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Now the very man who Biden said enabled antisemitism and authoritarianism will succeed him.
Washington – On April 25, 2019, it has marked an ordinary moment in American Jewish history: it was the first time that a presidential candidate has supervised its resolution to combat opposite to anti -Semitism.
Candidate Joe Biden.
At first, Biden had not impatient in the presidency in 2020. But that was replaced when the neo -Nazis paraded through Charlottesville, in Virginia, in 2017, shouting slogans that Biden’s father taught him represented the worst of human nature .
Worse, Trump may not condemn the walkers and fatal rally unequivocally, saying that among them were “very lovely people. “
Biden has placed the coverage of the Jews in the center of his announcement of the Crusade. He described the protesters as “degraviating the fangs of racism, turning a song with the same anti -Semitic bile that is heard in Europe in the 1930s”, and then lifted Trump’s reaction, and then raised Trump’s reaction to the homicide of Heather Heyer, the counterprotester killed in Charlottesville.
“That was when we listened to the words of the president of the United States who surprised the global and surprised that of this nation,” Biden said in the video. Then he cited the line of “very lovely people. “
Centering his campaign on concerns for Jewish safety may have been unprecedented for a candidate, but was not unusual for Biden, said William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. In his 50 years of public service, Biden repeatedly brought up the lessons about standing with Jews that his father imparted to him in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“It is the old school,” Daroff said, adding that Biden demonstrated “the recognition of the old school that other Jewish people want friends and wish allies, and that the opposite combat to anti -Semitism is something that will have to be done so much and Both days and with both bones in your body.
In office, Biden took a series of moves to combat anti-Semitism before and after Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, the attack on Israel replaced the landscape of Jews in the United States and around the world. IDB is the first president to present a national strategy to combat anti-Semitism.
But as he leaves office, his legacy on the issue is mixed: As he departs, documented antisemitic incidents are at historic levels — part of a global surge. And now the very man who Biden said enabled antisemitism and authoritarianism will occupy the White House after him.
“Anti-Semitism, hatred and extremism and broader democracy have been at the center of everything he’s done for more than 4 years,” said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, an organization that has resolutely embraced Biden’s methods to fight extremism. “Perhaps the public verbal exchange wants to reflect a greater way in which the problems of hate and extremism and democracy have direct effects on the genuine world, on people. “
Almost as soon as he took office, Biden tasked the Department of Homeland Security with creating a strategy to track domestic terrorists, adding right-wing extremists, reversing Trump’s policies to minimize threats.
But many in the Jewish community was not entirely comfortable with Biden’s initial approach of grouping anti-hate measures under one rubric, and there were complaints about jarring moments at a White House summit in September of 2022 that conflated various bigotries, with one speaker likening the event to “church.”
Highest high profile anti -Semites in the following months, with the artist known as Ye in a series of anti -Semitic comments, followed through Trump having dinner with him and a Holocaust denial. Elelon Musk, a new of its acquisition of Twitter, has also allowed extremists to return to the platform.
By the end of the same year, Biden seemed to have won the message that anti-Semitism is an exclusive phenomenon. He tasked Doug Emhoff, the second-greatest Jewish gentleman, with presiding over a task force to expand a strategy to combat anti-Semitism, which he deployed in May 2023, just 4 months before the Oct. 7 massacres, and the wave of domestic workers.
Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council for Jewish women, said the fortuitous calendar: the systems positioned in the government without delay responded to the crisis.
“Having that in place before Oct. 7 was necessary for government agencies to start with a plan instead of starting from scratch,” Katz said. “When I would meet alongside other Jewish leaders with the Department of Education or the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security, we had a roadmap that already was committed to by those departments that we got to pull up and say, ‘Where are you on x?’”
An example of the strategy deployed after October 7. Cases of anti-Semitism in schools and universities, and has closed some of them, with agreements aimed at preventing painful repetitions.
By many measures, it did not appear to be enough. Watchdogs and law enforcement reported mounting numbers of antisemitic incidents, and polls showed burgeoning Jewish concerns about antisemitism. The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives appeared to be leading the way in combating antisemitism, with hearings leading to major changes on some campuses, including the removal of presidents at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
Democrats and Biden were hampered on the component because key portions of the progressive base, from academics to teams of left-wing activists, concentrated a giant component of their power on the Gaza war protest and Biden’s help for that. These demonstrations and movements included exhibitions that many Jewish teams called anti-Semitic.
Jews from all over the country said they were alienated through the left, a fissure that distanced some of the Democrats and Biden.
“What has happened since then in American politics has made many of our Jewish brothers have to question the Democratic party,” said Nikki Fried, Jewish president of the Democratic Party of the State of Florida. In October.
“I listen a lot about the team,” he said, referring to a small organization of progressive democrats who criticize to Vocally Israel. “I listen a lot about Kamala Harris’ policies, you know, what Joe Biden has or did. “
The Jewish Democrats were worried and, on one occasion of the month of the American heritage of the White House in May, they sprayed the main workers drove with the considerations they heard throughout the country.
The White House did not seem to be aware of the degree to which campus disorders had interrupted Jewish scholars and their families. Later, Fried would be that Vice President Kamala Harris seemed surprised through the revelation that the Jews were surprised by the anti -Semitism of the campus. Shortly after, Biden pronounced a speech that denounced the anti -Semitism of the campus, while taking care of maintaining the principles of freedom of expression.
Anti-Semitism has a crusading problem, with Trump and his supporters seeing it as a way to recruit Jewish electorate that has long supported the Democrats. A giant majority of Jews ended up voting for Harris, yet there turns out to have been a move toward Trump among the Jewish electorate.
Kenneth Marcus, who senior civil rights officials in the administrations of George W. Bush and Trump, praised Biden for his rhetorical commitment to combat opposite to anti -Semitism, which, according to him, unprecedented. But he said the strategy has not failed. Marcus said Biden could not institute policies that would involve anti -semitism.
“There have been moments in the last 4 years, namely, after October 7, when it has become obvious that Biden officials were about to take significant measures and, nevertheless, that never evolved,” Marcus said.
In his last weeks in office, Biden commuted 37 of the 40 federal inmates of death to death. Feed, the 3 still face the death penalty is the shooter who massacred 11 faithful Jews in Pittsburgh in 2018, the worst anti -Semitic act in US history in US history, in the component of a theory of the conspiracy resolved through Trump .
Biden’s reasoning was overwhelming, said the White House. “He believes that the United States will have to avoid the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” he said, “except in cases of terrorism and mass homicide motivated by hatred, so today’s movements apply to all even those instances even those instances “
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