WASHINGTON — Coming down the stairs in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City in 2017, Kamala Harris saw the Western Wall and knew what she had to do.
Harris, then a California senator, reached into her pocket and pulled out a blue kippah and clips she had prepared for the occasion. She told her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, to bend down a bit and fastened the kippah to his head.
Halie Soifer, then Harris’ national security advisor, took a candid photo of the moment, which she says embodied Harris’ relationship with the Jewish community: The senator knew what to expect at a moment of Jewish significance.
“She prepared for it because she knew it would be meaningful for Doug,” said Soifer, who is now the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “Part of the reason that trip was so special for both of them was because it was his first time in Israel.” The trip was Harris’ third time in the country.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks on the 59th commemoration of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ Selma bridge crossing in Selma, Alabama, March 3, 2024. (Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
Harris went on to become vice president and has now been catapulted to running for the country’s highest office after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed her.
Over the course of her life and career, she has been surrounded by Jews, from her schoolmates to her colleagues to her closest family members. That background has given Harris, 59, an easy familiarity with Jewish spaces, say those who have interacted with her. She has also encouraged Emhoff to embrace his Jewish identity as the second gentleman; for the first time, mezuzahs have been installed at the vice presidential residence, and Emhoff has taken a leading role in the administration’s efforts to fight antisemitism.
But Harris has also stirred concerns among some pro-Israel Jews. She has staked out positions on Israel’s war with Hamas, and the student protests against it, that are to Biden’s left and that are sympathetic to some of the war’s strongest critics.
Shmuel Rosner, an Israeli author and commentator, noted that Harris’ ascendance marks a generational departure from Biden — a man who has demonstrated a deep and abiding affection for Israel since the 1970s even amid criticism.
“The Americans have changed and we have changed,” he wrote on X on Monday. Referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his predecessor Menachem Begin, Rosner added, “Harris is not Biden, and Netanyahu is also not Begin. Her party is not Biden’s party.”
Harris’ Jewish supporters say her Jewish knowledge showed on the 2017 Israel trip. In her entry in the visitor’s book at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, she said she was “devastated by the silent testimonies of those who died in the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for the Holocaust not commonly used outside the Jewish community.
Kamala Harris and Douglas Emhoff pose near the Western Wall, Jerusalem, November 2017. (Halie Soifer)
It showed, they said, in her references in a 2017 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “those Jewish National Fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel,” when she was a child in the Bay Area. And it showed, they said, in the pitch-perfect impression she made of her Jewish New Jersey mother-in-law, Barb, in an appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show” in April.
“She puts my face in her two hands and she looks at me and says, ‘Look at you! You’re prettier than you are on TV!’” Harris said, a story she has told multiple times.
More substantively, said Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a national Jewish community relations body, Harris is in lockstep with Emhoff in what has become his most prominent role, chairing a task force that developed the Biden administration’s strategy to counter antisemitism.
“It’s hard to draw a line between the vice president and the second gentleman when it comes to their engagement on some of these issues because they have been so deeply coordinated,” she said. “If you think about the Rosh Hashanah at their home, their remarks were so complementary, because they’re both so deeply engaged in this work.”
At the event last September that Spitalnick was referencing, Emhoff gave a speech outlining progress on implementing the plan to combat antisemitism, which had been launched in May 2023. Harris followed with remarks about why the work was critical.
“We are being presented with a wake up call, the blast of the shofar,” she said, referring to the ram’s horn blasted during the High Holidays. “We are dealing with very powerful forces that are attempting to wage what I think is a full-on attack against hard-won freedoms, liberty.”
In calling for attention to antisemitism and either biases, Harris has said that she often focused on hate crimes when she was a prosecutor and then state attorney general in California. She has also been the lead administration spokesperson on another issue that, polls show, animates Jewish voters: combating abortion restrictions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to repeal Roe v. Wade.
But when it comes to Israel, her detractors on the right see her as insufficiently supportive of the military campaign against Hamas and closer to the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, which has become increasingly critical of Israel. Perhaps ironically, critics of Israel on the left share that assessment of Harris — but see it as a positive.
