New York in a tweet that includes the hashtag #John13, referring to a chapter in the New Testament. “A thought I plan to ruminate on this week:” she tweeted in September of 2012, “Follow #Christ for his own sake, if you plan to follow Him at all,” quoting the 19th-century Anglican Bishop J.C. Ryle. One acquaintance who knew Salazar during her time as a CUFI activist said that she wasn’t shy about her religious faith, dropping the occasional “praise Jesus” into casual conversation.

In March of 2012, Salazar was one of over a dozen Columbia students to receive a stipend that allowed them to attend AIPAC’s annual Policy Conference in Washington. That August, she traveled to Israel for the first time, on a trip with CUFI—Facebook photos show Salazar and the other trip participants posing with IDF soldiers near Israel’s border with Lebanon. Just a few months later, Salazar’s view of the region, and of her own identity, had taken a dramatic turn. In February of 2013, she was one of the students who helped charter Columbia’s J Street U chapter. By September of 2013 she said she kept kosher at her apartment at 122nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, two blocks north of Columbia’s main campus.

The message board, which has remained public, shows that by this point Salazar was an energetic campus organizer and far from a hardcore anti-Zionist—“Is anyone else a little disturbed by the similarity between Palestinians referring to this as ‘Nakba’ and it’s mockery (intentional or not) of the Jewish use of the word ‘Shoah’ (both literally meaning ‘catastrophe’). I find it to be a little too close for comfort,” she wrote in April of 2013. In September of that year, she helped strategize a response to the anti-Zionist Students for Justice in Palestine national Right to Education Week event, and wrote a piece in the Columbia Spectator in February of 2014 arguing for more organized community support for the then-ongoing U.S.-mediated peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

According to people who knew Salazar at Columbia, and to messages and social media postings, a distinct shift occurred after the CUFI trip. After the official part of the mission ended in August of 2012, Salazar stayed in the region and visited the West Bank cities of Bethlehem and Hebron—where, according to messages from Salazar seen by Tablet, she empathized with the plight of the territory’s Palestinian population and questioned the pro-Israel narrative in which she had once wholeheartedly believed. She appears to have broken off her affiliation with CUFI as soon as she returned to the United States, just before the 2012 fall semester began.

A friend of hers, who knew her through the J Street U chapter that Salazar helped co-found at Columbia in early 2013, says that her colleagues with the campus “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group were aware that she had inhabited a much different religious and political identity just a short time earlier. Not that this was anything unusual: “Overall the story just seems to be jumping from one extreme to the other,” a former acquaintance of Salazar’s said. “I feel like I knew a lot of people like that at Columbia.” However Salazar identified politically, what is clear is that she brought the same passion and energy to whatever cause moved her. By early 2014, Salazar appeared to be presenting herself as a left-wing anti-Israel Jew, according to former acquaintances and social media postings.

On Sept. 11, 2014, the anti-Zionist website Mondoweiss published a writer named Julia Carmel’s account of being denied entry in Israel at the Allenby Bridge in July of 2014. The border crossing links Jordan to the Israeli-controlled West Bank (her page on Mondoweiss links to the Twitter account @JuliaCarmel___, which in turn encourages people to follow @SalazarSenate18). “I stammered, frozen in shock,” she writes of the moment of being sent back to Jordan. “I stood helplessly, searching the officers’ faces as tears welled in my eyes, but they diverted theirs.”

Salazar’s anti-Zionist turn happened within the space of just a few months (She had been president of Columbia’s CUFI chapter less than two years before the Allenby Bridge incident.) In September of 2013, Salazar’s email signature indicated she was a campus fellow of the World Zionist Organization Office of Diaspora Affairs, and she was in the 2013-2014 fellowship class with Bridging the Gap. Opposition to Israel’s existence is one perfectly rational response to being denied entry to the county, but her July 2014 rejection at the border came during a time of increasing pro-Palestinian activism on her part: She notes in the Mondoweiss article that she hoped to learn Arabic in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour and work with the Alternative Information Center in Bethlehem. Replies to deleted tweets from the first half of 2014 suggest that Israel was irredeemable in Salazar’s eyes months before the country barred her from entering.

Her work around the issue continued after her ban: In September of 2015, Salazar, writing as Carmel, co-wrote an article about right-wing targeting of Israel’s critics with Max Blumenthal, an anti-Zionist writer who has become controversial in leftist circles for spreading conspiracy theories about Syria’s White Helmets medical relief organization and generally parroting Assadist talking points in his writings on the country’s civil war. Unruly, the Jewish Voice for Peace-affiliated blog she co-edited as late as May of 2017, frequently published articles arguing against Zionism, and the site had a Palestine editor but no Israel editor. In an August 2016 article for Mondoweiss, she argued in favor of Black Lives Matter activists accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians.

