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‘Emotional and intense’: Douglas Emhoff’s trip to Poland and Germany brings him back to his Jewish ancestral roots
BERLIN (JTA) — For second gentleman Douglas Emhoff, the final hours of a five-day working trip to Poland and Germany brought everything into focus.
It was here in the underground information center in Germany’s central Holocaust memorial that Emhoff sat down with several survivors, including two who had recently fled war-torn Ukraine.
Sitting in a small circle, they shared their stories. One of them “was saved in the Holocaust as a young baby, settled in Ukraine and then just had to flee again. And she was taken in by Germany,” Emhoff said in remarks immediately following the meeting. “It was a real emotional and intense way to finish the trip.”
The journey, which he undertook with Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, included visits to Krakow, Poland; to the nearby memorial and museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau; and to the Polish village of Emhoff’s ancestors, Gorlice.
It was all intended to feed into the design of a “national action plan against antisemitism” that Emhoff is working on with Lipstadt and others. The second gentleman has made combating Jew hatred his main focus since entering the White House, touring college campuses to talk on the subject and leading events with Jewish organizations.
But this trip, which began on Friday, aligning with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, took Emhoff’s efforts onto the international stage — and brought him back to his ancestral Jewish roots.
Emhoff’s two days in Berlin were a whirlwind. On Monday, he met with U.S. Ambassador to Germany Amy Gutmann, Germany’s commissioner of Jewish life Felix Klein and other leaders. On Tuesday, he and Lipstadt took part in an interfaith roundtable hosted by the Central Council of Jews in Germany, before visiting a historic synagogue in former East Berlin and meeting with members of the community. He also visited three Holocaust memorials in the city center: one dedicated to Sinti and Roma victims of the Nazis, another to homosexual victims, and finally Germany’s massive Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
From left, shown at a meeting in Berlin, Jan. 30, 2023: U.S. antisemitism monitor Deborah Lipstadt, Emhoff, U.S. Ambassador to Germany Amy Gutmann, Germany’s commissioner on Jewish life Felix Klein and Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission Coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life. (U.S. Embassy Berlin)
Speaking this morning to the small gathering of Muslims, Christians and Jews hosted at the Central Council headquarters, Emhoff said he could not help thinking of his grandparents, who had escaped persecution in Poland and settled in the United States.
“They found opportunity and freedom,” he said, “and now, 120 years later, their great-grandchild is the first Jewish spouse of a United States president or vice president, who is working to combat hate and antisemitism. That’s something isn’t it?” he said, as if pinching himself. “It’s a remarkable full circle.”
Abraham Lehrer, Central Council vice president, told the guests that interfaith relations between Jews and Christians are generally good, and that the groups have developed channels of communication “in case of heavy disputes.”
Relations with Muslims function well on the grassroots level, he said, “but it is quite difficult with heads of some organizations, because a lot of them still have connections to antisemitic or antidemocratic organizations.” Participants in the round table commented afterward on the “positive atmosphere.”
“I was very impressed by the young Muslim man [Burak Yilmaz], who is organizing trips for young Muslims to visit Auschwitz,” said Rabbi Szolt Balla, who serves a congregation in Leipzig and is rabbi for the German Armed Forces. “It was a very good and productive thing to meet in this circle,” he added
Emhoff told reporters the purpose of the trip was to share best practices and feed ideas into the “national action plan” that he is working on with Lipstadt, U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Rashad Hussain and White House Liaison to the American Jewish community Shelley Greenspan.
“We are going to put our heads together and talk about what we learned and then put it into the pipeline so we can come out with the most effective national plan,” Emhoff told reporters after the day’s meetings. He added that he would be addressing the United Nations in early February.
Emhoff’s last official act here was his meeting with survivors. He changed his schedule “just in order to meet with them and listen to their stories,” said Rudiger Mahlo, Germany representative of the Conference for Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Sonja Tartakovska, who had survived a Nazi mass shooting operation in her village during World War II, told Emhoff how she had to flee Ukraine last year without a change of clothing. She is one of the Ukrainian Jews whom the Claims Conference brought to Germany last spring, said Mahlo, who took part in the meeting.
