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Kamala Harris is No Friend to Israel
By HENRY SREBRNIK A mere days after the Democratic Party leaders pushed President Joe Biden out the door, Kamala Harris, until then a virtual nonentity, was suddenly recast by the so-called “legacy media,” acting in complete lock-step, as a wunderkind bringing the politics of “joy” to America.
That was no surprise. She is a creature of the Democratic Party left and its journalistic enablers, themselves beholden to a woke progressive ideology. And this includes an antipathy – if not worse – to Israel.
For many American Jews, the prospect of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as a running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris prompted elation. He was clearly the candidate who could help the party bring back worried Jewish voters. But not so fast!
Why did Harris go with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a man who can’t deliver a swing state, over a young and glib governor who can? There’s only one reason: Jews are no longer allowed on the Democratic presidential ticket. Shapiro is, after all, a “Zionist,” and that wouldn’t do.
Efforts by left-wing and pro-Palestinian activists to derail Shapiro’s nomination – some called him “Genocide Josh” — worked, and it told us just where Harris stood as she made the first significant choice of her candidacy.
The left attacked Shapiro, considering him too sympathetic to Israel. Heeding their warning, she preferred a bland Minnesota liberal governor who will help her far less.
Progressive Democrats were elated. CNN senior political commentator Van Jones said “anti-Jewish bias” may have played a part in the selection of Walz and warned that “antisemitism has gotten marbled into this party.”
Remarked Micah Lasher, a New York City Democrat who is running for that state’s legislature, “There was an inescapable sense the selection had been made into a referendum over Israel.”
We all remember her egregious insult to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed the U.S. Senate July 24, an event Harris boycotted. She instead spoke to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority in Indianapolis.
“It is unconscionable to see Vice President Kamala Harris shirk her duties as president of the Senate and boycott this historic event,” stated Victoria Coates, vice president of the Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. “If we can’t stand with Israel now, when can we?”
“I see you. I hear you,” Harris told pro-Hamas demonstrators in Washington during Netanyahu’s visit, as they burned American flags and assaulted police.
On August 7 Harris and Walz met with the leaders of the Uncommitted National Movement in Michigan, a state with a large Arab American population. This is the group that mobilized more than 100,000 people to withhold their votes from President Biden in the Michigan primary last February over his support for Israel.
Founder Layla Elabed reported that Harris “expressed an openness” to meeting with them to discuss an arms embargo against the Jewish state. “Michigan voters right now want a way to support you, but we can’t do that without a policy change that saves lives in Gaza right now,” she told Harris. “Will you meet with us to talk about an arms embargo?”
Elabed explained that Harris wasn’t agreeing to an arms embargo but was open to discussing one “that will save lives now in Gaza and hopefully get us to a point where we can put our support” behind Harris. At a rally in Arizona August 9, Harris told pro-Palestinian demonstrators that “I respect your voices.”
Harris’s presidential campaign subsequently stated that she has “prioritized engaging with Arab, Muslim and Palestinian community members and others regarding the war in Gaza.” She herself had maintained that “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”
All this led to pushback among some Israel supporters. “Kamala Harris won’t speak with the press. But she will speak with pro-Hamas radicals and suggest she’s open to a full arms embargo against Israel,” Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton stated. “Floating an arms embargo against Israel to pro-Hamas activists is disgraceful,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served in the Trump administration, added.
“If the group in line with Harris was pro-life and asked for a meeting about banning abortion, she would forcefully say ‘no.’ Don’t tell me it means nothing she said she’s open to an arms embargo on Israel when radical Hamasniks got in line,” declared Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
In an interview with the far-left Nation magazine, “Is Kamala the One?”, published July 8, she had already indicated her sympathy for the young people who had mobilized against the war in Gaza and occupied university campuses across the country.
“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. 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.”
The Biden administration has assembled an interagency team tasked with finding Israeli individuals and groups to sanction, in order to weaken if not topple Netanyahu.
The International Economics Directorate at the National Security Council (NSC) leads the effort. Ilan Goldenberg, who has now become Harris’ liaison to the Jewish community, has played a very enthusiastic role.
Goldenberg, who has served as Harris’s adviser on Middle East issues, has been an acerbic critic of both Netanyahu and the Palestinian leadership.