***

If Salazar experienced a political change of heart these past few years, she is hardly the only one. However quickly she changed her mind about Israel, the trajectory of her views is a coherent one, and it runs in only one direction. But there are details in her biography that are harder to reconcile—including, though not limited to, her religious shift.

According to messages from Salazar obtained by Tablet, during her period of pro-Israel activism she told students at Columbia that her mother’s family was from Israel. At one point in the fall of 2012, just a year before keeping a kosher apartment, she described herself as a fervently Christian descendant of Israelis. Multiple acquaintances have told Tablet that in the fall of 2012, Salazar had also informed friends she had undergone a Conservative movement conversion in the space of just two months. In the spring of 2013, Salazar told a co-participant in one of her Jewish fellowship programs (in a preserved online message that Tablet has also obtained) that her grandfather moved from Mandatory Palestine to Colombia 10 years before Israel’s founding and that her father was the only one of his children to move to the United States.

Lilith reports that Salazar’s father was “a Sephardic Jew from Colombia;” The Forward states that Salazar’s “father was Jewish, descended from the community expelled from medieval Spain.” Salazar alluded to a Jewish upbringing in a September 2014 comment on Mondoweiss: “Like most American Jews, I was raised with the delusion that Israel was a safe haven for me, perhaps even the only safe place for Jews.” Whatever the source or nature of her Jewish identity, Salazar was presenting herself as a vocal left-winger of Jewish persuasion by early 2014. Her Jewish identity was used as an argument-ender on Twitter: “Is it anti-Semitic for a non-Jewish student to publicly impose opinion of whose voice is permitted in our Jewish communities?” Salazar sniped in the midst of a lengthy February 2014 Twitter exchange with the non-Jewish pro-Israel writer and activist Chloe Valdary (a Tablet contributor). “Please leave my Jewish community alone,” Salazar continued. “You don’t speak for us.”

All of the tweets posted under the handles @Julia_C_Salazar and @JuliaSalazarCU have been deleted. The replies to the account (or accounts) still survive, and almost all of them have something to do with Jewish issues or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Despite repeated requests by phone and email for clarifications, Salazar’s campaign would not make the candidate available to be interviewed for this story, either in person or over the phone. On two occasions this week, Tablet offered to delay publication of this article if it meant Salazar could speak with us. The campaign declined both times. (Tablet sent over a short list of questions about Salazar’s history with Jewish and Israel-related issues at 1 p.m. today, including one about where Salazar, who has claimed to be an immigrant from Colombia, was born. An hour later, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published a story about Salazar in which she acknowledged she was in fact born in Miami.)

Based on her activism with CUFI and other available evidence, she appears to have had a Christian upbringing. A 2009 funeral notice for her father, a former commercial airline pilot named Luis Hernan Salazar, indicates that the service was held at the Prince of Peace Catholic Church in Ormond Beach, Florida. 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. Their mother, Christine Salazar, indicated in a public September 2012 Facebook post that she planned on attending services at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, a nondenominational evangelical church in downtown Brooklyn. Although the candidate goes by Julia Carmel Salazar—and sometimes just Julia Carmel—in her professional life, her given middle name is Julia Christine Salazar, a discrepancy that makes it trickier to track down public records of the would-be state senator. A Julia Christine Salazar who shares Julia Salazar’s birthday and who had a mailing address in Columbia University’s Lerner Hall showed up in Florida voter registration records in May of 2017 as a Republican. This past July, the New York Daily News reported that Salazar had only registered as a Democrat “a year ago.”

Salazar touts her immigrant background, and has claimed that she moved to Florida at an early age. “My family immigrated to the US from Colombia when I was a baby,” she told Jacobin, a leading socialist journal. Salazar is “a working-class Colombian immigrant,” according to a lengthy profile in The Intercept written by a fellow DSA activist: “Salazar’s family emigrated from Colombia to South Florida when she was a baby. Her mother, already a U.S. citizen, wanted to raise Julia and her brother in the States.” New York magazine reports that Salazar is “a naturalized US-citizen.” On July 2, a Twitter user reported that she was “Listening to Julia Salazar talk about her life as a Colombian immigrant and a Jew of color.”