The fact that former Holocaust victims were now seeking refuge in Germany was not missed.
Emhoff speaks with 101-year-old Margot Friedländer during a meeting with Holocaust survivors in Berlin, Jan. 31, 2023. (U.S. Embassy Berlin)
“We have been talking about the Holocaust, talking about antisemitism, about violence and oppression and here in Europe all these years later these things are still happening through this unjust, unprovoked war,” Emhoff told reporters after the final meeting of the day.
From people like Tartakovska “you hear these stories of survival. A lot of it was a twist of fate, just some luck. A non-Jewish stranger deciding on a whim to do something, that then led to a life long-lived.”
“I was also struck: One woman” — German Holocaust survivor Margot Friedlaender — “was 101 years old. Imagine living with those memories for 80 years. Those are the kinds of things I take back with me,” Emhoff said.
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DSA racks up wins in Congress as Democratic party shifts on Israel
The Democratic Socialists of America is expected to grow its influence within the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, picking up at least five seats in the House, according to unofficial election results on Tuesday night. The gains mark major progress for the organization that is credited with the rise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a fierce critic of Israel.
Before Tuesday night, the organization had just two members in Congress: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Both are members of the Squad, the group of young, outspoken progressives formed in 2018 that challenged the party’s establishment and criticized U.S. support for Israel.
DSA members Chris Rabb, Donavan McKinney, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and Melat Kiros were projected to win their House seats Tuesday night, preliminary election returns show.
A larger DSA caucus could give progressive Democrats greater leverage to pressure leadership into holding votes on Israel policy, an issue that has divided the party since Oct. 7, 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, with intensifying concern over the war with Iran. The DSA gained influence during a period when Democrats had little power, as the minority in both the House and Senate, to shape the foreign policy of the United States. Regaining control of the House, and potentially the Senate, those divisions will become much harder for party leaders to avoid.
All of the DSA members heading to Congress have described Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide and support cutting off military aid to Israel — positions increasingly held by Democrats outside the DSA as well.
President Trump announced Tuesday that the U.S. will end nearly $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel by the end of the year, while still allowing Israel to buy U.S. weapons. But the national DSA goes further, leading a campaign for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel and passing a 2025 resolution explicitly opposing Zionism.
The victories follow a string of DSA wins over longtime incumbents during the Democratic primaries, buoyed by the victory of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor last June. Two of the DSA candidates that Mamdani endorsed, Avila Chevalier and Valdez, cruised to victory in their heavily blue New York City districts.
Avila Chevalier is a former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist who has repeatedly defended her attendance at a pro-Palestinian rally on Oct. 8, 2023.
Rabb in Philadelphia; McKinney in Detroit, Michigan; and Kiros in Boulder also won comfortably in their heavily blue districts.
Kiros drew condemnation from some Colorado Jews after declining to call the 2025 firebombing of a walk for Gaza hostages in Boulder antisemitic, instead calling it a “political attack” targeting Zionism. The attacker was heard yelling “Free Palestine” as he threw Molotov cocktails, injuring 13 people, including an 82-year-old woman who later died from her injuries.
In California, DSA candidates faced tighter races in the general election, facing off against Democratic incumbents. The nail-biter races were the result of California’s unique primary process, where the top two candidates advance to the general election regardless of party. Several key California races were still too early to call, including two House races featuring DSA candidates and the Los Angeles mayoral election featuring DSA candidate Nithya Raman.
Two other DSA mayoral candidates won Tuesday night, David Morales in Providence, Rhode Island, and Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C.
But the DSA did not win everywhere. In Florida, Republican incumbent Ashley Moody defeated DSA member Angie Nixon Tuesday night, early results show.
Had Nixon won, she would have become the first DSA member in the U.S. Senate. (While Sen. Bernie Sanders has long identified as a democratic socialist, he is not an official DSA member.)
