WASHINGTON — Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, opened a roundtable discussion on antisemitism Wednesday with a plaintive pronouncement that the Jewish community “is in pain.”
With antisemitic incidents on the rise in the U.S., Emhoff called for more people to step up and publicly denounce “vile” speech and violent acts directed against Jews.
“Antisemitism is dangerous,” said Emhoff, the nation’s first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president. “We cannot normalize this. We all have an obligation to condemn these vile acts.”
The conference led by Emhoff included an assortment of Biden administration officials and representatives of various Jewish groups. It comes as assault, harassment, and vandalism targeting Jews have risen to their highest levels in more than four decades, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Last week, the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was suspended from Twitter after posting an image that appeared to show a swastika embedded in a Star of David.
Earlier that day, Ye had given an interview to the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in which he said, “I see good things about Hitler,” a reference to the German dictator whose Nazi regime presided over the murder of 6 million Jews.
In late November, former President Donald Trump had a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Ye and two other guests, including white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Trump has faced criticism from within his own party for hosting them at his Florida club. His former vice president, Mike Pence, said that Trump had shown “profoundly poor judgment.” On his Truth Social platform, Trump said he did not know who Fuentes was and that Ye did not express any antisemitic sentiments during the meal.
At Wednesday’s conference, a portion of which was open to the press, none of the participants specifically named Ye or mentioned the Mar-a-Lago dinner in their public remarks. But Susan Rice, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and one of the speakers, said, “There’s nothing more vicious than what we are seeing today out of the mouths of our leaders, of our public figures, of our celebrities, of our elected officials.”
Emhoff described the event as the start of what would become an ongoing project to combat antisemitism. The speakers noted various steps that the Biden administration has taken so far, including setting aside $250 million to protect places of worship like synagogues. President Joe Biden has proposed raising that sum to $360 million in the coming year for the 2023 fiscal year.
Conference speakers drew a link between antisemitism and another scourge that the Biden administration wants to confront: threats to democracy. Those who consider Jews to be puppeteers manipulating government and the media don’t believe the U.S. is a true democracy, one speaker said.
“Antisemitism is the death knell of democracy,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust scholar and the Biden administration’s special envoy to combat and monitor antisemitism. “The antisemite believes Jews control the government, the press, the media — and therefore democracy is an illusion.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