Salazar’s mother grew up in New Jersey and attended West Morris Central High School in Chester Township, according to her Facebook page—in that same New York magazine article, she’s identified as “Italian-American.” (Alex Salazar told Tablet that his mother’s mother immigrated to the United States from Italy.) Records on file with the Dade County registrar show that a Luis Hernan Salazar successfully sued a local car dealership in 1977 and applied for a $100,00 mortgage in 1979, events that took place over a decade before Julia Salazar was born. Her father petitioned for naturalization in 1982 according to a publicly available documents that Tablet has obtained—Luis and Christine Salazar applied for a $90,000 mortgage in 1987, and Salazar lists a Miami address in a July 1989 affidavit (the couple also secured a $260,000 mortgage for a Jupiter, Florida, property in July of 1993, worth about $460,000 in 2018 dollars. In December of 1993, they sold the house for $318,000, or about $550,000 today.) Even if Julia Salazar was born outside the United States, as of 1986, a child born in wedlock in a foreign country who had one parent who was an American citizen who had lived in the United States for a total of five years at any time prior to the child’s birth is automatically granted citizenship. A short online biography of Salazar’s brother, who is two years older than her, states that he was “born and raised in Florida,” with no mention of living in any other country. “We were born in Miami, both of us,” Alex Salazar told Tablet.

Perhaps Salazar’s more interesting transformation is from someone deeply invested in Israel to someone who barely discusses the topic. Her campaign’s official Twitter feed hasn’t mentioned Israel or Palestine once, and the tweets from her Israel-heavy handles @Julia_C_Salazar and @JuliaSalazarCU are no longer online. In fairness, plenty of Tweets from @JuliaCarmel___ deal with the subject, although there are no tweets available on the account between Feb. 28, 2012, and Nov. 20, 2017, even though numerous replies to deleted tweets appear during this period. Earlier this month, when a string of high-profile figures were singled out for questioning at Israeli crossings, drawing unprecedented attention to the country’s border security practices, Salazar, who had written a first-person account of being banned from entering Israel just four years earlier, stayed silent. Her most extensive comments on the Israel during the campaign were texted to a JTA reporter, as part of an article published earlier this afternoon, several days after Tablet first contacted the Salazar campaign for this article.

Salazar might be following the example of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wisely noted that “Middle Eastern politics is not exactly at my kitchen table every night.” Salazar’s campaign isn’t about Israel but about the things that really are kitchen-table issues in the district she hopes to represent: Tenants’ rights, health-care access, criminal-justice reform, and political change in Albany. Focusing on these set of concerns has worked so far—it might be that she senses nothing to gain from re-opening her whiplash-inducing history in Israeli-Palestinian affairs. She might even be a rare and eminently admirable type: Someone who has decided they’ve said everything they ever need to about the Jewish state and its neighbors. She hinted as much to The Forward. Salazar told the newspaper that “after graduation” she “didn’t feel like I could effect change [in Israel-Palestine], and I would still say I feel that way, and that’s why I’m just focused locally. And I don’t follow it closely like I once did.”

This is a striking statement for a leftist politician in New York. Cuomo’s anti-BDS executive order has become a contentious topic in New York politics, and Salazar co-authored a story about the targeting of boycott activists in 2015. Contrary to the timeline in The Forward, a lot of major Israel-related experience, including Salazar’s rejection at Allenby, her arrest at a 2014 IfNotNow protest, and her editorship for a JVP-linked blog, occurred when she was no longer a Columbia undergraduate.

But Salazar tends to move on from her past quickly. In her Mondoweiss articles and in the communications preserved on the Columbia J Street U message board, she makes no mention of her work with CUFI or her past belief in right-wing Zionism—even though her ideological conversion could easily have been used to bolster her case against Israel. When discussing her Jewish identity, she makes no reference to her past Christian beliefs and doesn’t allude to any process of rediscovering her Judaism, which is presented as something that has always existed for her. When discussing her career in activism, Israel-Palestine is now mentioned in passing, if it’s brought up at all (it gets no treatment in this interview in Jacobin, or in the Intercept piece). And when discussing her Israel-Palestine activism, important events in her own personal history—her travel, her shifts in perspective, and her border rejection—aren’t raised either.

Salazar has not been alone in her journey from right to left on Israel. She isn’t alone in defining a nontraditional Jewish identity, or in that identity becoming an impetus for activism. The Jewish left coalescing in New York has staked out a Jewishness that is proudly at odds with many of the longstanding markers of communal belonging—Julia Salazar is right at home in a milieu where religion, nation, denomination, and ethnic peoplehood don’t matter as much, or are looked upon as slightly backwards. Her supporters should be grateful that their formidable candidate arrived at what they believe to be the correct politics, whatever route she took to get to them and whatever she’s said about herself along the way.

