George Santos, due to be sworn in as a congressman on Jan. 3, is no longer welcome at Republican Jewish Coalition events.
“We are very disappointed in Congressman-elect Santos,” RJC CEO Matt Brooks said in a statement on Tuesday. “He deceived us and misrepresented his heritage. In public comments and to us personally he previously claimed to be Jewish. He has begun his tenure in Congress on a very wrong note. He will not be welcome at any future RJC event.”
On his campaign website, Santos had claimed his maternal grandparents were refugees who fled the Nazis to Brazil and also spoke of his mother’s “Jewish background beliefs.”
In an interview with the New York Post on Monday, the recently-elected representative for a New York congressional district on Long Island and a small part of Queens admitted to fabricating key details of his biography.
“I never claimed to be Jewish. I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish,’ ” Santos said.
In a subsequent interview with the City & State outlet, he added: “It just strikes me as so odd that people are rushing to disinherit me from being Jewish or for even allowing [me] to care for Israel and Judaism in a time and era where antisemitism is at an all-time rise.”
Santos also confessed that he never graduated from any institution of higher education, despite previously claiming to have received a degree from Baruch College in 2010, and that he never worked directly for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, despite his previous assertions.
