Is Doug Emhoff a Jewish role model or a partisan prop?

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In a presidential election year unlike any other, the late-summer mainstream corporate media push to remake the image of Vice President Kamala Harris must rank as one of the most extraordinary stories in American political history.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, attend Israel’s Independence Day Reception, hosted by the Embassy of Israel to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., on June 6, 2023. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images.

Once it was clear that she would replace President Joe Biden as the presidential candidate in November, in the course of a few weeks, the same journalists and pundits who had snickered at her word salad speeches and policy failures were suddenly singing her praises as the savior of the Democrats. With everyone who had a stake in the defeat of former President Donald Trump engaging in groupthink, Harris was transformed from a figure derided by many Democrats as well as Republicans as a disaster in the post of vice president to the exemplar of “joy,” and a uniquely brilliant and unifying national leader.

If it was blatantly dishonest, it was also just another example of how partisan politics works. One of the interesting sidebars to this story was the way it also fueled similar inflation in the image of her husband, Doug Emhoff.

He is now being hailed as both a sex symbol and a Jewish role model. It’s hard to take the former claim seriously. But the attempt by some Democrats to pretend that he will be an effective advocate for Jews or Israel or even in the fight against antisemitism if his wife becomes president is worth examining. So, too, is an effort by some on the Jewish left to claim that his status as a Jew who married a non-Jew is an “inspiration” to contemporary American Jewry.

From prop to sex symbol

Prior to July 2024, Emhoff was a minor figure in official Washington who was reportedly unhappy about being stuck in the nation’s capital and about the fact that he had been forced to give up his successful and lucrative Los Angeles entertainment law practice in order to stand by his wife as she served as vice president. He was trotted out as the face of the Biden administration’s ineffectual and largely meaningless “U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” and asked to tag along on some of the foreign trips undertaken by Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the administration’s Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism. Nevertheless, no one was under the impression that he was a major player—or any sort of player at all—on policy issues concerning Jews or anything else.

Yet in the white heat of his wife’s presidential campaign, he, too, was transformed.

To read some of the gushing descriptions of Emhoff that have been published in the last few weeks is to encounter a very different person from the largely nondescript person to whom the nation was introduced when Harris was tapped by Biden as his running mate in 2020. At that time, the entire focus of the press was on the fact that Biden was committed to picking a black woman for the job and that Harris, who had a résumé as U.S. senator and state attorney general to her credit, was the only really plausible candidate who fit that description.

Today, just as Harris must be praised as an exemplar of American progress, so, too, must her husband be lauded. For the liberal press, Emhoff is now—as The Washington Post put it—“a modern-day sex symbol.” The fact that he put his career on hold to prioritize his wife’s ambitions made him a man “secure enough in his own masculinity,” and therefore, “a hunk.” The international press chimed in the same way; Le Monde declared the Harris-Emhoff marriage “a model blended family.” He was, the paper declared, “a symbol of modern, progressive and feminist masculinity” and “the antithesis of Donald Trump.”

Critics might point out that Emhoff’s troubled marital past in which he had an affair with his daughter’s nanny and got her pregnant sounded very much like the image that Trump cultivated during his days as a real estate mogul/reality TV star who seemed to own a permanent spot on the gossip pages of New York tabloids. That’s a version of “feminist masculinity” I’m sure most women would prefer to steer clear of in their own lives, regardless of who they will vote for in November.

Yet since they elected a well-known womanizer in 1992 who had been credibly accused of rape and acts of sexual harassment, it’s clear that American voters no longer regard such misbehavior as disqualifying in a candidate, let alone a presidential spouse. That’s a fact that Democrats who profess to be horrified by Trump but still give Bill Clinton featured speaking slots at their national convention seem to forget. Such hypocrisy is to be ignored when most of the goal of any coverage of Emhoff is ensuring that Harris beats Trump.

The partisan flummery that passes for commentary about presidential candidates’ spouses is not terribly interesting. But we should take seriously the claim that in Emhoff, the Jewish community will have a powerful and influential advocate if his wife is elected president.

A typical American Jew

Discussing Emhoff in a feature published last week in Haaretz, the leftist Israeli newspaper went beyond his recent claims of a passionate embrace of his identity and supposed status as a policy influencer. It declared his status as a Jew who married a non-Jew as precisely what makes him relevant to most in the U.S. Jewish community. As the article put it, “For many American Jews in interfaith partnerships, Emhoff’s embrace of his identity and his way of speaking about his partnership (which is also interracial and interethnic) has meant representation for something they take both as a given and find questioned by others, especially other Jews.”

There’s some obvious truth to this assertion.

Outside of the minority of American Jews who identify as Orthodox, intermarriage is not so much accepted as it is normative. According to the 2020 Pew Research Center statistical analysis of American Jewry, the rate of intermarriage among non-Orthodox Jews is 72%, a figure that continues to grow higher with each successive such study.