But Moody was widely expected to win the race, leading Nixon by an average of 6 percentage points in polls.
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This Georgia Democrat stood by Israel and criticized her party. She is expected to win another term.
Esther Panitch spent Tuesday evening the way she spends every election night since holding office: on her couch at home in an Atlanta suburb, watching The Campaign, the 2012 comedy in which Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis play rival candidates for Congress who will stoop to anything to win.
It looks likely that the Georgia Democrat will have a third term in the state Georgia House of Representatives, where Panitch has been the only Jewish member since 2023. With 72% of precincts reporting, she is leading 67%-33% over her Republican challenger, Keith Gettmann. She may be joined in the state legislature by some additional Jewish members after Tuesday night’s vote.
Panitch is a pro-Israel Democrat in a party where support for Israel is increasingly contested. She has built her time in office on issues around antisemitism and Holocaust education, and she has criticized her own senator, Jon Ossoff, in public over Israel. Ossoff endorsed her this fall anyway.
Panitch has been warning for years that her party is drifting away from Israel, and she said she’s grateful Georgia’s Democratic leaders haven’t gone along. This summer she felt the pull at home. A local Democratic youth group told her to “mind her own business” after she asked a county party to move a fundraiser from Rosh Hashanah to another date. The Jewish Council of the Democratic Party of Georgia, where she’s first vice chair, condemned the group, and Panitch says the state and county parties did too.
She also survived a primary challenge from her left this spring. Aaron Baker, a fellow Jewish Democrat and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, called her a “DINO,” or Democrat in name only. Panitch won by a 13% margin.
Her complaint about Ossoff goes back to 2024, when he voted for resolutions to block some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, and Panitch criticized him publicly at the time. But she still voted for him in the midterms. “I’m not going to bite my nose to spite my face,” she said.
Ossoff’s Republican opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, is a “non-starter,” she said. Collins has faced scrutiny over a son-in-law who posted antisemitic videos and a former staffer who posted Nazi imagery. He has said he doesn’t share those views. Ossoff was reelected Tuesday.
Laws she’s passed
Much of Panitch’s record in office has been a response to Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Georgia already had a hate crime law, she said, but it didn’t define antisemitism. She co-sponsored the bill that did — adopting a widely used, though controversial, definition — which the governor signed into law. She had been arguing for it before Oct. 7, but her colleagues, she said, “really couldn’t understand that until they saw it on Oct. 8.”
This past session, she co-sponsored a first-in-the-nation measure requiring public schools to disclose foreign funding, which she said grew out of research showing Qatar had funded Fulton County Public Schools and Georgia State University. She also backed a requirement that the state monitor complaints of antisemitism and other discrimination, from public schools through colleges. Previously, she said, parents had complained about incidents, but whether anything happened depended on the principal. A separate bill she led, creating one-stop family justice centers for victims of domestic violence and trafficking, passed unanimously and was signed into law.
The monitoring requirement puts her in the middle of the debate over where criticism of Israel ends and antisemitism begins. Asked whether she considers anti-Zionism antisemitism, Panitch said, “Not all of it. But there’s enough crossover that any of it should be examined.” Her line is a legal one. “They can hate Israel and Jews all they want,” she said. The issue is “if they commit a crime because of it.”
A tree for every critic
She’s also been targeted. On the morning the antisemitism bill was signed into law in January 2024, she discovered a threatening postcard in her mailbox containing antisemitic slurs, including a reference to “gassing the Jews.” A local rabbi who had backed the bill received a similar postcard. The man who sent the cards, Ariel Collazo Ramos, was convicted last fall and sentenced in February to five years in prison, the maximum. Panitch testified at his trial and sentencing.
“Jews have a right to participate in civic life in the United States, just as any other American,” she said, “and I’m not going to allow anybody to stop that.”