Salazar’s election would be a breakthrough for the city’s Jewish left: proof that their institutions can become a pathway to formal political power, that anti-Zionist Jews can win high-profile elections, and that big things are possible when communities grow ravenous for some kind of change. Her career in politics might also convey a little of the dislocation of the current moment, for Jews and for American political life in general. Identity is both obsessed over and self-fashioned; meanwhile, newcomers can knock off incumbents on the strength of ideologies and political forces that wouldn’t have seemed viable or even operative just a couple years ago. Anyone can beat anyone—and maybe anyone can get elected as anything they decide themselves to be.

Additional reporting by Debbie Hall and John-Paul Pagano

***

Armin Rosen is a New York-based writer. He has written for The Atlantic, City Journal, and World Affairs Journal, and was recently a senior reporter for Business Insider.


THIS PIECE FROM THE DAILY INTELLIGENCER GIVES A MORE FULLY FLESHED OUT SET OF POSSIBLE ANSWERS TO SOME OF THOSE GLARING QUESTIONS THAT ARE THROWN AGGRESSIVELY AT HER ABOVE. I MUCH PREFER THE JOURNALISTIC APPROACH IN THE INTELLIGENCER, BECAUSE THIS I MY IDEA OF REAL INFORMATION. IT ISN’T MERELY AN ATTACK, BUT GIVES SOME REAL DISCUSSION AND EVIDENCE. THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE SALAZAR NAME IN SPAIN’S HAVING HISTORICAL LINKAGES WITH SPANISH JEWRY AND ROMA FAMILIES IS LITTLE KNOWN, AND A VERY PLAUSIBLE CASE FOR HER CLAIMS.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/julia-salazar-new-york-state-senate.html
CONTROVERSIES SEPT. 11, 2018
This Week in Julia Salazar She had a trust fund, her ancestors were Catholic elites, and she has a new version of her conversion story.
By Garance Franke Ruta

Julia Salazar during a rally in Brooklyn. Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP/REX/Shutterstock
A state senate race that was once hailed as a test of the rising strength and power of insurgent socialists has devolved into a full-fledged New York City tabloid circus, featuring charges of lies, identify fraud, theft, and an affair with New York Mets legend Keith Hernandez.

And that was just last week.

Every time the life story of first-time state senate candidate Julia Salazar, 27, seems it can’t get any more convoluted, it does. First, questions were raised about her religious background and political affiliation, after it was revealed she grew up in a Christian family and was a registered Republican who led an anti-abortion group in college before running for office as a Jewish socialist. Then, her self-identification as an immigrant came under fire — she was born in Miami — and her own brother went to town on her claims that she is from a working-class background. Next came revelations of a complex legal dispute with Hernandez’s wife that had led to Salazar being arrested on identity-impersonation charges; she doggedly pursued a defamation countersuit that was ultimately settled in her favor. Amid that story, legal documents surfaced showing her lawyer pointing to “Ms. Salazar trust Account records showing in excess of $600,000” in assets in 2011 and therefore no incentive to steal from Hernandez’s wife.

Now the campaign has confirmed Salazar has had substantial assets held in trust for her. “Julia’s father, who played a very limited role in raising her after her parents’ divorce, was not able to work due to disability in the final years of his life, but on his death in 2009 he left a house and considerable retirement savings; those assets were put in a trust to be divided evenly between Julia and her brother,” campaign spokesman Michael Kinnucan said. “Julia does not have direct access to the trust; the trustee is a relative in Colombia.”

On September 13, Salazar will face off with incumbent Senator Martin Malavé Dilan; the primary winner is all but assured of victory in November.

Salazar’s bid, which has won endorsements from and/or appearances with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cynthia Nixon, and Nina Turner of Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution, has even drawn attention in her father’s homeland of Colombia, where a genealogist’s findings further undermine her early campaign claims of having come from a working-class mixed Jewish-Christian family and raise questions about how aware of her own Colombian heritage she has sought to be, despite her repeated statements identifying with it. Meanwhile, interviews with the candidate and with Jewish religious leaders show her story about converting to Reform Judaism could not have happened as she has described it to multiple reporters, because the person she now says guided her conversion process was not an ordained rabbi and also was, in any case, not affiliated with Columbia University the year she initially said she converted through the Columbia/Barnard Hillel.

According to Maria Emilia Naranjo Ramos, a genealogist with the Colombian Academy of Genealogy and Historic Academy of Córdoba, the Salazars have for generations been a prosperous family in Colombia that has played a prominent role in civic and political life. Far from being the daughter of struggling immigrants of mixed Jewish-Catholic religious heritage, which early news reports described her as based on her statements and those of her campaign, Julia Salazar is the scion of longtime Latin-American Catholic elites.

