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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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What does Mamdani’s response to synagogue protests mean for Jews? No one will like the answer.
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s ambivalent response to last week’s protests against an Israeli immigration event at an Upper East Side synagogue pleased no one. But his words were meaningful precisely because they were so frustrating. They revealed something essential about not just Mamdani’s politics, but about the fabric of New York Jewish life today.
When Park East Synagogue hosted an event with Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit that facilitates immigration to Israel, last Wednesday, protesters outside chanted slogans like “death to the IDF” and “globalize the intifada.” The event’s attendees said the protest made them feel unsafe. But Mamdani did not respond with either full-throated endorsement or condemnation, as many on both sides of the issue wanted him to. Instead, his spokesperson issued a statement condemning “the language used at last night’s protest,”” and specifically reiterating his belief that “every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation.”
Yet in the same statement, Mamdani also argued that “sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.” Specifically, his team said he was referring to the fact that Nefesh B’Nefesh has ties to Israel settlement activity in the West Bank.
Mamdani’s ambivalent response to the protests represent an attempt to knit together two competing imperatives, which are not easily reconciled.
As the mayor of a city with political activists on multiple sides of contentious issues, he wants to protect the right to protest. And he surely shares some of the protesters’ criticisms of Israeli settlement activity. American immigrants to Israel are more likely than other Jewish immigrants to move to West Bank settlements; Mamdani is making the point, in this context, that an event like the one at Park East can carry clear geopolitical implications.
Yet at the same time, Mamdani, who has committed to increasing funding for hate crime prevention by 800% and pledged “to root the scourge of antisemitism out of our city,” knows how problematic it is that protesters used threatening language in front of a house of worship. (On Friday, Mamdani told Rabbi Marc Schneier, son of Park East’s rabbi and a vocal critic of Mamdani’s, that he’d consider a pitch for legislation prohibiting protests outside houses of worship.) His insistence that no one should feel intimidated entering a synagogue is not merely rhetorical, but represents a genuine commitment to religious freedom, to public safety, and to basic respect.
These two impulses — protecting the right to protest, and safeguarding houses of worship — pull in different directions. They do not lend themselves to a tidy, one-line slogan. Yet Mamdani’s ambivalence is not just a political calculation; it is an expression of something deeply Jewish about New York City.
The city’s Jewish community — the largest of any city on earth — is not monolithic. Some New York Jews view Zionism as foundational to their identities, as a spiritual and cultural demand that goes beyond mere politics. Others see Zionism as a fundamentally political ideology, one to be critiqued or resisted, especially when tied to the realities of the occupation of the West Bank.
These are not just academic debates. They mark how Jewish people across the city — and the country — build meaning, pray, mourn and hope.
New York City embodies Jewish pluralism. It is where so many different strains of Jewish identity cross paths: Orthodox, Reform, secular; Zionist and anti-Zionist; immigrant Jews, native-born Jews. And it is also a city where immigrants from all around the world live together in relative peace, where countless religions worship together, where just about any kind of food on earth can be sampled.
With his nuanced response, Mamdani is showing that he is trying to represent that city. He is not offering reassurance to one side by abandoning the other; instead, he is straining to hold multiple truths at once.
Navigating a city of such profound pluralism is necessarily messy. And for many people, that very messiness will be unsatisfying. To critics, Mamdani’s statements may feel evasive, insufficient or morally suspect. Some argue he should never have questioned the legitimacy of a Jewish gathering about making aliyah. Others contend he should never have condemned the slogan “globalize the intifada” in the first place.
But sometimes, leadership over this diverse metropolis means recognizing that people will feel uncomforable, and still forging a space where dissent and belonging have to coexist, even if uneasily.
Mamdani must be pressed to clarify what concrete steps he will take to ensure that places of worship are protected from intimidation. His words to Schneier, and the apology that police commissioner Jessica Tisch — who will retain her role under Mamdani — offered to the synagogue are steps in the right direction.
And Mamdani must engage more deeply with Jewish communities who feel their identity and safety were undermined by this incident. Theirs are legitimate and necessary demands.
But if we reduce this episode to a clear binary, in which Mamdani is seen as either supporting the protesters or the Jewish community , we erase a crucial reality. Part of what makes political life in New York City, and Jewish life in New York City, so vibrant is that both are too complex to allow for neat explanations.
