Who Are Kamala’s Jews?

By Seth Mandel

Sunday, September 22, 2024

 

On the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention in August, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides offered Jewish Democrats a message of reassurance about Kamala Harris: “She’s not Joe Biden, and that’s OK.”

 

Not exactly a galvanizing statement. Nides is a Democratic Party elder statesman, a respected diplomatic figure, and for decades one of the Democrats’ key conduits to the financial sector. Few have made as many trips through the revolving door as Nides, who has served Democratic presidents since Jimmy Carter and has also been an executive at Morgan Stanley, Fannie Mae, and Credit Suisse. If Nides, who is expected to serve in a possible Harris administration, couldn’t do better than “she’s not Joe Biden, and that’s OK,” he provided evidence that those tasked with making the case for Kamala often end up making excuses for her instead—especially when it comes to specifically Jewish and Israel-related issues.

 

Later that same night, Harris’s newly minted director of Jewish outreach, Ilan Goldenberg, had his own words of encouragement for attendees at a dinner hosted by a liberal Zionist group: “Her relationship with Israel is a lot more than just about October 7. It goes back 20 years. It goes back to her time in San Francisco as an attorney general. It goes back to her being part of the Jewish community, largely through her husband, through Doug.”

 

That would be Doug Emhoff, the first second gentleman and the first Jewish spouse in the White House altogether. A Hollywood lawyer by trade, Emhoff has emphasized his Jewishness on the campaign trail. He has also played a prominent role as President Biden’s domestic emissary on anti-Semitism—a role he is seeking to reprise if his wife wins the presidency.

 

When it comes to Harris and the Jewish community, one can’t help but notice: There’s a great deal of vouching going on. That’s because Harris is uniquely dependent on the affirmations of her campaign surrogates.

 

The reasons for this are plain. On policy, Harris is a blank slate. She rarely speaks to voters or to the media outside of prepared remarks. She did not have to win anyone’s vote to become the nominee this year. And as a one-term senator with a focus on judicial matters, Harris has no foreign-policy record to lean on. You’re just going to have to trust her. “We’re not going to address hypothetical policy questions,” a Harris aide pointedly told Jewish Insider.

 

Since two of the most salient issues of the election are Iran’s multifront war on Israel and rampant anti-Semitism in America, voters might not be in the most trusting of moods. So Harris has assembled a team of Jewish advisers whom she hopes voters will trust instead. It’s worth looking at what this team will mean for U.S. governance should Harris return to the White House, this time as president.

 

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The most important voice in the Harris war room belongs to Philip Gordon. A European policy hand in the Bill Clinton administration, Gordon made an early bet that paid out in full: Against the wishes and warnings of Democratic foreign-policy establishment figures like Richard Holbrooke, Gordon threw his lot in with Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton in 2008. His loyalty was rewarded with a top post at the State Department. Gordon moved to the National Security Council in Obama’s second term and refocused on the Mideast. That included helping to coordinate the Iran nuclear deal.

 

In 2019, Gordon made another risky bet: He joined Harris’s doomed presidential campaign as her national-security adviser. When Harris eventually went to the White House with Joe Biden, Gordon came too, and when Biden dropped out of the race, Gordon instantly became the national-security adviser to the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

 

Professionally, he has shown remarkable foresight. Not so when it comes to policy. The first red flag is that, as reported by the Financial Times, “Gordon was instrumental in crafting [Harris’s] more sympathetic tone for the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.” That “more sympathetic tone” on Gaza is just another way of saying Harris and her team have struck a more antagonistic tone toward Israel than the president has. “The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people… We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies,” Harris said after a less-than-joyful meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

 

That “more sympathetic tone” was also apparently on display in a pre-convention meeting with anti-Zionist activists, at which Harris signaled her openness to discuss an arms embargo against Israel. A day after the conversation was made public, the Harris campaign walked it back, though in her August 29 interview on CNN, she refused to say that restricting arms shipments was off the table for her. And that “more sympathetic tone” was apparently responsible for Harris’s decision to skip Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress in July, over which Harris was due to preside as the president of the Senate.