Her direct-line ancestors include the mayor of Bogota, elected in 1824, and a founder and mayor of the city of Manizales. Her great-grandfather Félix Salazar Jaramillo was a congressman, senator, and minister of finance for the Republic of Colombia during two separate presidential administrations. A Colombian Conservative Party politician, he later became manager of the then–newly established Bank of the Republic in 1924, the country’s first central bank. Her ancestor Captain Mariano Grillo was a martyr of the independence, having been sentenced to death by firing squad in 1816 during the fight to throw off the shackles of Spain. Along the way other direct-line family members were military captains, doctors, and businessmen.

“The Salazar and Grillo families have been recognized throughout their generations” for their roles in “public and political life,” Naranjo Ramos wrote in an unusual blog post diving into the Salazar ancestry (she doesn’t normally perform this exercise for living people) in response to the controversy in New York. Family photos and records were provided to her site by Marcela Salazar, Julia’s cousin.

Salazar, a common Basque name, is one surname on the list of hundreds of names Spain released in 2015 as having possible Jewish ancestry, as part of an attempt at reparations by offering citizenship to anyone who could prove that they were descended from Jews forced to flee or convert by the Catholic monarchs of Spain. Most of those forced conversions took place in the several-hundred-year period that ended with the remaining practicing Jews being expelled from Spain at the end of the 15th century. That much is not contested. But it’s also a name that was adopted by Roma people in Spain during the forced taking of surnames in Castille, where the Salazars were a noble family, in the 14th and 15th centuries. And it is found in Latin America thanks also to the history of a group of Catholic Salazars who were deeply involved in the conquest of the new world. Still, the legacy of the forced conversions meant an entire people and culture was absorbed, and more than half a millennium later, about 20 percent of people who live in Spain and Portugal have genetic signatures suggesting Sephardic Jewish ancestry, according to a 2008 study. That’s probably true of some fraction of New-World Catholics of Iberian ancestry as well.

Whether there were Jewish Salazars in Julia Salazar’s direct line before the late 17th century, when her ancestor Pedro Salazar arrived from Spain is unknown, but according to Naranjo Ramos, Salazar’s patrilineally descended surname for the past three centuries has not belonged, in Colombia, to men or women who left a record of having considered themselves Jewish that she could locate.

“The Salazar family has been Catholic in their tradition and for many generations,” Naranjo Ramos wrote of the family.

That’s not how Julia Salazar has told the story. “Some of my extended family are Jewish; many are Catholic. Others converted from Judaism to Catholicism,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, to whom she also described herself as coming from a “secular and mixed family, Catholic and Jewish.” “My father was of Sephardic Jewish heritage,” Salazar wrote in an August campaign statement. “I was told that I had Jewish family when I was growing up,” Salazar told Jewish Currents. “My dad would talk about his dad being Sephardi, and then he would talk about it as a spiritual and geographical connection.”

Church records, however, show her grandfather Alejandro Salazar Grillo was Catholic, according to Naranjo Ramos.

Her brother Alex Salazar, just two years her senior, says their father never mentioned any possible Sephardic heritage to him. Not while his parents were married, not during weekends spent with him after their parents divorced, and not in the years during which he spent half his week taking care of his ailing father before his death from cancer in 2009.

“It was never discussed. The family was Catholic and my father, even though he wasn’t really religious, would have told you he was Catholic. His family was Catholic. His brother was a Jesuit; is a Jesuit priest. His mother, my grandmother, was a very devout Catholic and so that was the only religion that was known in the household,” Alex Salazar told New York.

“That’s probably true,” Christine Salazar, his mother, said when asked about his comment that the question of Jewish heritage was never discussed father to son. “My daughter is the one who did the research, and she’s most inquisitive. So she’s the one who sought out her family history, and, as far as we know, the last multiple generations were Catholic. But my daughter has a keen interest in the Jewish faith.”

Asked if her husband Luis had ever discussed having Jewish heritage with her during their marriage, Christine Salazar replied, “No, he did not. But like I said, his generation and probably multiple generations prior, they were Catholic.”

“I never discussed it with him,” she added. “I believe that was a discussion that Julia had with him about the family history in Iberia. But he would always say that he was born and raised in Colombia but his family was Iberian.”

“I don’t enjoy subjecting myself to Tablet-esque race science, as a person from a mixed background,” Julia Salazar tweeted in August after Tablet published the first piece questioning her self-descriptions.