All this demonstrates that Harris is no friend of Israel. To take another example, her Middle East guru, Philip Gordon, who has served as Harris’s foreign policy adviser since she ran for the White House in 2020, sees and hears no evil emanating from Iran.
Republicans are already demanding the vice president answer why Gordon wrote a string of 2020 opinion pieces together with a Pentagon official, Ariane Tabatabai, who was tied last year to an Iranian government-backed initiative tasked with selling the 2015 nuclear deal to the American public.
“Before joining your office, Mr. Gordon co-authored at least three opinion pieces with Ms. Tabatabai blatantly promoting the Iranian regime’s perspective and interests,” Cotton and New York Representative Elise Stefanik wrote Harris on July 31.
Gordon has argued that the easing of economic sanctions could have allowed Iranian businesses and civil society to better integrate internationally and potentially moderate Tehran’s clerics. He was among the most vocal Democratic critics of former President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull the U.S. out of that landmark nuclear agreement.
But critics have maintained that the loosening of sanctions on Iran has provided Tehran with billions of dollars to fund its terror proxies across the Mideast, leading, among other things, to the Hamas and Hezbollah attacks on Israel, as well as providing the Houthis in Yemen with weapons to strangle Red Sea shipping.
Cotton and Stefanik, in their letter to Harris, asked if Gordon and Tabatabai purposefully spread Iranian disinformation to relieve U.S. pressure on Tehran’s theocratic rulers. “Did you request further investigation into Mr. Gordon when Ms. Tabatabai’s connections to the Iranian Foreign Ministry were revealed in September 2023? Did Mr. Gordon admit and report his ties to this individual?” they wrote. Harris did not reply.
Yet there are Jews who have eyes yet cannot see, so wedded are they to the Democrats. It’s become their ersatz religion. Not long ago the Charlottetown Jewish community hosted a mid-summer event on a beautiful day, which included many of the American summer residents. I was talking to an older man from Massachusetts who said he will (as usual) vote for the Democrat.
I suggested that it should be impossible for any Jew to vote for Harris after she went off to a sorority event in Indiana in July when the prime minister of the embattled Jewish state, suffering a traumatic loss last October and fighting for its survival today, spoke to the United States Senate, where she normally serves as presiding officer. Such a slap in the face would not have been administered to any other head of government.
And not liking Benjamin Netanyahu is no excuse. Would this man not have supported Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill during the Second World War, no matter what he thought of them? Would he have thought Britain and the United States were not worth defending, due to some of their actions during the war? Such excuses really ring hollow. I can understand why Harris favours the Palestinians, both for pragmatic reasons — there are more Muslim votes than Jewish ones — and ideological ones — progressive woke ideology — but do Jews have to go along with this?
(Yes, we know Harris has a Jewish husband. But this is a man who has had little concern with Judaism in his life. His first wife was non-Jewish and neither are his daughters; indeed, one supports anti-Israel protests. A Hollywood entertainment lawyer, he has only now been trotted out as a supposed expert on anti-Semitism, with absolutely no qualifications, so I doubt too many Jews are impressed.)
“Jews for Kamala are Living in Denial,” wrote American playwright, film director, and screenwriter David Mamet on August 9 on the website UnHerd. “Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that, under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. And yet American Jews will support her.” We do live in strange times.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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At long last, a TV show captures the experience of multi-racial Jewish families like mine
The new CBS television series Boston Blue has achieved what I long thought impossible — something close to an accurate portrayal of a multi-racial Jewish-American family.
The show, which quietly debuted last month as a spinoff of the hit series Blue Bloods, centers around the Silver family — a clan of police officers and elected officials helping to maintain safety and order across Beantown. They include siblings Lena, who is Black, Sarah, who is white, and Jonah, who is bi-racial.
“We’re just one big happy kinda confusing family,” Lena declares in the pilot episode, as she explains that her mother married Sarah’s father — with Jonah arriving shortly thereafter. And by establishing the Silver family tree so early on, Boston Blue softens the audience up for its real wild-card: The Silvers are all loudly, proudly and unapologetically Jewish.
Their family reminds me of my own. And I think the show got just about everything about our experience right.
In the pilot episode, Detective Danny Reagan (Blue Bloods veteran Donny Wahlberg) arrives in Boston to care for his injured son — who happens to be Jonah Silver’s partner — and is invited by family matriarch, District Attorney Mae Silver, to the type of “family dinner” made famous by Reagan’s own family on Blue Bloods.
