Joe Biden entered the White House pledging to fight antisemitism. He leaves with it at historic levels.
Now the very man who Biden said enabled antisemitism and authoritarianism will succeed him
President Joe Biden speaks onstage during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 19, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
(JTA) — WASHINGTON – April 25, 2019, marked an extraordinary moment in American Jewish history: It was the first time a presidential candidate framed his decision to run around fighting antisemitism.
The candidate was Joe Biden.
At first, Biden hadn’t seemed eager to run for president in 2020. But that changed when Neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, shouting slogans that Biden’s father taught him represented the worst of human nature.
Worse, Trump could not bring himself to unequivocally condemn the marchers and the deadly rally, claiming that among them were “very fine people.”
So Biden placed protecting Jews at the crux of his campaign announcement. He described the marchers as “baring the fangs of racism, chanting the same antisemitic bile heard across Europe in the 1930s” — and then he raised Trump’s reaction to the murder of Heather Heyer, the counter-protester killed in Charlottesville.
“That’s when we heard the words of the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation,” Biden said in the video. He went on to quote the “very fine people” line.
Centering his campaign on concerns for Jewish safety may have been unprecedented for a candidate, but was not unusual for Biden, said William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. In his 50 years of public service, Biden repeatedly brought up the lessons about standing with Jews that his father imparted to him in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“He’s old school,” Daroff said, adding that Biden evinced “an old-school recognition that the Jewish people are in need of friends, and are in need of allies, and that fighting antisemitism is something that needs to be done every day and with every bone in one’s body.”
In office, Biden took a range of actions to fight antisemitism both before and after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel changed the landscape for Jews in the United States and around the world. Biden was the first president to unveil a national strategy to fight antisemitism.
But as he leaves office, his legacy on the issue is mixed: As he departs, documented antisemitic incidents are at historic levels — part of a global surge. And now the very man who Biden said enabled antisemitism and authoritarianism will occupy the White House after him.
“Antisemitism, broader hate and extremism and democracy have been at the core of everything he’s done for the last four years,” said Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a group that has robustly embraced Biden’s strategies to combat extremism. “Perhaps the public conversation needs to better reflect how issues of hate and extremism and democracy have direct daily, real-world impacts on people.”
Almost as soon as he assumed office, Biden tasked the Department of Homeland Security with creating a strategy to track domestic terrorists, including right-wing extremists, reversing Trump’s policies of downplaying such threats.
But many in the Jewish community was not entirely comfortable with Biden’s initial approach of grouping anti-hate measures under one rubric, and there were complaints about jarring moments at a White House summit in September of 2022 that conflated various bigotries, with one speaker likening the event to “church.”
High-profile antisemitic incidents spiked in subsequent months, with the artist known as Ye erupting in a string of antisemitic comments, followed by Trump dining with him and a Holocaust denier. Elon Musk, fresh from his purchase of Twitter, also allowed extremists back onto the platform.
By the end of the same year, Biden seemed to have gotten the message that antisemitism was a unique phenomenon. He tasked Doug Emhoff, the Jewish second gentleman, with chairing a task force to come up with a strategy to combat antisemitism, which he rolled out in May of 2023, just four months before the massacres of Oct. 7, and the wave of domestic antisemitism it spurred.
Sheila Katz, the CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, said the timing was fortuitous: The systems the strategy put in place made the government immediately responsive to the crisis.
“Having that in place before Oct. 7 was necessary for government agencies to start with a plan instead of starting from scratch,” Katz said. “When I would meet alongside other Jewish leaders with the Department of Education or the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security, we had a roadmap that already was committed to by those departments that we got to pull up and say, ‘Where are you on x?’”
One example of the strategy being deployed post-Oct. 7 was the letter the Department of Education sent to educational institutions warning that a failure to adequately address campus antisemitism would cost federal funding, she said. The department has since opened dozens of investigations into complaints of antisemitism at colleges and universities — and closed some of them, with agreements aimed at preventing painful repeats.
By many measures, it did not appear to be enough. Watchdogs and law enforcement reported mounting numbers of antisemitic incidents, and polls showed burgeoning Jewish concerns about antisemitism. The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives appeared to be leading the way in combating antisemitism, with hearings leading to major changes on some campuses, including the removal of presidents at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
Democrats and Biden were hampered in part because key parts of the progressive base — from college students to left-wing activist groups — focused much of their energy on protesting the war in Gaza and Biden’s support for it. Those protests and actions often included displays that many Jewish groups called antisemitic.
Jews across the country said they were alienated by the left, a fissure that also distanced some from Democrats and Biden.
“What has happened since then in American politics has made a lot of our Jewish brothers and sisters start to question the Democratic Party,” Nikki Fried, the Jewish chairwoman of Florida’s state Democratic Party, said in October.
“I hear a lot about the Squad,” she said, referring to a small group of progressive Democrats who are vocally critical of Israel. “I hear a lot about Kamala Harris’ policies, you know, what Joe Biden has or has not done.”
Jewish Democrats were worried, and at a White House Jewish American Heritage Month event in May, peppered top Biden staffers with the concerns they were hearing from around the country.
The White House seemed to be unaware of the degree to which the campus unrest had unsettled Jewish students and their families. Fried would later recall that Vice President Kamala Harris seemed dumbfounded by the revelation that Jews were reeling from campus antisemitism. Soon after, Biden gave a speech denouncing campus antisemitism, while taking care to uphold free speech principles.
Antisemitism became a campaign issue, with Trump and his supporters viewing it as a way to recruit Jewish voters who had long supported Democrats. The Republican Jewish Coalition unveiled an ad focusing on how unhappy “bubbies” were with Biden’s handling of campus antisemitism. A large majority of Jews ended up voting for Harris, but there appears to have been a bit of movement toward Trump among Jewish voters.
Kenneth Marcus, who served as a top civil rights official in the George W. Bush and Trump administrations, lauded Biden for his rhetorical commitment to combating antisemitism, which he said was unprecedented. But he said the strategy fell short. Marcus said Biden failed to institute policies that would stem antisemitism.
“There were times over the last four years, especially in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, when it appeared that Biden officials were at the cusp of taking some significant action, and yet it never really panned out,” Marcus said.
In his final weeks in office, Biden commuted 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates. Among the three still facing the death penalty is the gunman who massacred 11 Jewish worshipers in Pittsburgh in 2018, the worst antisemitic act in American history, based in part on a conspiracy theory echoed by Trump.
Biden’s reasoning was blunt, the White House said. “He believes that America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” it said, “except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder – which is why today’s actions apply to all but those cases.”
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