Asked what he knew about his great-grandfather — who is so well-known in Colombia there’s even a Wikipedia page on him — Alex Salazar said, “Not much. But I have an old chair that belonged to him.” Alex did not know about his great-grandfather’s history in Colombian politics, he said.

Nor did Julia Salazar, until her cousin Marcela Salazar sent her a link to Naranjo Ramos’s research. Learning that she comes from a long line of civic leaders is “pretty cool — but I had no idea until I read that report,” she said. The one thing she had heard about was that an ancestor was founder of Manizales. “I had heard something about that actually,” she said, “but … I had no way of proving it, and didn’t give it that much thought, until a week ago; until a proper genealogist investigated it.”

To learn about that history while running for office has been something, and in the heat of the campaign she hasn’t been able to fully process it. “It’s totally bizarre. It’s wild. I haven’t even — truthfully, I haven’t had time to just really interrogate it and ruminate over it in the way that I would if I were not running for state senate,” she said.

Julia Salazar’s lengthy Catholic family history in Colombia makes her failure to correct the multiple stories that described her father as a Sephardic Jew, and her own statements about coming from a mixed-faith family, as misleading as describing herself as an immigrant, or allowing others to do so. “She also came from a unique Jewish background. She was born in Colombia, and her father was Jewish, descended from the community expelled from medieval Spain. When her family immigrated to the United States, they had little contact with the American Jewish community, struggling to establish themselves financially,” the Forward, a Jewish paper, reported in July in an article titled, “Julia Salazar Says Her Jewish Roots Helped Inspire Her Political Activism.” The JTA later reported that it was Salazar who told the Forward reporter her father was Jewish.

Nor was the Colombian side of her family, with its centuries-long record of playing elite roles in public life, one that could be considered working class, according to any reasonable definition of the term, despite her statement to a Village Voice reporter that “my parents both come from a working class background.” The legacy of financial well-being and achievement carried over from Colombia to Salazar’s early family life in Florida, where she was born.

“We were probably what you would consider upper middle class,” said Alex Salazar. “My father was a commercial airline pilot and did well, and he had a successful business as well that he had at the same time.”

Julia has disputed her brother’s description, accusing him of confronting her publicly because he disagrees with her politics, a charge he has denied and countered by supplying copious photographic evidence of the family’s lifestyle to the press, resulting in headlines like, “Private school, a waterside home, luxury boats, a jet-ski for four and a maid — Democratic Socialist Julia Salazar’s brother reveals truth about the childhood she called ‘hardscrabble’.”

Her mother says the story is more complex. “It’s a little bit of both worlds,” she said, “and I’ll explain why: My husband came from a solid middle-class family, there is no question. I came from a working class family.”

“When we divorced, our economic situation changed dramatically,” she said. She had to downsize, and returned to college. The kids lived primarily with her. Her ex became ill shortly after the divorce, then had a second bout of cancer at the same time she was laid off from her job in 2004. Then he died, in 2009. “These were big events in the life of any child — the turmoil of divorce, economic uncertainty, and a sick parent who ultimately died — these were big events in a child’s life, in ten years,” she said. “I did my best to shelter them, but these are big changes.”

Salazar’s father, born in 1944, was baptized and first came to America as a child with his parents, who traveled frequently between Bogota and the Tampa area, according to his son. By his teen years, Luis Salazar was in Southern California, where he studied and played football while attending an American high school, before going to community college in Santa Barbara. His interest in the nascent regional aerospace industry led him to flying lessons, his son said, and his skill caught the eye of legendary aviation pioneer Jack Conroy, who invited him to work for him.

Conroy designed the Guppy super plane that was an essential part of the successful effort that helped put Americans on the moon by allowing for the rapid transport of enormous rocket segments from Southern California to Cape Canaveral by plane. During the space race, every week counted. Luis Salazar would go on to pilot some of those Guppies, according to his son, and even met the father of rocket technology, former Nazi turned U.S. Army engineer and NASA space-flight director Wernher von Braun, once during this period.

While working as a pilot, Salazar also started his own airplane parts and avionics business, Global Aviation Distributors; it mainly sold to the Colombian airplane industry. It was also part owner of Storch Aircraft LLC, which manufactures replicas of the famous German Third-Reich Storch reconnaissance aircraft, according to records that precede the elder Salazar’s death.

Alex Salazar said he wasn’t speaking out about the family to criticize his sister, and he declined to comment directly on Julia Salazar’s specific statements. The whole situation has been extremely difficult for the family, especially his mother, he said. But he felt impelled to speak out, he said, because he wanted to correct the record about his father and his accomplishments and role in his children’s life. He spoke emotionally about his love for his father, whom he helped care for during the years of illness that preceded his death.

