But Republicans are going to paint her as one.
Kamala Harris is not an anti-Semite. It feels absurd to have to say this. After all, she is married to an actual Jew, and I’m certain he would happily vouch for her. But in the days since she took over Joe Biden’s spot as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, there has been a surge of innuendo that Harris bears a secret antipathy for Jews.
Leave it to Donald Trump to utter the quiet part out loud—he always does. Speaking at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, yesterday, he said that Harris “is totally against the Jewish people.” I’m afraid we are about to live through a political moment that is already reminding me of Barack Obama’s entry onto the national stage, when an entire news cycle could revolve around a photo of him in a Somali turban that supposedly exposed his closeted fundamentalist-Muslim identity.
Before we get to why Harris has been smeared like this and what the political dangers are for her, we can clear up this basic point: Harris has no problem with Jews. She has talked of walking around the Bay Area as a young girl with those blue Jewish National Fund boxes, raising money to plant trees in Israel; she does a killer (and affectionate) imitation of her Brooklyn-born Jewish mother-in-law; she knows how to use the word shofar correctly in a sentence; she even helped her husband, Doug Emhoff, clip a kippah to his head at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I could go on.
These are just her kishkes. But she also has a consistent record of both calling out anti-Semitism and expressing the kind of unambiguous support for Israel that gets a politician invitations to AIPAC conferences every year—she has spoken at two. Harris has condemned again and again hate crimes against Jews and attacks on synagogues. “When Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is anti-Semitism,” she said in 2021, as incidents in which Jewish Americans were the subjects of hate crimes rose steeply. Emhoff made combatting anti-Semitism his signature issue before the war in Gaza, and he has kept at it, clearly with her support, even now that being a proud Jew in the American public eye is a newly fraught proposition—as recently as yesterday, he was fantasizing about putting a mezuzah on the White House.
I have really found nothing in Harris’s record as a senator or as the vice president to make me doubt her Zionist bona fides, whether she chooses to embrace that label or not. For those on the radical left, such as the writer and activist Jeremy Scahill, there is no ambiguity either: Harris is a “hardline” supporter of Israel, he writes, in an article titled “Can Kamala Harris Wipe the Blood off Her Hands?” In 2017, she co-sponsored a Senate resolution that criticized the former Obama administration for being too harsh on Israel at the United Nations. Asked in 2016 about her views on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, Harris said she was deeply opposed to an effort that was “based on the mistaken assumption that Israel is solely to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Since October 7, Harris has supported the ultimate military goal of the Israeli government, saying in March, “Hamas cannot control Gaza, and the threat Hamas poses to the people of Israel must be eliminated.” Just last month, Harris held a White House screening of a documentary about the sexual violence that took place against Israelis on October 7—violence that many pro-Palestinian activists deny even happened.