Jewish communal fundraising groups like federations reacted to the 1990 National Jewish Population that claimed that the intermarriage rate was 55% with alarm and a commitment to greater funding for Jewish education, camps and trips to Israel to counter the trend. Still, by the time Pew came out with a 2013 “Portrait of Jewish Americans” that with greater statistical certainty confirmed those numbers were actually far higher, the Jewish world reacted with indifference. The same organizations wanted no part of any effort that could be mistaken as advocacy for endogamy. How could they when most of their donors and their children were intermarrying themselves, even if the consequences for the demographics and future of American Jewry pointed to a drastic decline?

So, in that sense, Emhoff is a typical Jew of his generation. Though he was given some Jewish education, had a bar mitzvah and attended a Jewish summer camp, he displayed little or no interest in Jewish identity, faith or Israel until only a few years ago. He not only married a non-Jew but his children were raised in a home where Judaism, Jewish peoplehood and Israel were not to be found. Indeed, to the great disappointment of The Forward in 2021, when it hoped to embrace his daughter Ella as a Jewish celebrity, she disabused them of this claim, telling the newspaper that although her father had gotten more interested in his background since marrying Harris, it was “not something she grew up with.”

Ella Emhoff has since generated publicity for her fundraising for a Palestinian cause in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7. While some left-wingers in the Jewish community reacted similarly to the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the fact remains that as her spokesman told The Forward three years ago, “Ella is not Jewish.”

Jews have thrived in America as they have nowhere else in the Diaspora because of its freedom, and the choices of Emhoff and his daughter must be seen in that context and accepted as one of the consequences of that freedom.

‘Lox and bagels’ Judaism

What is wrong about the claims that Emhoff is an “inspiration” to fellow Jews who identify with his personal choices is the assertion that his journey illustrates that intermarriage can be a spur to further commitment to Judaism rather than an obstacle.

It is entirely factual that many Jews who intermarry react by doubling down on their Jewish identity. Equally true is the fact that many non-Jews who marry Jews choose to embrace Jewish life, including both those who convert to Judaism as well as some who don’t. But that wasn’t what happened with Emhoff. To the contrary, though he may have fond memories of his grandmother’s brisket consumed in an apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y., where the couches had “plastic covers,” he was someone who completely abandoned his Jewish identity. Indeed, his life and family illustrate exactly why the belief that a fondness for specific foods, which is often described as “lox and bagels Judaism,” rather than those aspects of Jewish tradition, law, faith and communal commitment, is a formula for the eventual disappearance of a secular Jewish community.

Emhoff’s newfound embrace of Jewish life may well be, as he has said, something in which his second wife played an important role. But that is a reason to doubt his sincerity and to be skeptical about him using his influence to help the Jews or Israel.

If the vice president encouraged Emhoff to rediscover his ties to his people, the reasons appear to have had little to do with her desire to help him get in touch with his roots. Rather, it was because having a husband who could at least pretend to care about the Jews was good for both optics and her political career, particularly with a war raging in the Middle East.

Despite the recent surge in antisemitism, that Harris would see a spouse with an active interest in Jewish life as an asset shows just how accepted Jews have become in American life in the last half-century. That’s especially true when compared to the early 20th century when it might have posed a problem for many non-Jewish voters.

It also exposes Emhoff’s decision to suddenly remember his ancestral ties as merely a political ploy to help his wife win Jewish votes and to raise money from Jewish donors who liked the idea of having a “second mensch” in the White House.

A political prop

Everything Emhoff has done in his capacity as the vice-presidential spouse demonstrates that is all that there is to this storyline. It’s not just that his understanding of the issues is paper-thin, showing how little he knows about any of the problems fueling antisemitism and the war on Israel. Rather than pushing for a national strategy on antisemitism that would have teeth and would understand the way left-wing Jew-hatred had been empowered by woke ideology, Emhoff was content to serve as the front man for a plan that did nothing about the problem. His subsequent embrace of the same stance for another effort about the fake problem of Islamophobia made the same point.

Though many Jews work in the Biden administration and the same fact will likely be true of a Harris administration, her husband’s role as a symbol of her concern for Jewish issues is almost certainly entirely fake. Though he is now touted as a symbolic Jew inside her inner counsels, there is no reason to believe that he cares much about Israel and its people or countering the plague of pro-Hamas incitement against Jews on college campuses. Nor does he seem willing to push back against the claims of his wife and Biden that the mobs targeting Jews “have a point” or need to “be heard. “As such, the notion that he will be a check on the influence of the powerful intersectional left-wing of the Democratic Party that stands against the Jewish state and which is helping fuel antisemitism is nothing more than an exercise in wishful thinking by Jewish Democrats who do care about these vital issues. Indeed, it is more likely than not, as a faithful supporter of his wife, that he will serve as a Jewish apologist for policies that may be inimical to the fight against antisemitism and the security of Israel than as someone who will stand up to them.

Emhoff may be a typical assimilated Jew of his generation and that ought not to be a source of contention or a reason to vote for or against his wife. And we shouldn’t even bother with the absurd claims that he is a Jewish role model any more than we should about his being one of masculine feminism. But no one should accept the myth that Harris’s husband is going to be a crucial figure advocating for Israel and the Jews in the way that members of Trump’s family and inner circle did when he was president. Whatever it is that he does believe, he is nothing more than a prop in a political campaign and any claims made that he will be more than that are mere partisan fiction.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate.