Mexico's new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has been famously quiet about her Jewish ancestry. Yet she will live and govern Latin America's second-largest economy from the Palacio Nacional, three blocks from Mexico's first synagogue and a neighborhood where Jewish immigrants first found refuge here.

I wrote this column shortly after Claudia Sheinbaum’s landslide electoral win in June and have decided it’s relevant to re-publish it now, four days after Mexico’s first female president took the oath of office.

Mexico’s first female president in more than 200 years of independence promises to protect an expanded social safety net and fight for the poor like her predecessor.