Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the Jewish Democratic Council of America on May 24, 2023. Photo by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images

Halie Soifer August 22, 2024

CHICAGO — Here in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, attendees are elated about the prospect of electing Vice President Kamala Harris as the next President of the United States. For women, it’s past time that we broke the seemingly impenetrable glass ceiling. For Asian and Indian Americans, a Harris victory would ensure that the 47th President of the United States finally represents those woefully underrepresented by the first 46. And for Black Americans, it would ensure that Barack Obama’s historic presidency was not an exception.

For Jewish Americans, Harris’ election to our nation’s highest office would also have a deeper meaning. It’s not just that Doug Emhoff would become the first Jewish spouse of a U.S. president. Harris aligns with our views and values on every issue, including Israel. Her victory would also mean the defeat of former President Donald Trump, who is an antisemite and an aspiring dictator, and has incessantly disparaged millions of American Jews. 

Harris has a long history of taking action to combat antisemitism. In her first few weeks in the Senate, she said, “As someone who’s personally prosecuted hate crime, I also believe that we cannot stand by while antisemitism, hate crime, and bigotry are on the rise.” Her first major legislative accomplishment was her leadership in passing a bipartisan Senate resolution condemning “the rise of hate crimes targeting minority communities, as well as any form of religious or ethnic bias, racism, discrimination, or other forms of hate.”

She has continued to lead on this issue as vice president in President Joe Biden’s administration, which — with Emhoff’s stewardship — developed and implemented the first-ever National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. Harris has been clear that rising antisemitism, including that which has lately emerged on college campuses related to Israel, has no place in this country. 

She has affirmed that “when Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or identity, and when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism, and that is unacceptable.” More recently, she condemned destructive anti-Israel protests in Washington, D.C., making it abundantly clear that she condemns “any individuals associating with the brutal terrorist organization Hamas, which has vowed to annihilate the State of Israel and kill Jews.”

Prior to and since Oct. 7, Harris has made it abundantly clear that Israel has a right to defend itself and that she is unwavering in her commitment to Israel’s security. She played a critical role in the passage of the National Security Supplemental Aid package, which provided $15 billion in aid to Israel, after months of Republican delays and a no vote by Senator JD Vance — now Trump’s running mate. 

Meanwhile, Trump mocked Israel and praised terrorists after Oct. 7, called on Israel to “finish up” the war in Gaza without recognizing the more than 100 hostages who remain in captivity there, and has said he supports transforming U.S. foreign aid, including to Israel, into loans. Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, told The New York Times that “Trump’s support for Israel in the first term is not guaranteed in the second term, because Trump’s positions are made on the basis of what’s good for Donald Trump, not on some coherent theory of national security.”  

Contrast the vice president’s emphatic advocacy for American Jews’ right to live free from violence and harassment to Trump, who has personally harassed millions of American Jews for years. 

Trump has, during this current presidential campaign, repeatedly stated his mantra that any Jew who votes for a Democrat “needs to get their head examined” — only one of his steady drumbeat of deeply offensive remarks that began in 2019, suggesting that all Jews who vote for Democrats are disloyal or uninformed. Trump has said that Jews who support Democrats “hate Israel” and their religion. He accused “liberal Jews” of wanting to “destroy America and Israel,” as part of an ominous and threatening Jewish New Year’s greeting in 2023. 

Trump clearly harbors deep animus toward the vast majority of American Jews — more than 70% of whom identify as Democrats. He continues to spread conspiracy theories about Jewish philanthropist and Democratic donor George Soros, and just yesterday gratuitously labeled Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro a “highly overrated Jewish governor.” Reports indicate that Trump and his allies recently fueled an antisemitic whisper campaign targeting Shapiro amid Harris’s vice presidential selection process.

As the Harris campaign put it today, Trump “consistently denigrates American Jews, elevates Neo-Nazis, and traffics in antisemitic tropes.” Vice President Harris is our best defense against the hate that Trump promotes. 

We saw the results of this hate when Trump was in the White House. His administration saw an exponential rise in the number of antisemitic attacks in the U.S., including the largest massacre of Jewish Americans in the United States at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where the perpetrator was inspired by the conspiratorial white supremacist Great Replacement Theory — which Trump has tacitly endorsed. This was the same antisemitic ideology chanted by neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville in August 2017, whom Trump infamously equated with peaceful protesters, falsely and dangerously identifying “very fine people, on both sides.”

Jewish Americans will never forget that, despite being implored to condemn white supremacy from the 2020 presidential debate stage, Trump pointedly refused to do so. Instead, he instructed a far-right extremist group, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by.” They heeded that call on Jan. 6, 2021, with fatal results.

I worked for Harris in the Senate and traveled with her to Israel in 2017, and I’ve seen firsthand her commitment to Israel’s security and safety, as well as that of the Jewish Americans. She’s demonstrated her commitment to this partnership when it comes to a wide range of issues, including through her staunch support of Israel and ongoing efforts to combat antisemitism. And perhaps most importantly, her election is vital to our security and safety given the grave and growing threat posed by Donald Trump to American Jews.

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