You get the democracy you deserve, but do Jewish Americans deserve Doug Emhoff as the Democrats’ point man on antisemitism?
Emhoff, an amiable entertainment lawyer, is husband to Vice President Kamala Harris. That makes him the first Second Gentleman in American history, and the first Jewish spouse of a President or Vice President. This is not progress, only Progressive.
The Progressives are taking American Jews backwards: pushing them out of the mainstream because they’re seen as heartless capitalists who support the pariah state of Israel.
In the 2000 elections, the Democrats had an observant Jew, Joe Lieberman, as Al Gore’s nominee for Vice President. This year, Harris decided not to select Josh Shapiro, the moderate Democrat governor of the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, as her running mate. John King of CNN tidily summarised the Harris camp’s thinking about Shapiro: “He’s Jewish, there could be some risks in putting him on the ticket.”
Shapiro’s indecent effort to secure the nomination by toning down his pro-Israel record was not enough to win Harris’ support. Instead, she chose Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz, who is, as the Democrats now say of anyone they dislike, weird, not least because his voting record is as far to the left as Harris’s is.
How the swing voters of Pennsylvania feel about the Shapiro snub may determine November’s election. Meanwhile, the Democrats must deal with the feelings of the Jews. This is where the Second Gent comes in.
The Democratic Party is a big tent. As we saw in the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the tent in question is a circus of identitarian self-love. But the “joy” which overflows from the Democrats these days does not extend to Israel and its supporters.
Doug Emhoff is a Hebraic fig leaf, covering not just the obscene aspects of the Democratic left’s street thuggery, but also the Biden-Harris administration’s cynical failure to walk its pro-Israel talk in Israel’s war for survival against the Iranian Axis.
This is a lot to bear, even for a man of Emhoff’s solid stature. Nothing suggests he has the substance. Emhoff isn’t a heavyweight historian like Deborah Lipstadt, the administration’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. He’s an LA lawyer for a firm whose clients have included Al Jazeera and the banking arm of the Palestinian Authority.
Emhoff went through the twin ordeals of Jewish American adolescence, a Reform bar mitzvah and a summer camp. His first wife wasn’t Jewish. It seems that the marriage broke down when he had an affair with their nanny. She wasn’t Jewish, either. Neither are his two children, Ella and Cole.
Ella Emhoff let it be known in 2020 that she is not Jewish. A fashionista and socialist influencer, Emhoff responded to the October 7 massacres by calling on her followers to donate to Unrwa. It’s a free country and all that, but it’s hardly to Doug’s credit in his new gig as First Jew.
He has no expertise in antisemitism, but somehow he’s the politically-correct face of the program in media damage control that is the administration’s “Antisemitism Task Force”.
Readers with long memories and a sick bag will recall that in 2008, Obama’s Jewish supporters assured their fellow Jews that he’d never do a number on Israel because he got it “in his kishkes”. Look how that went.
Doug Emhoff is being deployed for the same reason. We’re told he’s breaking a glass ceiling, but it’s really a glass floor. It’s identity politics all the way down.
Dominic Green is a Contributor to the Wall Street Journal and a Washington Examiner columnist.
