Lauren Holtzblatt, a rabbi in Washington, DC, caused outrage at her synagogue earlier this month when she declared that American Jews need to elect Kamala Harris as president of the United States to comply with “sacred texts”.
She told Harris supporters at a Jewish Democratic Council of America meeting held on Zoom: “I could tell you that we need to elect Vice-President Kamala Harris because as Jews our sacred texts tell us we need to build a world where we feed the hungry, where we care for the sick, where we love the stranger, where we guard and nurture this planet. Those are her values. That is what her policies seek to achieve.”
Members of the influential Adas Israel congregation reacted furiously. Telling congregants to vote in a certain way was “frankly insulting,” said one. Tying this instruction to “sacred texts,” said others, was “at best simplistic” and “easily rebutted with myriad other examples from scripture”.
All true, and doubtless a dismal reflection on the standard of Holtzblatt’s religious credentials. But there are other issues.
Earlier this month, speaking to representatives of the “Uncommitted” movement — the most extreme anti-Israel and pro-Hamas faction of the Democratic Party — Harris reportedly said she was “open” to an arms embargo against Israel. This while the Jewish state is fighting for its life on seven fronts against genocidal Iran and its proxies.
Harris has fuelled the current tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred by recycling the lies and blood libels against Israel that have been spread by Hamas and its western stooges for the past ten months. Ignoring the reality of plentiful food supplies in Gaza and the thefts of aid by Hamas, she accused Israel of causing starvation there so that families were “eating leaves and animal feed” and children were “dying from malnutrition and dehydration”.
In an attempt to court votes among the Muslim voters of Dearborn, Michigan, she met the town’s radical mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, who the day after the October 7 pogrom tweeted: “Israel’s decades of illegal military occupation and imprisonment of Gaza make peace impossible and tragic violence inevitable.”
Hammoud had also spoken of Democratic Party donors who “stuff your pockets with money,” apparently recycling the antisemitic trope about Jews paying for congressional support for Israel.
Even more disturbing is Harris’s apparent tolerance for the Iranian regime. In January 2020, she helped push through the House of Representatives the No War Against Iran Act to prevent any money from being used for unauthorised military action against Iran. She also has a close relationship with members of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which reportedly collaborates with Tehran.
Worse, a congressional investigation has been opened into links between Harris’s National Security Advisor Philip Gordon and Ariane Tabatabai, a Pentagon staffer who is reportedly an Iranian agent of influence tied to a network of experts in the Beltway pushing the interests of the Iranian regime.
Tabatabai was first infiltrated into the Biden administration in 2021 by Robert Malley. He was the point man on Iran under both the Obama and Biden administrations until he was placed on leave last year following the (still unexplained) suspension of his security clearance.
Gordon was the co-author with Tabatabai of at least three opinion pieces that lawmakers said had been “blatantly promoting the Iranian regime’s perspective and interests” by claiming that sanctions against Iran would create “catastrophe” and cause Tehran to “lash out”.
Despite the antisemitism on display around this week’s Democratic convention, both from the pro-Hamas mobs in the streets and the pressure on Jewish groups that were forced to hold their meetings at secret locations in Chicago, Harris hasn’t uttered a word of condemnation.
This is hardly surprising. Her response to the antisemitism that exploded across America after October 7 was to announce: “As the result of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, we have seen an uptick in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and Islamophobic incidents across America.”
As pro-Hamas, virulently anti-Zionist students wrought havoc on campus, Harris commented: “They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”
Now Harris has appointed her former adviser Nasrina Bargzie to “lead outreach to Muslim and Arab voters”. Bargzie is a longstanding anti-Israel activist from Students for Justice in Palestine. She helped stoke antisemitism on campus and even argued at the UN against the civil rights of Jewish students, accusing them of “organised legal bullying” for using the law to demand that universities protect Jewish students.
Harris’s pick as “liaison” to the Jewish community, Ilan Goldenberg, is no less vicious. Goldenberg has spearheaded the defamatory and unjust effort to hunt down and sanction Israelis who the Biden-Harris administration has decided are “right-wing crazies” and therefore must be treated as pariahs — a fate that the administration declines to impose on Palestinians who murder Israelis.
As a member of the Obama administration, Goldenberg was a vocal proponent of the 2015 Iran deal that would have legitimised Iranian nuclear weapons after a short delay. He opposed the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the US embassy’s move to Jerusalem; he opposed recognising Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights; and he opposed the Taylor Force Act cutting off aid to the Palestinian Authority over “pay-for-slay”.
Contrary to Holtzblatt’s strictures, American Jews can be forgiven for being skeptical of Harris’s views on Israel and the Jewish people.
Tragically, however, Holtzblatt was speaking for too many American Jews, who believe that the “social justice” agenda embodies the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, or “repair of the world”.
Holtzblatt wasn’t wrong that compassion and respect for the natural world are Jewish values. But these are also values prized by those of other faiths or none. When dislocated from Judaism, they are no more than Kumbaya values— and so the “intersectional” social-justice agenda, which actually repudiates Jewish principles, has turned into a weapon against Israel and the Jewish people.
Jewish values are fundamentally based on moral responsibility. The social-justice agenda, by contrast, dispenses with moral responsibility altogether for an entire “victim” class based on race and gender. Those people are deemed not to be responsible for their actions, whose bad effects are blamed instead on their supposed “oppressors” — notably white people, men and Jews.
Since moral choice defines what is to be human, the social-justice agenda is thus the quintessence of racial and dehumanising bigotry against that supposed “victim” class. It stands for a culture of resentment and grievance that traps the poor permanently in poverty and disadvantage, promotes division and hatred, and is a dagger in the heart of Jewish values and identity.
Harris is, therefore, the anti-Jewish candidate. To disguise this, she is cynically recruiting anti-Israel Jews like Goldenberg to her team. She is also deploying what she presumably regards as her biggest weapon of deception: her husband, Doug Emhoff.
In a cheesy address at the convention, Emhoff played his Jewish card. He said Harris had helped him connect more deeply to his Jewish faith; she accompanied him to synagogue during the high holidays; and she made “a mean brisket” for Passover that “brings me right back to my grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn; you know, the one with the plastic-covered couches.”
This is aimed at persuading those who think that Jewish identity is about brisket, sepia-colored memories of booba in Brooklyn and twice-a-year synagogue visits that Harris has the interests of the Jewish people at heart.
In fact, Emhoff has a starring role in a circus of deceit being used to launder a viciously anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agenda. There are sacred texts explaining that, too.