“I don’t really even want to speculate why or if she said these things, but I’m just telling you there’s stuff out there that is incorrect. It is false,” he said. “I don’t feel right seeing things being said about my family that aren’t true.”

New York City is not only the largest city in America, it is home to more Jews than any city outside Israel. The varieties of Jewish experience in New York City are as diverse as the city itself. There are Jewish Grindr groups and Hinjews who mark Diwali. There are Jews who bake Christmas hams and put up trees for their half-Jewish kids and Jews who read Torah and attend gender-separated synagogues and dress according to centuries-old European practices. There are blues-guitar Kol Nidre services and street-corner Lulav and etrog shakers and great stone and stained glass institutions that once held sermons in German. There are men who wear fur hats and sing in Hebrew and women who wear yoga pants and chant in Sanskrit. There are Jews who are related to Hillary Clinton, and Jews who are related to Donald Trump.

Whether or not Julia Salazar has any Jewish ancestry, she chose in college to identify and live as a Jew in 21st-century New York City amid a rising population of adults with fractional Jewish ancestry. Reform Judaism is America’s largest denomination, and half of Reform Jews who marry wed someone of a different faith background, according to the Pew Research Center — as do 79 percent of nonreligious Jews. That’s created a large population of young people of mixed ancestry who are both connected to and alienated from traditional Judaism. Salazar’s story fits easily into that mix. “She’s part of a generation that recognizes her story. No anonymous smear or racist attack can drown that out,” tweeted filmmaker Rebecca Pierce in her defense.

There’s no question that Salazar in college and after found for herself a Jewish community that accepted her, employed her, and to this day does not care about the technical details of how she came to Judaism — only how she lives it day to day in her values. Some of Salazar’s college classmates have written an editorial in the Forward claiming her and defending her: “We knew her as a woman with her own place in Judaism’s complicated history who yearned to connect with her roots and her past. Julia’s story is a celebration of 21st-century American Jews who embrace Judaism and Jewish life as adults, even when provided few resources to do so while growing up.”

All that being the case, on the question of when and how she formally converted to Judaism, as with her descriptions of her ancestry, her story has never stopped having that hard-to-pin-down quality that’s defined so much of her self-description and turned her from a minor would-be Brooklyn politician into a source of debate and high-profile fascination.

“I went through a conversion process with a Reform rabbi at [Columbia-Barnard] Hillel in 2012,” she told the JTA in August. “I don’t really bother to consider it a conversion because many people don’t respect Reform conversion.” The New York Jewish Week interviewed her and reported that she “underwent a formal conversion in 2012 … after a two-month conversion course.”

“Pressed for details,” the paper continued, “she said the course was taught by someone she believes was a rabbinic intern who left before the end of it for paternity leave. She also said she chose not to have any formal ceremony marking her conversion.”

“I essentially took a course and learned how to read Torah and had the option of going through a b’nai mitzvah ceremony … but declined to do it,” she also told JTA. “It also didn’t feel earnest to consider it a conversion because there was no religion for me to convert from … I felt Jewish, I was committed to Judaism and remain committed to Judaism.”

In September, a Vox reporter wrote “she told me [the course] was ‘more like five months’ and that she definitely completed all the required work.” Tablet, which first raised questions about Salazar, reported, “Multiple acquaintances have told Tablet that in the fall of 2012, Salazar had also informed friends she had undergone a Conservative movement conversion in the space of just two months.”

In the past month, stories have reported a two-month conversion course and a five-month course; a Reform conversion and a Conservative conversion; a rabbi being involved, and a rabbinic intern. In several stories based on interviews with Salazar she says she did not complete the course, and in one she says completed all the requirements. Three stories describe the course as having taken place in 2012, and one “in mid- to late 2013.”

Today, Salazar chalks up this scatter-plot graph of a biographical tale to being a first-time candidate. “I was naive about the need to solidify messaging,” she said. “It is a bit naïve, right. It sounds naïve. It’s a little embarrassing. But when I sought to run for state senate I thought I was just running on policies and certainly my record as an advocate, but didn’t give a lot of thought to where I was born or just verifying the details about my biography.”

I called Salazar to talk about the genealogical report on her family’s history in Colombia, which she now readily acknowledges is not the source of her religious faith, just the inspiration for exploring it. “To be clear, this genealogy does not make me Jewish,” she said. “I’m Jewish because I committed to practicing Judaism in college and went through a conversion.”

Given the conflicting reports about that conversion, I wanted to make sure I understood what had actually happened: “You did a Reform conversion with the beit din and the whole thing?”