And at a time when the reigning political culture wants to force people into simple black-and-white boxes, we need to make more space for that ambivalence.
Because in the end, Mamdani’s response is not a statement of political convenience. It is a mirror of the divisions and tensions that exist within ourselves and our communities. It reflects back to us a city where protest and prayer, dissent and belonging, identity and ideology coexist.
That tension may be painful. But while the struggle to speak honestly across differences may be messy, it is also indispensable.
If we want leaders who represent all of us, we might have to live with their ambivalence, and, in so doing, accept that our community is stronger when its contradictions are acknowledged and not erased.
The post What does Mamdani’s response to synagogue protests mean for Jews? No one will like the answer. appeared first on The Forward.
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US House Committee Announces K-12 Antisemitism Investigations in Democrat Strongholds
People take part in anti-Israel protest in Fairfax County, Virginia, US, Nov. 24, 2023. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect
The US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Monday disclosed a triad of K-12 antisemitism investigations at school districts in California, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Among the cases, Virginia’s stands out for being based in the heavily progressive stronghold of Fairfax County, which former US Vice President Kamala Harris (D) carried by 35 points in 2024 and Abigail Spanberger, the Commonwealth’s new Democratic governor-elect, won by a similar margin in this year’s gubernatorial race. According to the House committee’s chairman, the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) district spills over with antisemitic incidents.
“FCPS experienced significant antisemitic incidents even prior to the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks against Israel. Jewish students allegedly faced repeated antisemitic bullying, including other students making the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute and throwing coins at them,” US Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a letter to the district. “Another school for years allegedly refused to remove a hallway display that included painted tiles, 40 percent of which featured swastikas and Nazi flags.”
He added, “Just prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, one high school’s Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) hosted a speaker who had made grotesque antisemitic statements. For example, he had tweeted, ‘I’m not racist I love everyone. Except the yahood [Jews],’ and ‘Never met a Jew who didn’t have a huge nose.’”
Across the country, in California, which has not allotted its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, the Berkeley Unified School District, an array of alleged antisemitic incidents included students chanting “Kill the Jews” to protest Israel and a teacher displaying an image of the Star of David being pummeled by a fist in the classroom.
“In another concerning incident, at Malcolm X Elementary School, a second-grade teacher told her students to write ‘messages of anti-hate’ for display,” Walberg continued in another missive to BUSD’s superintendent. “Several students followed the teacher’s lead and wrote ‘stop bombing babies.’ However, rather than displaying the message in the hall outside of her classroom, the teacher allegedly placed them outside of the classroom of the school’s sole Jewish teacher.”
The School District of Philadelphia (SDP), based in a city which has awarded the Democratic Party no less than 77 percent of its voters in presidential contests since 1996, is also seeing troubling trends, according to Walberg, a Republican.
“Today, SDP employs numerous educators who allegedly promote antisemitic content in their classrooms,” the chairman explained in his letter to the district. “One such teacher has allegedly threatened Jewish parents and students alone. She and other Philadelphia educators also allegedly use lessons from an effort called Teaching Palestine, whose class materials rationalize terrorist violence and advocate for the destruction of Israel.”
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
The problem has led to civil rights complaints and lawsuits.
In September 2023, for example, some of America’s most prominent Jewish and civil rights groups sued the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then in February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit.
One month later, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
As The Algemeiner has reported previously, the North American Values Institute (NAVI) also raised alarms about rising antisemitism when the Wissahickon School District (WSD) in Ambler, Pennsylvania presented as fact an anti-Zionist account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its K-12 students by using it as the basis for courses taken by honors students.
The material, provided by virtual learning platform Edgenuity, implied that Israel is a settler-colonial state — a false assertion promoted by neo-Nazis and jihadist terror groups — while referring to the founding of Israel as the “nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe” used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists. Based on documents shared with The Algemeiner, the material does not seemingly detail the varied reasons for Palestinian Arabs leaving the nascent State of Israel at the time, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. Nor does it appear to explain that some 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, especially in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
“College campus antisemitism has gotten a lot of attention because we see the effects, the protests, the barricades, and encampments,” Gerard Filitti, senior counsel of End Jew Hatred and The Lawfare Project, told The Algemeiner in September during an interview. “In K-12, it’s not as flagrant. It’s educational material that’s talked about in the classroom and which parents may not be aware of unless they talk with their children about what’s happening in school. So, this has essentially been a secret issue because the American people are not aware of what children are learning in schools or how schools have been handling antisemitism in school.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Miss Universe Israel’s Team Reveals National Costume Was Stolen Before Debut at 2025 Pageant in Bangkok
Melanie Shiraz of Israel takes part in the National Costume show during the 74th Miss Universe pageant in Bangkok, Thailand, Nov. 19, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha
Miss Israel Melanie Shiraz had her national costume stolen shortly before she was set to debut the look in the Miss Universe 2025 pageant, her team revealed on Tuesday.