Which is how Reagan unexpectedly finds himself at a Shabbat dinner.
When Mae married Sarah’s father — District Judge Ben Silver — she and Lena converted to Judaism, Reagan learns. Jonah was raised in the faith. But Judge Silver was killed a year earlier, leaving Mae’s father, Rev. Edwin Peters, as the de-factor paterfamilias — a Black pastor at one of Boston’s oldest Black churches, kippah-clad and leading a family of Jews as they light Shabbat candles and recite traditional prayers.
It might all seem a bit far-fetched. Unless you know my own family.
We have white Jews, Black pastors, Asian uncles, Latino ex-husbands and mixed-race Jewish twins — that would be my sister and I. Separated on both coasts, it’s been awhile since we all came together for Shabbat like the Silvers. But if we did, our gathering would look a lot like theirs — minus the mansion on Beacon Hill.
This is what makes Boston Blue so refreshing and unexpected. The Silvers’ Jewishness never feels confrontational or contrived.
There are close to 1 million “Jews-of-color” in the United States today, but Boston Blue accurately understands that the family would still be an enigma to most American viewers. But rather than dwell on this potential narrative hiccup, the show’s writers cannily deployed it as a narrative device instead. These are folks who understand they must often explain their unique family dynamics, but ultimately have nothing to prove. They are both confident and casual in their faith.
As a Jew whom many other Jews often fail to recognize as one of their own, I’ve too often felt I’m not allowed to just be Jewish. So it thrills me to see the Silvers so matter-of-fact and well-adjusted in their Judaism — even if it’s only onscreen.
Two years after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent war with Hamas in Gaza, I went into Boston Blue worried about how Israel, antisemitism, Zionism and anti-Zionism might unfold within the show. Owing to the burdens of identity politics and intersectionality, Jews of color are often tasked with bridge-building amid these fractious and conflicted arenas.
Would they be forced to do the same on TV?
Former Law and Order star Ari’el Stachel — whose Israeli father is of Yemenite heritage — speaks of this duty in his new one-man show Other, now playing in New York. Stachel’s parents are both Jewish. But owing to his darker skin, he possesses a fluency in the optics of ethnicity that often sees him forced to field questions about cross-cultural discourse — even when, like me, he so often wishes the askers would just leave him alone.
I think Stachel would be satisfied by Boston Blue, whose showrunners aptly decided to keep war and hate away from the Shabbat table. Rather than try to shoe-horn the current political climate into the narrative, they avoided it all together. I, for one, was relieved: it’s a gift to see a family like mine onscreen, just being together, without being forced to try and solve all our myriad cultural problems at the same time.
I’ve always been leery of the entire concept of “Jews of color”; I worry it can impede us from understanding that all Jews are equally Jewish. So I was nervous heading into Boston Blue. For so long, so many in Hollywood have gotten our stories wrong at best, and been downright offensive at worst. They’ve tokenized and politicized and fetishized our experiences, while failing to actually humanize families like the Silvers and my own. But Boston Blue got it right — and it’s a step, long overdue, in the right direction.
The post At long last, a TV show captures the experience of multi-racial Jewish families like mine appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani: Israel immigration event at NY synagogue misused ‘sacred space’
(JTA) — Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s team has responded to a protest targeting an event promoting migration to Israel at an Upper East Side synagogue on Wednesday night, suggesting that the event was an inappropriate use of a “sacred space.”
The protest was organized by a group called Palestinian Assembly for Liberation has drawn allegations of antisemitism from Jewish leaders in the city. During it, participants shouted phrases including “globalize the intifada” and “death to the IDF” as well as insults toward pro-Israel counter-protesters like “f—king Jewish pricks,” according to reports from the scene. Police separated the protesters and counter-protesters but did not halt the demonstration.
“The Mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so,” Mamdani’s press secretary, Dora Pekec, said in a statement Thursday afternoon.
She went on, “He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
Pekec did not offer further comments about whether or why Mamdani believed the event at Park East Synagogue, a prominent Orthodox congregation, violated international law.
The event was organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, the nonprofit that facilitates immigration to Israel for North American Jews. The organization bills its open house events as a chance to “get your questions answered, learn about the process, and discover what life in Israel could look like for you and your family.”