 

Gordon’s faults go deeper than tone. In 2007, he published a book-length critique of the War on Terror, Winning the Right War. Part of Gordon’s thesis was that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was one of the main drivers of global terrorism. As proof, he quotes Osama bin Laden and 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta, thus taking at face value the propaganda they spread that was designed to blame Israel for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center.

 

In his book, Gordon strikes what one might call a “more sympathetic” tone toward the narratives of Israel’s sworn enemies. “Israel’s very foundation was the initial humiliation,” he writes of decades of built-up Arab resentment, “as the relatively small number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine managed to destroy a coalition of Arab armies and set up the Jewish state.”

 

This wording—demonstrably false and breezily ignorant of the history—amounts to the delegitimization of the State of Israel’s right to exist and the embrace of the modern blood libel that claims the Jewish state is a settler-colonial European project.

 

Meanwhile, Gordon’s proposed solutions to the Arab–Israeli conflict have aged as poorly as anything anyone has ever written on the subject. He advised recognizing Hamas as a legitimate part of the negotiating process on the theory that “putting a serious peace offer on the table would force Hamas to accept it or undermine its legitimacy by refusing the peace that most Palestinians want.” In fact, as amply demonstrated by the current crisis in the region, refusing to make peace with Israel is the source of Hamas’s popularity and of its international support structure.

 

But don’t worry, Islamist terrorism isn’t long for this world, Gordon predicted in 2007: “Muslims themselves will turn against the extremists in their midst. Somewhere in the Islamic world, at some point possibly sooner than we realize, new Lech Walesas, Vaclav Havels, and Andrei Sahkarovs will emerge to reclaim their people’s future from those who have hijacked it. They will seek to put their civilization on a path that will restore its greatest era—when the Islamic world was a multicultural zone of tolerance.” More naive words were never spoken.

 

As for where he might stand on the war that Israel is currently fighting, in his 2020 book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East, Gordon includes Israel’s removal of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982 and Saudi Arabia’s intervention against Iranian proxies in Yemen in the 2010s as “examples of Middle Eastern regime change attempts that ultimately backfired badly.” It is safe to say that Kamala Harris’s key adviser on foreign policy is a leading advocate of “restraint” and “de-escalation,” as his peers would say—especially when the restraint and de-escalation is to be practiced by the Jewish state unilaterally.

 

It is therefore understandable that Harris’s electoral team recognizes that she might need to reassure Jewish voters, who make up a key constituency in particular in the “tipping ground” state of Pennsylvania. And while Emhoff’s embrace of his Jewish roots might be genuine and at times even moving, his deployment as “second mensch” has limited effects on policy. Emhoff’s focus has been to be visibly and comfortably Jewish in the political arena. He has put up a mezuzah on the doorpost of the vice-presidential residence, led White House seders, lit Hanukkah candles, visited concentration camps, and baked matzah with Jewish day-schoolers. But he has also been made to appear as something of a mascot, like the “Mensch on a Bench” puppet that travels with Israel’s national baseball team, cuddly and brimming with team spirit and a belly full of bagels and lox.

 

Emhoff’s one foray into the policy arena was, to put it mildly, inauspicious: his participation in the crafting of the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism. The plan was touted as a “whole-of-society,” all-hands-on-deck approach to fighting anti-Semitism in America. The problem is that it amounted to talking about talking about anti-Semitism. Even the executive “actions” directed by the strategy mostly consisted of the president directing government agencies and committees to “conduct learning sessions,” “help raise awareness,” “disseminate model resources,” “highlight new resources,” “provide educational opportunities,” “launch an interagency effort,” “conduct outreach,” “collect data”—you get the point.

 

In fact, the National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism was so useless when the post–October 7 wave of Jew-hatred hit the streets that the president was compelled to take new executive actions because there was nothing tangible in the 60-page whole-of-society blueprint he had proudly presented to the country a few months earlier.

 

Of course, spouses are not (usually) policymakers. And if Harris needed to persuade Jewish voters that she was a woman of action—well, that’s why she hired a Jewish liaison. But in a bitter irony, Harris’s Jewish liaison has only added to the anxiety about her stance on Jewish issues.