She has a lighter response to online critics. In 2024, she was at the University of Georgia for Israel Week, walking a student in a yarmulke to another building so he wouldn’t be alone, when protesters followed and chanted at her. “Esther, Esther, you can’t hide,” she recalled. “We charge you with genocide.”
Her response: Donate a Jewish National Fund tree in Israel in the name of the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and post the receipt online. She has since sent trees in the names of individual trolls and other pro-Palestinian activists. “Okay, you get a tree! You get a tree!” she recalled in her best Oprah Winfrey impersonation. The harassment, she said, “really stopped bothering me after that.”
Her Jewish roots
Panitch grew up in a Jewish household in Miami, where she went to a JCC day camp and later spent a couple of summers at Camp Ramah in Massachusetts. She’s a lifelong member of Hadassah, the third generation of her family in the organization. Her daughter is the fourth. She met her husband on a 1997 trip to Israel organized by the Jewish Federation of Miami, and they married the next year. Their three children went through Camp Judaea in North Carolina.
This summer she toured Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka with a group of teachers on a trip to concentration camps in Poland. They also visited Kielce, a city where survivors who had returned after the war were attacked by a mob in 1946 after a rumor that a Christian boy had been kidnapped. Dozens of Jews were killed.
What stunned her was how deep the roots went. “Jews had been there for 1,000 years before the war,” she said, “and were turned on in the blink of an eye. They were always othered, so I’m not going to allow that to happen in my country.”
She wants to bring that message home. Panitch is a legislative liaison for the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust and plans to push mandatory Holocaust education in her next term, especially given foreign money she believes has been used to create anti-Israel sentiment.
“I want to be able to show students what happens when mobs go after Jews, which is what is starting to happen now,” she said. “Everybody needs to know their history, Jews and non-Jews, and the ugly parts too, because we have to figure out how not to repeat them.”
Criticize Israel as much as you want, she said, but when it’s singled out for criticism “that they wouldn’t hold any other place to,” it can cross into antisemitism. “The result of antisemitism, unchecked, turns into atrocities.”
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Republican Israel supporter Ashley Moody projected to beat DSA candidate Angie Nixon
(JTA) — Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, a supporter of Israel, is projected to beat Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialist of America member, in a special election on Tuesday that could help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
With 96% of the vote counted, Moody won by a 2.7 percentage points. according to Associated Press.
The incumbent, Moody, was formerly the state attorney general, and was appointed to the Senate by Gov. Ron DeSantis in January 2025 after Marco Rubio vacated the seat to become secretary of state.
She was endorsed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and President Donald Trump. She is a staunch supporter of Israel who has said she wants the U.S. to be “the most pro-Israel country in the world.” She also said that she “worked to make Florida the most pro-Israel state in the nation” as attorney general.
She has been critical of pro-Palestinian campus protests, and introduced a bill last year that would “claw back federal funds” when universities “violate students’ civil rights.” Too many “woke schools prioritize support for Hamas over their duty to protect the civil rights of ALL students,” she added.
Moody supported Trump and Rubio’s move to deport green card holders for their activism last year. “It is time for Hamas agitators to go,” she wrote.
Nixon is a progressive state legislator, with a campaign focused on universal healthcare and free childcare. She became a DSA member this year, but was not endorsed by the left-wing political organization. She did draw endorsements from a number of major progressive figures and campaigned alongside Vermont independent Bernie Sanders and former President Barack Obama.
She accuses Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza and opposes sending military aid or American weapons to Israel “at this moment.” In November 2023, she introduced a statewide bill advocating for “de-escalation and cease-fire in the state of Israel and occupied Palestine,” which was defeated 104-2 in the Florida House. She has condemned Hamas and the “violent terrorist attacks” that it committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Nixon’s Israel stance raised questions over whether it would affect her performance among the state’s substantial Jewish minority. Some Jewish Democrats and independents in the state said they were hung up on her Israel views, while others said they are counting on the Democrats flipping the Senate and that Nixon has toned down her harsher talk about Israel.
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