The group is considered a semi-governmental agency in Israel, receiving funding from the Israeli government and works closely with its ministries. It does not assign immigrants to particular communities, but has showcased West Bank settlements — which most of the world, though not Israel or the United States, considers illegal under international law — in events and on its website as possible destinations for new immigrants. (Previous protests in New York and beyond have targeted events at synagogues advertising real estate for sale in the West Bank.)
The organizing group suggested that all of the Jews who have moved to Israel with Nefesh B’Nefesh’s support are “settlers,” a term that some pro-Palestinian activists apply to all Israelis, not just those living in the West Bank.
“Nefesh b Nefesh is an affiliate of the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency for Israel, mainly responsible for the recruitment of settlers to Palestine from North America. Since 2003, they have recruited over 80,000 settlers of which over 13,000 served in the IOF,” Palestinian Assembly for Liberation said in an Instagram post advertising its demonstration, using an acronym by which anti-Israel activists refer to the Israeli army as the “Israel Occupation Forces.” It also called El Al “Genocide Settler Airlines.”
The demonstration is providing an early window into how Mamdani’s long- and deeply held pro-Palestinian views might influence his leadership of the city.
As a state Assemblyman, he sponsored legislation aimed at blocking nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank that some, including critics of the settlement movement, decried as casting an overly broad net.
During the campaign, he initially declined to condemn the protest phrase “globalize the intifada,” drawing allegations of antisemitism. He later shifted to say that he would “discourage” the phrase’s use in New York City, saying that he had learned from a rabbi that many Jews interpret it as a call to violence against them.
Now, Mamdani’s response to the Park East demonstration offers a stark contrast to two robust condemnations of antisemitism he has offered up since being elected, after a swastika was painted on a Brooklyn yeshiva and after the words “F–k Jews” were painted on a Brooklyn sidewalk. Both times, he quickly offered a full-throated denunciation on social media.
This time, even as prominent Jewish voices in the city alleged antisemitism on the part of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, Mamdani did not make a public comment himself. His office’s statement did not address allegations of antisemitism.
Mayor Eric Adams, who is in Uzbekistan after a visit to Israel this week, said in a statement that he planned to visit Park East upon his return to the city. Calling the rhetoric shouted there “desecration,” he suggested that the protest augured a grim future for the city under Mamdani.
“Today it’s a synagogue. Tomorrow it’s a church or a mosque. They come for me today and you tomorrow,” Adams tweeted. “We cannot hand this city over to radicals.”
The event came the same day that Mamdani announced that Adams’ police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, would stay on once he becomes mayor. Tisch, who is Jewish, has previously criticized the conduct of pro-Palestinian protesters in the city.
Rabbi Marc Schneier, who has been staunchly critical of Mamdani and whose father is the longtime senior rabbi at Park East Synagogue, said he was distressed by how the police allowed the confrontation to unfold.
“What I find most disturbing is that the police, who knew about this protest a day in advance, did not arrange for the protesters to be moved to either Third or Lexington Avenues,” he said. “Instead, they allowed the protesters to be right in front of the synagogue, which put members of the community at risk.”
One of the demonstrators repeatedly shouted about the Nefesh B’Nefesh event attendees, “We need to make them scared,” according to video from the scene.
“This kind of intimidation of Jewish New Yorkers is reprehensible and unacceptable,” tweeted Mark Levine, the Jewish comptroller-elect. “No house of worship, of any faith, should be subjected to this.”
Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, decried the demonstration as “reprehensible.”
“It is not a violation of any law, international or otherwise, for Jews to gather in a synagogue or immigrate to Israel,” he said.
“Using violent rhetoric and hurling antisemitic insults in front of a crowded synagogue was a direct threat to our community’s safety,” he added. “JCRC-NY reached out to city officials and we have confidence that the NYPD will thoroughly investigate this serious matter. No one should ever have to fear entering or leaving their house of worship and that includes our Jewish neighbors. We stand with the Park East community and with all New Yorkers who reject hate.”
In a statement from a spokesperson, UJA-Federation New York said they were “outraged by the demonstration outside Park East Synagogue.”
“We’ve been in contact with our partners at the NYPD, and they are taking this matter very seriously,” the statement reads. “Calls to ‘globalize the intifada’ and ‘death to the IDF’ are not political statements—they are incitements to violence against Jewish people. Every leader must denounce this heinous language, and the choice to target a house of worship makes it especially vile.”
