Tracing his family history in Poland, Emhoff explains his approach to antisemitism
On a chilly Sunday morning, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff sat in Krakow’s historic Jewish quarter at a stylish coffee shop called Cheder, the Hebrew word for a standard Jewish primary school. Bookshelves full of Jewish volumes in Polish, English and Hebrew covered the partitions from floor to ceiling. Poland was for hundreds of years the beating heart of Jewish life in Europe, and half of the 6 million Jews killed within the Holocaust were Polish. Fewer than 10,000 Jews live on this country that after was home to one of the vibrant and diverse Jewish communities in history. So there was no higher place for Emhoff, the primary Jewish spouse of a president or vice chairman, to go to so as to viscerally understand what happens when antisemitism is taken to its most extreme, brutal manifestation. “This happened. That is real. When you don’t imagine me, go — go see what I saw,” Emhoff told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch, two days after an emotional visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on the 78th anniversary of its liberation.
Strategy session: Over the past several months, Emhoff has emerged as a visual advocate for the Jewish community and a figurehead within the national fight against antisemitism. But while in Poland, Emhoff was careful to only characterize his role as that of a listener, perhaps even a catalyst or a cheerleader, but actually not that of a policymaker. As an alternative, he offered a window into his approach to the problem, articulating a big-tent vision for combating antisemitism that requires constructing a broad base of support across party lines while avoiding a number of the more contentious questions around antisemitism, just like the place of anti-Zionism or Islamist extremism. “This whole thing is to listen and produce back good ideas that we will use as we’re constructing out our national plan,” he said. “We’re not that granular yet,” he said, when asked whether he intends to deal with more specific types of antisemitism like jihadism or anti-Zionism. “There are particular facets that we’ve discussed by way of security, funding and how you can address particular issues, but I’m really straight away just focused on listening, gathering information, bringing it back, after which attempting to determine the very best method to cope with it.”
Superb line: Emhoff has been reluctant to discuss where Israel matches into the White House’s approach to antisemitism, whilst many Jewish leaders have argued more forcefully in recent times that anti-Zionism often veers into antisemitism. Still, the subject was unimaginable to avoid, even while in Poland. Hours after Emhoff wrapped up his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Palestinian terrorist killed seven Israelis as they were leaving a Friday night prayer service in Jerusalem. The following morning, after a Saturday morning tour on the Oskar Schindler Enamel Factory in Krakow, Emhoff addressed the incident. He said he had spoken about it along with his wife on the phone. “It is a terrorist attack. That is murder. That is something that’s horrible. These were individuals who were just praying in a temple, living their on a regular basis lives, and were murdered in cold blood,” he told reporters. “It’s something that we’d like to simply stop. And that’s why we’re doing this work. And that’s why I’m gonna proceed to do that work. However it’s also — we stand with the people of Israel on this. We’re committed to the safety of Israel.”
Coming home: After a two-hour drive through winding roads within the Polish countryside, blanketed by snow, Emhoff’s motorcade pulled as much as the town hall in Gorlice, the town where his great-grandmother was believed to have lived before she fled to the U.S. roughly 120 years ago. A mural was painted on the wall, dated 2005, marking Gorlice’s 650th anniversary. Before World War II, the town’s population was greater than half Jewish. Now, none remain. (Many were killed in an August 1942 massacre memorialized in a forest outside town, where a mass grave marks the positioning of the tragedy.) “Everyone desires to know where they arrive from. I believe that’s essential to know, and to see this beautiful place, to see the way it was, but to see the violence that happened here, and throughout Europe to disrupt what were strange lives,” Emhoff told reporters. “These were strange people just living their lives but due to propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, antisemitism and hate, it led to mass murder. And that’s why we have now to do that work. And that’s why I’m doing all the things I can on behalf of our administration, with our partners and friends in Europe, to ensure that we ward off so this doesn’t occur again.”
League of countries: On the subsequent leg of his trip, Emhoff attended a convening on Monday of antisemitism envoys in Berlin, alongside Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to combat and monitor antisemitism. There, he heard from representatives from European nations, including Germany, Romania, Austria, Croatia and the UK, which have been coping with surging antisemitism for a few years. Earlier within the trip, he also met in Krakow with Jewish and interfaith leaders about tolerance and antisemitism. “It was an actual good lesson,” Emhoff told JI of the Krakow roundtable, that “regardless of where you land politically, on a non secular spectrum, it’s committed towards [fighting] the scourge of antisemitism.” He pointed to specific ideas that they discussed, like engaging young people, coping with legal issues, involving the private sector and NGOs, and mobilizing educators and historians.
Bonus: At Monday’s meeting of international antisemitism envoys, Felix Klein, the German federal commissioner for Jewish life in Germany, announced that an expanded version of the group will meet with the White House Interagency Antisemitism Task Force and members of Congress in Washington at the top of February, on the invitation of the American Jewish Committee.