 

That liaison, Ilan Goldenberg, opposed Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem without extracting Israeli concessions. He was also critical of U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, arguing that it “damages Israeli security and undermines American interests in the Middle East and beyond, while stirring a hornet’s nest that didn’t need stirring.” His instinctive suspicion of Jewish sovereignty and his poor predictive abilities regarding the conflict are a strange match for someone tasked with calming Jewish nerves in an election year.

 

What does Goldenberg do when he’s not campaigning for Kamala? He’s thinking of reasons to blacklist Israeli settlers. One of the ways Biden has sought to placate his anti-Israel base is by creating a new framework of sanctions specifically directed at Jews who live in the West Bank. These Jews, the administration believes, can be credibly accused of “undermin[ing] the foreign policy objectives of the United States, including the viability of a two-state solution and ensuring Israelis and Palestinians can attain equal measures of security, prosperity, and freedom.” That is an absurd basis for creating a new category of sanctions, since almost any action taken by a foreign government with which any administration disagrees can be said to undermine the president’s objectives. Even more striking, such sanctions are tribally specific: They will apply only to Jews living in the West Bank and not Palestinians there, even if the Palestinians violate the same prohibitions. In his previous position at the National Security Council through August, Goldenberg played “a very enthusiastic role” in this sanctions-devising task force, per reporting from Tablet.

 

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How about the issue of Jewish safety here at home? American Jews have been subject to a staggering amount of anti-Semitism in academia, politics, and assorted professions. The pro-Hamas encampments on campus, in particular, will continue to be an issue through the election, as the fall semester revivifies the Iran- and China-backed demonstrations.

 

And on this, Harris leaves plenty to be desired. The vice president has praised the protesters as “showing exactly what the human emotion should be” in response to the war in Gaza; meanwhile, according to a new survey, nearly half of current Jewish students and recent graduates “never” or “rarely” feel safe identifying as a Jew on campus.

 

The street mobs have posed a particular challenge to Democrats around Harris. JB Pritzker, Illinois’s billionaire governor and a liberal donor, talks often of his family’s roots as Jewish refugees from Ukraine. But his concentration on extremism focuses entirely on the right-wing variety, comparing the MAGA threat to “the early days of the end of the Weimar Republic.” That ideological blind spot is convenient, because other members of the Pritzker clan, heirs to the Hyatt hotel chain, have been funding pro-Palestinian protest groups and sponsors of those groups through family foundations. Pritzker has become a Democratic Party rising star in his own right, and he is the reason that Harris’s coronation, at which he gave a prime-time speech, was held in Chicago—a city where even the city council has taken an official position in favor of the Gaza protesters and against Israel.

 

Also speaking at the convention, and specifically vouching for Harris to Jewish voters, was Chuck Schumer. The Democratic Senate majority leader—the highest-ranking elected Jewish official ever, he dubbed himself to the crowd, even though his position is entirely organizational and institutional and comes from securing 51 votes out of 100 in the Senate rather than a plebiscite either of Jews or of Americans—had a simple pitch. He said a vote for Harris was a vote to fight anti-Semitism. That claim is beneath contempt and shows how the outpouring of anti-Semitism among the ranks of voters and politicians in his own party has scrambled his moral compass. In March, Schumer gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he called for Netanyahu, the democratically elected leader of Israel, to be replaced—an unprecedented act of diplomatic meddling by a senator, made even more shameful by the fact that the senator in question is a high-profile Jewish American who delivered this denunciation of the Jewish state to placate the anti-Semites in his party.

 

The aftershocks from Schumer’s stunt lasted for months. In July, Netanyahu was due to give his speech to Congress. Usually, the vice president, in her capacity as president of the Senate, presides over the address. Since Harris refused to do so, a Senate Democrat had to step up in her stead. Had Schumer not called for Netanyahu’s toppling in March, he would have been the obvious choice. Instead, the Democrats were sent scrambling for someone to preside over the speech from an allied head of government, an embarrassing spectacle created by Schumer’s cowardice.

 

Team Harris is a striking example of a consistent trend in politics. For while Jewish individuals are overrepresented in the ranks of her followers and advisers, Jewish interests are being marginalized—and those overrepresented Jews are there in part or in whole to provide cover for that marginalization.