The post Mamdani: Israel immigration event at NY synagogue misused ‘sacred space’ appeared first on The Forward.
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John Fetterman Says Saudi Arabia Should Join Abraham Accords in Exchange for F-35 Fighter Jets From US
US Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) gives an interview in his office in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, Jan. 18, 2024. Photo: Rod Lamkey / CNP/Sipa USA for NY Post via Reuters Connect
US Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) told The Algemeiner that Saudi Arabia should officially normalize relations with Israel in order to receive F-35 fighter jets from the United States.
In comments made on Wednesday, Fetterman signaled that he would support Saudi Arabia purchasing the premier American fighter jet in exchange for an agreement to join the Abraham Accords, a series of US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states. The senator argued that Riyadh agreeing to establish diplomatic relations with Israel could help usher in an era of peace and stability across the Middle East.
“I do think it would be a significant breakthrough if they joined the Abraham Accords for that,” Fetterman, a staunch supporter of Israel, said when asked by The Algemeiner for his thoughts on Saudi Arabia potentially receiving the F-35 fighter jet.
Saudi Arabia does not officially recognize the state of Israel, although in recent years the two countries have increasingly cooperated behind closed doors.
“I hope that some peace emerges, and now I think there’s a way forward that might not [involve] a Democratic president,” said Fetterman, a Democrat known to buck much of his own party on various policy issues. “But I’m going to fully support that.”
The senator added that he will “always follow Israel through their security.”
US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met for talks in Washington, DC this week to deepen US-Saudi ties across a range of areas. While at the White House, bin Salman promised to increase his country’s US investment to $1 trillion from a $600 billion pledge he made when Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May.
The two men also reached deals on civil nuclear energy, critical minerals, and AI technology while agreeing to a sweeping defense cooperation pact. They discussed the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, with the kingdom reportedly looking to buy as many as 48 in what would be a multibillion-dollar deal.
Trump said earlier this week that he plans to greenlight the sale. According to the White House, he “approved a major defense sale package, including future F-35 deliveries, which strengthens the US defense industrial base and ensures Saudi Arabia continues to buy American.” However, no further details were provided about the number of jets or the timeframe for purchasing them.
If the sale goes through, it will be a policy shift for Washington, which primarily sells the F-35 to formal military allies, such as NATO members or Japan. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has the elite fighter jets, in accordance with longstanding bipartisan policy for US administrations and the Congress to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” in the region. Saudi Arabia’s acquiring them would at least somewhat change the military balance of power.
However, Israel has further enhanced its F-35s after purchase with superior features such as advanced weapons systems and electronic warfare equipment that the US has sought to incorporate. US officials have said the Saudi jets will not have these enhancements found in Israel’s F-35 fighters.
Despite the wave of deals, Saudi Arabia did not join the Abraham Accords, a key goal of the Trump administration. Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, said during his visit to Washington that Riyadh wanted official ties with Israel but that such a step would require actionable steps toward implementing a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
While speaking to The Algemeiner this week, Fetterman also lamented the anti-Israel sentiment emerging in Democratic politics, expressing concern that many of his party’s candidates for the 2026 midterm races are making opposition to the Jewish state a major pitch to voters.
“A lot of these races, it’s almost like [a] marquee anti-Israel kind of sentiment. I mean, that’s outrageous, and I’ve been disappointed by my party turning their back on that,” Fetterman said.
Many candidates in the 2026 Democratic primaries are running on explicitly anti-Israel platforms, especially far-left progressives. Longshot congressional hopefuls such as former New York state Rep. Michael Blake and left-wing podcaster Cameron Kasky, both of whom have launched campaigns in the Empire State, are attempting to differentiate themselves from other Democratic hopefuls by launching broadside attacks against Israel.
Breaking from traditional party orthodoxy, many insurgent Democratic primary challengers have condemned Israel for committing so-called “genocide” in Gaza and called for an immediate halt of all military aid to the Jewish state. This shift in support for Israel comes amid a nosedive in support for the Jewish state among Democratic voters. Several polls indicate that a supermajority of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis.
However, in the two years following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, Fetterman has emerged as one of the most vocal supporters of the Jewish state in the US Congress. The senator has repeatedly expressed disappointment and disillusionment with the Democratic Party’s increasingly hostile position on Israel, reaffirming his support of the Jewish state’s right to self-defense.