Harris’ husband is Democratic Jewish star

Democrats are deploying their newest Jewish star, Kamala Harris’ Jewish husband, Douglas Emhoff, to pull Jewish votes.

During a two-hour Florida webinar that contrasted President Donald Trump as less empathetic to Jewish concerns and countered Trump’s pro-Israel policies with claims he makes the country less safe because of his isolationism, Emhoff talked about growing up Jewish and his Jewish involvement today.

The webinar also made clear that Florida remains critical for Jewish Democrats and Republicans. It’s widely held that Trump, who won the state in 2016, can’t secure reelection without its electoral college votes. The Jewish population in the swing state is an estimated 700,000 out of 20 million people.

The night before the webinar, in a Republican Jewish Coalition call, a top adviser to the Trump campaign, Jason Miller, repeatedly said Florida was critical. “Got to make sure we win Florida,” he said. “If you noticed that I probably mentioned I like the state of Florida, we got to win Florida.”

There were plenty of speakers on the Florida Democratic webinar, including the state’s entire Jewish congressional representation, but the star was Emhoff.

There was a lot of Jewish trivia: He went to Cedar Lake, a Jewish camp in New Jersey, and excelled in tennis and soccer before soccer was popular in the United States, he said. He described the three-piece brown velour suit he wore for his bar mitzvah.

On their first date, Emhoff said, Harris “reeled off her Jewish bonafides,” including trips to Israel, fundraising for the Jewish National Fund as a teenager and the fact that her mother worked for the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, where Harris spent her teenage years.

Emhoff, a prominent entertainment lawyer in California, where Harris is currently the Democratic US senator, also spoke of his own Jewish commitment, including his pro bono work with Bet Tzedek, which provides free legal services for the poor.

Emhoff embraced a central theme of the Biden Jewish campaign, and the campaign overall: Trump is unfit to be president in part, he said, because he coddles right-wing extremists.

“We have a president, right now, who has repeatedly used anti-Semitic dog whistles,” Emhoff said. “But worst of all, when marchers in Charlottesville [in 2017] came out of the woods, carrying torches and spewing the same anti-Semitic vile that we heard in the 1930s in Germany, before the Holocaust, this president called some of them ‘very fine people’.”

Personal disgust with Trump was a recurring theme throughout the call. Anthony Blinken, a former top national security official in the Obama-Biden administration and a senior foreign policy adviser to the campaign, said Biden took his children to the Dachau concentration camp when they were old enough to understand the horrors of the Holocaust.

In contrast, Blinken said, “President Trump signed the guestbook at Yad Vashem like he was signing a yearbook, writing, ‘how amazing it was to be here with all my friends’.”

Lauren Alperstein, a lawyer who serves on the board of a number of Jewish groups in south Florida, said it was hard for her to explain Trump to her children.

“It’s been very hard — more so for our son — trying to explain to him what a president should look like, and what a president should be and how a president should act because this president does not embody those values … he does not embody the values of ve’ahavta le’raecha kemocha, you love your neighbor as yourself,” she said.

The call also offered a strategy to push back against Republican attempts to tie Biden and Harris to a cadre of Democratic progressives who are questioning the US Israel relationship, including two — and likely three in the next Congress — who support the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel.

That strategy had three parts, according to people on the call: reject BDS; argue that Trump poses a greater danger to Jews than the left; and make the case that while Trump made radical changes to US policy in line with Israel’s right-wing government, including moving the embassy to Jerusalem, his overarching foreign policy weakens the United States.

Harris, Emhoff said, would appropriately balance defending Israel while making clear the differences she has with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has pledged to annex parts of the West Bank.

“She’ll continue to reject BDS at every turn, denounce efforts to delegitimize Israel and condemn incitement, and she will not hesitate to call out leaders who deny Palestinian rights or threaten unilateral annexation that would effectively cut off the hope of a two-state solution,” he said.

Alperstein said her fears for her children outweighed Israel-related concerns in the present moment. “It shouldn’t have to be that my husband and I are nervous about sending our children to Jewish day school because they’re Jewish with anti-Semitism on the rise,” she said. “Israel is extremely important, OK, and the right of a secure Israel is extremely important, but we also need to vote on all of the other issues that affect us here at home.”

Blinken said Biden would restore the funding that for the Palestinians that Trump has cut, but would also hew to laws that ban US money from reaching Palestinians who have killed and injured Israelis and Americans. 

The tensions inherent in being a pro-Israel Jewish progressive were evident in thia opening prayer by Mark Winer, a religions scholar who lives in Florida:

“Strengthen us oh G-d to combat BDS, the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic virus which infects too many of our erstwhile allies in our battle for the soul of America, without weakening our defense of our own secure Jewish place in this society. May we reach out in fellowship to join with all Americans in fighting the pandemic of racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism which plagues our nation. … Kneel with us, oh G-d, and with the African American athletes who take to their knees in patriotic devotion.”