The Miss Universe competition concluded in Bangkok, Thailand, on Nov. 21 with Fátima Bosch from Mexico being crowned Miss Universe from a group of contestants representing more than 130 nations around the world. The first runner-up was Thailand’s Praveenar Singh followed by Venezuela’s Stephany Abasali as second runner-up.
Shiraz, 27, had designed the outfit she was set to wear for the national costume segment of the Miss Universe competition. Edgar Saakyan, national director of Miss Universe Israel, said in a released statement on Tuesday that a day and a half before Shiraz was set to take the stage in the national costume portion of the competition, the Miss Israel team was “misled by the costume constructor’s team, and the national costume was stolen.”
“A representative of the costume constructor arrived at the Bangkok airport under the pretext of ‘clarifying details,’ approached a member of our team, took the costume, and then stopped all communication – effectively stealing it and placing us in an extremely difficult position,” Saakyan explained. “We regard this as a deliberate act of harm, including damage to our intellectual property and reputation … This matter has been transferred to our legal team.”
Saakyan added that ultimately, a team of Thai costume makers made Shiraz a new look, based on her original concept, with only 10 hours left before the national costume segment of the Miss Universe contest. The costume was completed with “incredible support” from the Miss Universe and Miss Grand International teams, he said.
“This display of professionalism, grace under pressure, and human solidarity allowed us not only to take the stage – but to do so with honor, pride, and respect for the flag,” Saakyan noted. “We are grateful beyond words.”
Shiraz ended up wearing in the national costume segment a yellow floor length gown that also featured a yellow ribbon in honor of the murdered hostages still held in captivity and the former hostages who have returned home after being abducted by Hamas-led terrorists during their deadly rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. A crystal Star of David was displayed on her dress, and its train was adorned with red anemones, which is Israel’s national flower and also commonly found in southern Israel where the Oct. 7 attack took place. Shiraz paired the dress with a shawl and head covering. The costume was titled “The Light of Hope.”
“While many national costumes are joyful and celebratory, this year’s theme of peace, combined with all that our people have endured over the past two years, called for a more somber presence on stage,” Shiraz said in an Instagram post. “One that carries both remembrance and the hope for a more peaceful future. I designed this piece to honor our story, our grief, and the light we continue to hold onto. I couldn’t be more proud [sic] to wear it.”
Saakyan announced in his statement on Tuesday that next year, Shiraz will be the official national costume designer for Miss Israel. “We are confined this partnership will deliver not just visual beauty, but a meaningful cultural message to the world,” he said.
Miss Palestine Nadine Ayoub sparked controversy when she took the stage during the national costume segment of the Miss Universe competition wearing a robe that depicted the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, alongside olive branches. Earlier in the competition, Ayoub uploaded a series of posts on social media that included lies about the Israel-Hamas war, such as one that inflated the number of Palestinian casualties and another that described Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the Israeli children murdered in Hamas captivity, as Palestinian victims of the war instead of victims of Hamas terrorism. Ayoub was the first-ever “Miss Palestine” contestant in the Miss Universe pageant.
After the New York Post revealed that Ayoub was married to the son of notorious Fatah terrorist Marwan Barghouti and even named a child after him, Shiraz called on Miss Universe organizers to strip Miss Palestine of her place in the top 30. “Miss Universe should not condone fraud, violations of its code of conduct and especially terror. I expect them to take corrective action,” Shiraz told the Post on Saturday. “I don’t need to act as the moral CEO of Miss Universe – they should be able to do that themselves.”
“It makes my skin crawl thinking we were in the same room so many times,” added Shiraz. “It’s shocking that we all shared a stage with someone with serious terror ties.”
Following the Miss Universe 2025 competition, Brigitta Schaback renounced her title of Miss Universe Estonia and Olivia Yacé, the pageant’s fourth runner-up, renounced her title as Miss Universe Africa and Oceania.