“Yes,” she replied.

The process of conversion to Judaism is obscure to both outsiders and even many Jews, as it does not happen that frequently and often takes place within the context of marriage. The process culminates with a beit din — a religious court made up of either three rabbis or a rabbi and two learned members of the community, depending on the denomination, and a document usable for proving Jewishness to rabbis for the purpose of having them officiate future life-cycle events, like weddings.

Rabbi Hara Person, the chief strategy officer for the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional association of Reform rabbis, describes the process as extensive.

“Conversion involves study with a rabbi, usually also a class that could be anywhere from 20 weeks to a 32-week class. It depends on where you are in the country. But it definitely involves rigorous study,” Person said. “For many rabbis it involves going to the mikvah. It involves generally writing some kind of a statement about your personal Jewish identity. It’s a long and involved and rigorous process.”

“I just want to be clear I am not making any comment whatsoever about Salazar. I don’t know anything about her,” she said. As for the possibility of a two-month conversion process: “I would say that in general, that would be extremely unlikely.”

The same goes for undertaking a conversion with someone who is not an ordained rabbi. “That would be unusual,” she said. “I can’t say it’s never happened.” The standard of practice for the Reform rabbinate is “that conversions to Judaism be supervised and guided solely by ordained rabbis.”

Salazar’s tale of conversion has continued to evolve in the telling. She told me what she told Vox, that her course was not a two-month one, contrary to her earlier statements, but something longer. The “B’nai Mitzvah course” she took was “closer to five months,” she said. “I don’t, honestly, I just would want to be accurate, I’m not sure how long it was. It was definitely longer than two months. It may have been longer than five months … it began in one semester and ended in the next.”

And she now says, for the first time, that she was certified by a beit din, though she has no record of it. “I just did not keep my records,” she told me. “It was 2013. I never — truthfully, especially because it was a Reform conversion, I expected that people would probably always challenge the legitimacy of my Judaism even though I had remained active in the Jewish community since 2010.”

The person who taught the course “was definitely a rabbi at the time, but he may also have been a rabbinic intern because Columbia/Barnard Hillel doesn’t ordain rabbis, right, but he was definitely a rabbi, and his name was Daniel Crane,” she said. She says there were two other women in the course, but she does not recall either of their names.

There is in the United States one Reform rabbi with that name, Daniel Aaron Crane Kirzane, who was ordained in March 2014 by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. He was the Reform rabbinic intern at Columbia/Barnard Hillel during the 2013–2014 academic year — which is to say, he was not an ordained rabbi, and therefore could not yet lead conversions while Salazar was a student.

“At this time, I have no comment about Julia Salazar,” Kirzane said. The Columbia/Barnard Hillel said it would not be commenting on Salazar, either.

Reform conversions may not be honored by the other denominations for the purpose of religious weddings, and Reform weddings performed in Israel are not recognized by the state. But Reform Judaism is the largest of the Jewish denominations in the U.S., and Reform rabbis take the question of the Reform conversion process quite seriously.

“The state of Israel doesn’t always get to decide or determine what people do in North America,” Hara said.

Whatever happens on Thursday, Salazar’s bid for the state senate has opened a can of worms for her and for the Democratic Socialists who have their largest chapter in New York and thronged her campaign to elevate her bid for office following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over Congressman Joe Crowley in her summer primary.

None of the high-profile insurgent candidates who endorsed Salazar have backed away from her, and throughout the last weeks of controversy the Democratic Socialists of America have put their power and weight behind canvassing for her. By all accounts they are formidable organizers. On Friday, the leaders of DSA-NY emailed an appeal to members.

When she hasn’t been inundated by press requests, Salazar has been head-down, doing the same thing: door-knocking. “Julia has always from the time she was 14 been an advocate for the underdog, always trying to raise people up,” her mother Christine Salazar said, adding later: “She has relentless energy for that type of thing.”

The Dilan campaign has fended off primary challenges before, but with Cynthia Nixon on the ballot, the progressive vote in what some call “the L Train corridor” is likely to be high, and no one has any polling on this down-ballot race. The Dilan campaign has also drawn negative attention in the waning days of the race for failing to report thousands in donations.

“I cannot imagine if voters would judge her based on whether or not she is an immigrant, or any of the other creative claims about her background that have been shown to be untrue,” said Bob Liff, a spokesman for the Dilan campaign. “But they do care if she lies.”

Early Sunday morning, the attention seemed to be getting to Salazar. “I loved my job and my simple life before this ‘opportunity’ to go through hell like this,” she tweeted.

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