Coming down the stairs in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City in 2017, Kamala Harris saw the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, and knew what she had to do.
Then a California senator, Harris reached into her pocket and pulled out a blue kippah and clips. She told her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, to bend down and fastened the kippah to his head.
Halie Soifer, then Harris’ national security advisor, took a candid photo of the moment, which she says embodies Harris’ relationship with the Jewish community: The senator knew what to expect at a moment of Jewish significance.
“She prepared for it because she knew it would be meaningful for Doug,” said Soifer, now CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “Part of the reason that trip was so special for both of them was because it was his first time in Israel.” (The trip was Harris’ third time in the country.)
Harris went on to become vice president and has now been catapulted to running for the country’s highest office after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed her.
Over the course of her life and career, Harris, 59, has been surrounded by Jews, from schoolmates to colleagues to close family members. That background has given her an easy familiarity with Jewish spaces, say those who have interacted with her.
She has also encouraged Emhoff to embrace his Jewish identity as the “second gentleman.” For the first time, mezuzahs have been installed at the vice presidential residence, and Emhoff has taken a leading role in the administration’s efforts to fight antisemitism.
But Harris has also stirred concerns among some pro-Israel Jews. She has staked out positions on Israel’s war with Hamas, and the student protests against it, that are to Biden’s left and sympathetic to some of the war’s strongest critics.
Not Biden’s Party
Israeli author and commentator Shmuel Rosner said Harris’ ascendance marks a generational departure from Biden, who has demonstrated a deep and abiding affection for Israel since the 1970s.
“The Americans have changed and we have changed,” he wrote on X on Monday. Referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his predecessor Menachem Begin, Rosner added, “Harris is not Biden, and Netanyahu is also not Begin. Her party is not Biden’s party.”
Harris’ Jewish supporters say her Jewish knowledge showed on the 2017 Israel trip. In her entry in the visitor’s book at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, she said she was “devastated by the silent testimonies of those who died in the Shoah.”
It showed, they said, in her references in a 2017 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “those Jewish National Fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel” when she was a child in the Bay Area. And it showed, they said, in the pitch-perfect impression she made of her Jewish New Jersey mother-in-law, Barb, in an appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show” last April.
“She puts my face in her two hands and looks at me and says, ‘Look at you! You’re prettier than you are on TV!’” Harris said.
More substantively, said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Harris is in lockstep with Emhoff in what has become his most prominent role, chairing a task force that developed the Biden administration’s strategy to counter antisemitism.
“It’s hard to draw a line between the vice president and the second gentleman when it comes to their engagement on some of these issues because they have been so deeply coordinated,” she said. “If you think about the Rosh Hashanah at their home, their remarks were so complementary, because they’re both so deeply engaged in this work.”
At the event last September referenced by Spitalnick, Emhoff gave a speech outlining progress on implementing the plan to combat antisemitism, which was launched in May of 2023. Harris followed with remarks about why the work was crucial.
“We are being presented with a wake-up call, the blast of the shofar,” she said. “We are dealing with very powerful forces that are attempting to wage what I think is a full-on attack against hard-won freedoms, liberty.”
In calling for attention to antisemitism, Harris has noted she often focused on hate crimes when she was a prosecutor and state attorney general in California. She has also been the lead administration spokesperson on another issue that, polls show, animates Jewish voters: combating abortion restrictions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to repeal Roe v. Wade.
‘Cannot Look Away’
But when it comes to Israel, her detractors on the right see her as insufficiently supportive of the military campaign against Hamas and closer to the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, which has become increasingly critical of Israel.
Perhaps ironically, critics of Israel on the left share that assessment of Harris, but see it as a positive.
Both sides have pointed to a speech Harris gave in March where she called for an “immediate ceasefire” in the conflict for at least six weeks to pave the way for a release of Israeli hostages. Biden had not used the same phrase to call for a truce.
“Biden made many mistakes regarding Israel, but he is miles ahead of Harris in terms of support for Israel,” David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel during the Trump administration, told The Jerusalem Post. “She is on the fringe of the progressive wing of the party, which sympathizes more with the Palestinian cause.”
Lily Greenberg Call — the first Jewish staffer to quit the Biden administration to protest its backing for Israel and who worked for Harris’ unsuccessful presidential run in 2020 — said she was hopeful Harris will scale back Biden’s pro-Israel policy.
“She was the first person in the administration to use the word ceasefire,” Greenberg Call said in an interview. “I am hopeful … she is in a better position to listen to a majority of Democratic voters who want a lasting ceasefire/hostage exchange. I also think she’s serious about fighting authoritarianism at home. She needs to fight it abroad. We can’t be funding it in Israel while trying to fight it here.”
Harris’ backers say she understands Israel’s security needs. On the 2017 visit to the country, Soifer recalled Harris viewing Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and its cybersecurity capabilities.
Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, an Annapolis-based Jewish Democratic donor and longtime pro-Israel advocate, said Harris established strong relations on that trip, particularly with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who was then the parliamentary opposition leader.
“I was with her [in 2023] when she made an announcement of a $70 million deal between Israel and America to work on climate change,” Laszlo Mizrahi said. “I think she’s personally spoken with President Herzog more than a half dozen times.”
Laszlo Mizrahi noted that Harris recently screened a documentary on the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. “She came out very, very strongly” against some pro-Palestinian activists denying the rape accounts, Laszlo Mizrahi said. At the screening, Harris said, “We cannot look away.”
Moving Away from Agony
Just months after Harris joined the Senate in 2017, one of her first speeches was to AIPAC, where she said her first act as a senator was introducing a resolution condemning a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel.
Her sponsorship separated her from the just-departed Obama administration, which had allowed the Security Council to pass the resolution. Another sign of her cultivating AIPAC was that she declined the endorsement of J Street, the liberal Israel lobby. (This year, J Street has endorsed Harris for president.)
“I believe that a resolution to this conflict cannot be imposed. It must be agreed upon by the parties themselves. Peace can only come through a reconciliation of differences, and that can only happen at the negotiating table,” Harris told AIPAC. “I believe that when any organization delegitimizes Israel, we must stand up and speak out for Israel to be treated equally.”
Israeli officials worry that Harris has changed, pointing to her March speech where she appeared to principally blame Israel for difficulties in delivering humanitarian aid to Palestinians. The takeaway, Israeli insiders say, is she is more susceptible than Biden to pressures from party progressives increasingly hostile to Israel.
“No excuses,” Harris said in the speech. “They must open new border crossings. They must not impose any unnecessary restrictions on the delivery of aid. They must ensure humanitarian personnel, sites, and convoys are not targeted.”
Harris’ critics also take issue with sympathy she’s evinced for the nationwide student protests against the Gaza war which, Jewish students said, created a hostile atmosphere for them.
“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” Harris told The Nation earlier this month. “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.”
Discussing the recent protests in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Harris condemned some campus protest activities, saying when she was a prosecutor, she told police, “If there’s vandalism, I’m charging them. If there’s violence, I’m charging them, you can be sure.”
Harris’s backers say they are ready for the waves of opposition research that Republicans will deploy in trying to peel off the overwhelming Jewish majorities that have long voted for Democrats. Laszlo Mizrahi said Jewish donors and fundraisers she knew were relieved at Harris’s elevation after weeks of anxiously wondering whether Biden would step down.
“We’ve moved from agonizing to organizing,” she said.
Ron Kampeas is the Washington bureau chief for the JTA global Jewish news source.
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