Vice President Kamala Harris with her husband, Doug Emhoff, at a Rosh Hashanah event. In contrast to President Joe Biden, Harris and Emhoff have been careful to avoid wading into controversies over antisemitism. Photo by Getty Images

By Arno Rosenfeld July 23, 2024

At first glance, it is hard to spot much daylight between Biden and Harris on antisemitism. Biden drafted Doug Emhoff, Harris’s Jewish husband, to serve as his administration’s unofficial spokesperson on the issue. And the vice president’s office was deeply involved in creating the White House’s national strategy to counter antisemitism.

But there are significant differences.

A singular threat — or a universal one?

Biden has consistently described antisemitism as a unique menace. “There is no threat that worries me more than the rising tide of antisemitism,” he said during a speech at the Brookings Institution nearly a decade ago.

He has decried the “delegitmization” of Israel and frequently says that Israel is the only thing keeping Jews safe, repeating the refrain just days before dropping out of the presidential race Sunday.

When Biden visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, his takeaway was that, “for world Jewry, Israel is the light, for world Jewry, Israel is the hope.”

Harris, who is Black, Asian and female, speaks about antisemitism in more universal terms. “Let us always strive to remember that we as human beings have so much more in common than what separates us,” she wrote after her own visit to Yad Vashem.

Her statement about the fifth anniversary of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in late October did not connect it to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack, as Biden’s did, and it concluded by emphasizing solidarity: “No one in our nation should be made to fight alone.”

Harris and Emhoff dodge controversy over Israel

Like Biden, Harris has sometimes tied antisemitism and Israel together. Back when she was California’s junior senator in 2017, she announced new hate crimes legislation during a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“As I fight to promote human rights and security,” she said, “Israel and the Jewish community will always be a priority for me.”

But in the nine months since Oct. 7, both Harris and Emhoff have been careful to stay away from the contentious debate over whether strident protests against Israel are antisemitic. “When Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism,” both have said during multiple public appearances.

The mantra is borrowed directly from the national antisemitism strategy and differs slightly — but pointedly — from the controversial definition of antisemitism preferred by many leading Jewish organizations. That definition, created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, holds that “applying double standards” to Israel could be antisemitic regardless of the motive.

The clause grates on many progressives who point to many reasons other than antisemitism — someone’s Arab, Muslim or Jewish heritage, for example — that a person might focus on Israeli human rights abuses.

The language that Harris and Emhoff use allows them to sidestep these concerns while still making a nod toward Jews who are worried about left-wing activism by offering an incontestable observation: protests against Israel are antisemitic when they’re motivated by antisemitism.

This tactic is in keeping with Emhoff’s approach, as the White House’s most visible spokesperson on Jewish issues, of embracing antisemitism as a unifying cause for American Jews while refusing to draw any clear lines around criticism of Israel.

“We had hours and hours of off-the-record conversations with him in the evenings and he was very candid about a lot of things, but was definitely not willing to go there,” said Laura Adkins, the Forward’s former opinion editor, who traveled with Emhoff to Poland and Germany last year.

Harris shows more sympathy to protesters

Harris has gone off-script a few times to express sympathy with student protesters from the same pro-Palestinian movement that Biden has periodically accused of antisemitism: “They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be as a response to Gaza,” Harris told The Nation earlier this month. “There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”

Three years ago, Harris praised a college student who accused Israel of “ethnic genocide” in a question about why American dollars were going to fund Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“Your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth cannot be suppressed,” Harris said. “We still have healthy debates in our country about what is the right path.”

(Politico reported that she later called pro-Israel members of Congress and groups including the Anti-Defamation League and Democratic Majority for Israel to underscore her support for Israel.)

The ‘kishkes’ question

Biden, in contrast, has focused on expressing sympathy for “Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class” and his spokesperson has condemned “an extremely disturbing pattern of antisemitic messages” and “grotesque sentiments and actions” on college campuses over the past year.

His comments frustrated the left, but reflect something that our Israel-based opinion columnist, Dan Perry, wrote about in the wake of Biden’s Sunday announcement:

As a member of the generation that came of age in the years immediately after World War II and the establishment of Israel, Biden has throughout his political career been a friend of the version of Israel that dominated the discourse in those years. It was seen as an underdog country, central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, turned into an unlikely success story by a plucky people marked by the devastation of the Holocaust. To Biden and his peers, Israel was seen as having laid a marker in the sand — not just for the Jewish birthright in the Holy Land but also for Western civilization in the Middle East.

Or, as Abe Foxman put it recently, “In his kishkes, Biden is a Zionist.”

Harris, who was 6 years old when Biden was first elected to the Senate, came of age in a different era. Biden participated in the campaign to free Soviet Jews while Harris raised money to bail out Black Lives Matter protesters.

Harris has opposed federal legislation to crack down on the movement to boycott Israel over concerns that it “could limit Americans’ First Amendment rights.” She  sympathized with U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Muslim-American Minnesota Democrat, when Omar was accused of antisemitism for comments regarding Israel in 2019.

“There is a difference between criticism of policy, or political leaders, and antisemitism,” Harris said at the time.

While many American Jews still relate to Israel like Biden, others have a more ambivalent relationship to the country. Many younger Jews, especially, are equally focused on the suffering of Palestinians, and may resonate with her step-daughter Ella Emhoff’s social media fundraising for Gaza.

Kishkes, Yiddish slang for guts, doesn’t clearly translate to policy. Harris’s marriage to a Jew has given her some authenticity in lighting Hanukkah candles and using the word Shoah for the Holocaust. But it seems clear that she is at least starting in a different place from Biden on both Israel and antisemitism.

“The vice president understands how antisemitism is part of a larger scaffold of hatred and racism,” said Jonathan Jacoby, founder of the Nexus Task Force, a liberal group that lobbies Congress on Israel and antisemitism. “I don’t think it’s a contradictory perspective, she just has a more expansive understanding of hatred and racism.”

READ MORE:

• Kamala Harris’ backers say she understands Jews and Israel. Her critics fear her stance on Gaza. (JTA)
• Doug Emhoff: What would it mean if the first first gentleman is Jewish? (Forward)
• Who is Ella Emhoff? How Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter could affect her run for president (Forward)

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

$36 $500

$120 $180 Other amount