Both have pointed to a speech Harris gave in March where she called for an “immediate ceasefire” in the conflict for at least six weeks to pave the way for a release of Israeli hostages. Biden had not used the same phrase to call for a truce.
“Biden made many mistakes regarding Israel, but he is miles ahead of Harris in terms of support for Israel,” David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel under the Trump administration, told The Jerusalem Post. “She is on the fringe of the progressive wing of the party, which sympathizes more with the Palestinian cause.”
Lily Greenberg Call, who was the first Jewish staffer to quit the Biden administration to protest its backing for Israel and who worked for Harris’ unsuccessful presidential run in 2020, said she was hopeful Harris would scale back Biden’s pro-Israel policy.
“She was the first person in the administration to use the word ceasefire,” Greenberg Call said in an interview. “I am hopeful, trying not to be too optimistic, because she does have ties to AIPAC, but she is in a better position to listen to a majority of Democratic voters who want a lasting ceasefire/hostage exchange. I also think she’s serious about fighting authoritarianism at home. She needs to fight it abroad. We can’t be funding it in Israel while trying to fight it here.”
Harris’ backers say she understands Israel’s security needs. On the 2017 visit to the country, Soifer recalled her viewing Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and its cybersecurity capabilities.
Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, a Jewish Democratic donor and longtime pro-Israel advocate, said Harris had sustained relations established on that trip, especially with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who was then the parliamentary opposition leader. They share an interest in climate issues.
“I was with her” in 2023 “when she made an announcement of a $70 million deal between Israel and America to work on climate change,” Laszlo Mizrahi said. “I think she’s personally spoken with President Herzog more than a half dozen times.”
Laszlo Mizrahi noted Harris recently screened a documentary on the sexual violence that Hamas perpetrated on Oct. 7, when its terrorists raided Israel, launching the current war. “She came out very, very strongly” against some pro-Palestinian activists denying the rape accounts, Laszlo Mizrahi said. At the screening, Harris said, “We cannot look away.”
Just months after Harris joined the Senate in 2017, one of her first speeches was to AIPAC, where she said her first act as a senator was introducing a resolution that condemned a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel.
Her sponsorship separated her from the just-departed Obama administration, which had allowed the Security Council to pass the resolution. Another sign of her cultivating AIPAC was that she declined the endorsement of J Street, the liberal Israel lobby. (This year, J Street has endorsed Harris for president.)
“I believe that a resolution to this conflict cannot be imposed. It must be agreed upon by the parties themselves. Peace can only come through a reconciliation of differences and that can only happen at the negotiating table,” Harris told AIPAC. “I believe that when any organization delegitimizes Israel, we must stand up and speak out for Israel to be treated equally.”
Israeli officials worry that Harris has changed, pointing to her March speech, where she appeared to principally blame Israel for difficulties in delivering humanitarian aid to Palestinians. The takeaway, Israeli insiders say, is that she is more susceptible than Biden to pressures from party progressives who are increasingly hostile to Israel.
“No excuses,” Harris said in the speech. “They must open new border crossings. They must not impose any unnecessary restrictions on the delivery of aid. They must ensure humanitarian personnel, sites, and convoys are not targeted.”
Harris’ critics also take issue with sympathy she’s evinced for the nationwide student protests against the Gaza war which, Jewish students said, created a hostile atmosphere for them and saw cases of antisemitic harassment.
“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.”
On Monday, the right-leaning Zionist Organization of America condemned Harris for the remark. ZOA president Morton Klein said it was “unconscionable” that Harris would reject the statements but not any actions taken by protesters, which Jewish groups and students said had at times veered into violence and intimidation.
Discussing the recent protests in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Harris did condemn some campus protest activities, saying that when she was a prosecutor, she would tell police, “If there’s vandalism, I’m charging them. If there’s violence, I’m charging them, you can be sure.”
Harris’s backers say they are ready for the waves of opposition research that Republicans will deploy in trying to peel off the overwhelming Jewish majorities that have long voted for Democrats. Laszlo Mizrahi said the Jewish donors and fundraisers she knew were relieved at Harris’s elevation after weeks of anxiously wondering whether Biden would step down.
“We’ve moved from agonizing to organizing,” she said.
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