The pending “first gentleman” could also become the first Jew in the White House in the history of the United States. Doug Emhoff, 60, husband of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, is the grandson of Polish Jews who emigrated across the Atlantic to escape the Holocaust.
Born in Brooklyn, raised in New Jersey, he attended a Reform synagogue, Temple Shalom, where at the age of 13 he made his Bar Mitzvah, the ceremony that marks entry into the community. But he soon stopped going to temple, as a Jew more by culture than by faith. His first marriage, to film producer Kerstin Mackin, bore two children, Cole and Emma, whom he did not educate in the Torah.
After becoming a lawyer he moved to Los Angeles, into the hubbub of Hollywood’s goings-on. There he met Kamala Harris, the “iron prosecutor” of California. They married in 2014, in a ceremony officiated by her sister, Maya, a member of the Church of God in Oakland. Kamala, raised by her Indian mother in the Hindu faith, has for years attended the Baptist church of San Francisco led by the Reverend Amos Brown, but at home she continues to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. She is a typical exemplar of the religious scene in the United States, where transitions from one religion to another and interfaith marriages are ever more frequent.
But in 2021, when Harris became vice president, the turning point came for Emhoff too. He left his law practice and moved to Washington: “I became a lawyer because I hated bullies, but I want to continue defending the weak.” President Joe Biden took notice of him and entrusted him with a task force against discrimination. Which very soon focused on antisemitism. In January 2023 he went to Auschwitz, and in the United States he went all over to meet with Jews, especially in schools: “I didn’t realize what a big deal it would be not only to the Jewish community and to faith communities but to myself. It’s actually driven me closer to faith. It has opened my eyes to a lot of things.”
And so, in Washington, he attached the “mezuzot,” the Scripture-bearing cases dear to the Pharisees, to the door of the vice-presidential residence. He began lighting the Hanukkah candles again. He was the first to celebrate the “seders,” the Passover dinners, at the White House. After October 7, 2023, following the massacre committed by Hamas and with the growth of hatred for Israel and Jews, especially at the American universities, his activity became increasingly intense. At the convention in Chicago last August, when Kamala Harris officially became the Democratic candidate for president, he invited as speakers the parents of one of the Hamas hostages, the American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. A few weeks later, he would be one of the six found killed in the tunnels of Gaza.
“I love being Jewish,” Emhoff said at the convention in August. “I love everything about it. I want to shout it from the mountaintops. As your first first gentleman, I promise you, as the first Jewish person ever to be a White House principal, I am going to continue this fight against antisemitism.” Formally, the “first gentleman” does not have a predefined role. But there is much he can do. One need only think of the actual influence that the “first ladies” Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama had.
It is not surprising that the opposing camp is trying to exploit Emhoff’s Judaism to drum up votes for Donald Trump among pro-Palestinian voters, for example those of the large Islamic community in Michigan, one of the states most in the balance between Democrats and Republicans. The trouble for them is that Emhoff is not easy to caricature. He is not a Bernie Sanders, the famous far-left senator from Vermont, described by the gay journalist and rabbi Jay Michaelson as the perfect representative of the “basically atheist Jewish Democratic Socialist, part of the erstwhile 20th-century American Jewish Left.” No, Emhoff is a twenty-first century Jew, without facile stereotypes, with a big smile and kindly eyes, with a first wife who has become a friend of his current one and with children from his first marriage who affectionately call their second mother “Momala,” the complete opposite of that “childless cat lady” label pinned on Kamala Harris by Trump’s running mate, the Catholic J. D. Vance.
In short, Harris only needs her husband at her side to woo pro-Israel voters, after having dropped the idea, although considered up to the last minute, of choosing as her vice-presidential candidate another accomplished Jew, Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania.
Not to mention that among her advisors Harris also avails herself of another Jew with proven experience, Philippe Reines, former press secretary to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, during the presidency of Barack Obama.
Reines grew up in New York with his grandmother and his mother, Judith, and attended Ramaz, the elite Modern Orthodox school on the Upper East Side. He is one of the organizers of the “October 7 Project,” an organization that fights disinformation about the war between Israel and Hamas. He was the one who instructed Harris, step by step, on how to face and defeat her rival, Donald Trump, in the only televised duel they have had so far.
Furthermore, by a curious coincidence, on September 16 Pope Francis welcomed as Israel’s new ambassador to the Holy See Yaron Sideman, 57, a diplomat who knows the United States well, having carried out much of his activity there, most recently as consul general for Pennsylvania, Ohio, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, and southern New Jersey, and previously as the head for North America at the office for Diaspora and interreligious affairs of the Israeli foreign ministry. The axis between Israel and the United States has in him a seasoned professional, whom Vatican diplomacy will certainly take into account.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.