Kamala Harris is the “pro-Jewish candidate” in this year’s U.S. presidential election

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Zealots — true believers — are far worse than merely dangerous. They can be, to seriously mix metaphors here, ideological pied pipers who lead gullible, not to say dumb, lemmings into the sea.

Menachem Rosensaft

Melanie Phillips is one such zealot.

She worships seemingly breathlessly at the feet of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, JD Vance, and just about any other far-right politician whom she sees as Masada-like warriors against anything short of an absolute ultranationalist anti-liberal hegemony.

Someone might want to remind Phillips that neither she nor any Jew in the world today — or at any time since sometimes around the year 73 of the Common Era – is a descendant of the Sicarii fighters of Masada. If we accept the legend propagated by the Jewish general turned renegade historian Josephus, all the Jewish zealots at Masada, every last one of them, perished, presumably without leaving behind any progeny.

We Jews today — including Phillips — are all descendants and beneficiaries of Yohanan Ben Zakkai and those Jews of the Roman, Herodian era who understood that the survival of the Jewish people was predicated on a willingness to reject zealotry and to root Jewish survival in something other than a collective national suicide.

Not to put too fine a point on it, had Phillips been alive and writing at the time, she would most probably have railed against Ben Zakkai’s negotiations with Vespasian, denouncing Ben Zakkai as a some kind of liberal universalist unwilling or afraid to “fight back,” to the death if necessary, “bloodied but unbowed.”

The fact is, however, that the Jewish people exists today because Vespasian acceded to Ben Zakkai’s request to allow him to establish what became the first yeshiva at Yavne.

I write all this because we are faced today with two mutually exclusive views of the international arena, including the global Jewish community, including Israel. One is apocalyptic in nature, based on the fatalistic, quasi-fascist notion that extreme, unwavering, uncompromising ultranationalism is the only viable option. The other views the same international arena, including the global Jewish community, including Israel, as a collective whose various constituent parts, again including the global Jewish community and including Israel, must find a way to coexist.

The former is the political ideology, the Weltanschauung, if you will, of Trump, Vance, Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and Melanie Phillips. The latter is how U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, and, I daresay, erstwhile Likudniks such as Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Dan Meridor, and, I suspect, Naftali Bennett see the world.

I also write all this as a reaction to Phillips’ latest screed in which she denounces Kamala Harris vitriolically and disingenuously as “the anti-Jewish candidate.”

I have previously written on this platform why I – and, I am quite certain, the vast majority of American Jews — support Harris against Trump and consider her to be a true friend of both the American Jewish community and Israel. Her acceptance speech at the National Democratic Convention is evidence of her commitment to Israel. “Let me be clear,” she said. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself. Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on October 7th. Including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.”

It seems that Phillips missed that part of Harris’s speech. Or perhaps she just stopped listening when Harris expressed compassion for Palestinian civilians in Gaza, whose suffering Phillips either belittles or ignores.

“At the same time,” Vice President Harris continued,  “what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity. Security. Freedom. And self-determination.”

The balanced approach set forth by Kamala Harris is the only formula that has a chance of success. The disastrous Netanyahuesque alternative of fighting to a Masada-like death may appeal to the likes of Phillips but does not resonate with those of us who are committed to Israel remaining an integral and, yes, democratic rather than autocratic part of the international community.

I do not propose to refute here the numerous misrepresentations and succession of personal slurs in Phillips’ article. Suffice it to say that Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt is one of the most highly respected spiritual leaders in the United States. Her remarks to the Jewish Democratic Council of America were entirely in keeping with traditional Jewish teachings and Phillips’ disparagement of her “religious credentials” is beneath contempt. So are her palpable scorn for Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and her false depiction of Ilan Goldenberg, the Harris campaign’s liaison to the Jewish community, as anti-Israel, in part because he supports sanctioning Jewish settlers in the West Bank who violently attack Palestinian civilians there.

One egregious factual distortion bears mentioning. Phillips writes that “Harris reportedly said she was ‘open’ to an arms embargo against Israel” without informing her readers that Phil Gordon, Harris’ national security adviser whom Phillips denigrates separately, stated categorically that Harris “does not support an arms embargo on Israel.” I doubt that this flagrant omission was somehow inadvertent on her part.

But the issue at hand is neither Phillips’ dystopian view of the world nor her vendettas against all those who do not ascribe to that view. Instead, our focus should be on finding a viable way to bring to an end the cycle of violence and bloodshed of the past 10 and a half months and to return the surviving hostages viciously held captive by Hamas since October 7 to their families. In this context, as in many others, Vice President Kamala Harris is very much the “pro-Jewish candidate” in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).