I Am Not Joe Biden's Token
On Biden's cynical weaponization of Jewish identity
It is a difficult time to be Jewish in the United States. By historical standards, we are doing quite well for ourselves. I grew up in a world where I didn’t feel out of place for my heritage. Where my gentile friends knew about Passover and Hanukkah from watching Rugrats. Our people and our traditions are woven into the fabric of American culture in a way that my forebears would never have imagined. Yet it feels that we are moving backward. Donald Trump helped shepherd honest-to-god Nazism out of the shadows and into American political circles, though throwing Jews under the bus, or looking the other way when others do, is a bipartisan and pan-ideological pastime.
The temperature has risen further since Hamas’ attacks on October 7 and Israel’s antithetical-to-Jewish-values campaign of immiseration in Gaza. On the right, hateful bigots are gleefully swapping in “Israel” for “Jews” to launder their anti-Semitic beliefs into the mainstream. On the left, too many people have talked themselves into defending the vandalization of synagogues or arguing that a swastika could be a sign of righteousness.1 And in the so-called-respectable center, supposed allies have aligned themselves with blatantly anti-Semitic Christian Zionists, demonstrating that they care about the nation-state of Israel more than Jewish people themselves.
It is against this backdrop that Joe Biden delivered a speech about anti-Semitism on Tuesday. A Presidential address at the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance commemorations could have been an opportunity to bring reason and sobriety to a national conversation in dire need of such perspective: To dispel the myth that Israel represents the will of the global Jewish diaspora, to apply the lessons of the Shoah towards preventing the wanton destruction of an entire people in the present day, to atone for Biden’s own complicity in the appropriation of Jewish pain.
Alas, Biden used the occasion to double down on his shameless tokenism. In his dishonest framing of the threats we face and where the hatred is coming from, he did not merely demonstrate how little he cares about people like me. Biden’s keynote evinced the exact anti-Semitic bigotry that he purported to oppose.
Biden’s speech started out well enough. He opened by noting the widely accepted estimate of 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. (This seemingly obvious detail will be relevant later.) He outlined the steps Adolf Hitler took in targeting the German Jewish population for extermination, a fact of history that strangely is not universally accepted among Biden’s circle. He proclaimed our sacred duty to “recommit to heading and heeding … the responsibility of ‘never again.’”
He then moved on to modern times and the attacks of October 7, which Biden correctly noted was “the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” Yet he veered into the offensive when he said Hamas was “driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people.” As many have pointed out, Hamas is not an “ancient” organization, but was founded in 1987; Biden has been running for President for longer than Hamas has existed. The “ancient desire” he spoke of must thus refer not to Hamas but to the Palestinian people. Employing such a racist stereotype against an Arabic people is the literal definition of anti-Semitism.
Biden went on to address the recent protests against Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza (and America’s complicity in it). “On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class,” he said. “Anti-Semitism — anti-Semitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State.” Surely there have been anti-Semites among these crowds, and phrases may have crossed the line between critiquing Israel and opposing Judaism. The contexts of the protests do not excuse any such bigotry.
Yet as he has done previously, Biden here obfuscates not just the protestors’ goals — to end the atrocities inflicted on a civilian population by an occupying force — but their demographics. It is apparent to anyone not feigning obtuseness that the people in the streets and quads are disproportionately Jewish. There have been Shabbat dinners, Passover Seders, and discussions led by Jewish scholars in the encampments. To the extent that there is any sort of centralized support for these locally organized demonstrations, the most-prominent coordinating group is called Jewish Voice for Peace. Dismissing the protests as fundamentally anti-Semitic is not just a lie. It is an appropriation of our historical oppression, cynically deployed to justify Biden’s support for a military campaign that is indefensible on its own merits.
Biden’s specific rhetoric about Jewish students being “harassed” and “attacked” neatly elides the question of who is harassing and attacking them. Again, I do not doubt that some number of protestors have targeted people for their Jewish identity, and such behavior should be unequivocally condemned. But the vast majority of documented violence against Jewish students on campuses in recent weeks has come not from antiwar demonstrators but the belligerent Zionists who have shown up to counterprotest and the police called in to clear the areas at the universities’ behests. Pro-Israeli groups have made incendiary anti-Semitic statements in efforts to inflame tensions and physically attacked demonstrators. Schools are suspending Jewish professors. Militarized cops across the country are beating peaceful protestors — deploying unnecessary force against people who, again, are disproportionately Jewish.
Biden has cast himself as a champion of the Jewish faith while refusing to acknowledge the substantial opposition to his policies from his Jewish constituents, the way his ideological allies are targeting Jews across the country, or the parallels many have drawn between our people’s greatest tragedy and what he is enabling in Gaza. I would take offense to anyone who anointed themselves an arbiter of Jewish identity, or presented themselves as a unilateral representative of our diverse community. But a gentile? To claim such authority is as arrogant as it is immoral.2
Despite his claims to the contrary, Biden’s stubborn equation of Judaism with Zionism makes Jewish Americans less safe. Many non-Zionist Jews I respect say identifying the carnage in Gaza with our community will create new anti-Semites; I am uncomfortable with this argument, as it starts with the implication that bigotry can ever be reasoned out or explained. Yet I dread a world where gentiles grow up believing Biden’s representation of our people’s values. I wonder whether the President intends his strange, repeated insistence that Jewish Americans’ safety depends on Israel as a dog-whistle of othering, or whether he truly does not see protecting us as within his purview. And I am concerned for a future where gentiles do not take anti-Semitism seriously, if repeatedly invoking the term in the name of Zionism desensitizes our culture to actual discrimination against Jewish people.
Biden also betrayed the hollowness of his allyship in whom he chose not to criticize. The Days of Remembrance event’s other headliners included Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Johnson has been described as a Christian nationalist who believes the separation of church and state is a “misnomer.” Suffice to say his well-documented intolerant beliefs make him a strange fit for a Holocaust memorial. (Recall that the Nazis also targeted the LGBTQ+ community.) Meanwhile, Jeffries once unironically invoked the infamous language of George Wallace to proclaim “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever!”3 A few months before they shared the stage with Biden this week, Johnson and Jeffries co-headlined a rally with John Hagee, a pastor who believes “God sent Hitler” to carry out the Holocaust. Why isn’t Biden bothered by such demonstrations of anti-Semitism from two of the most-powerful legislators in the country?
Which brings us to the most-craven moment of Biden’s speech. Midway through his address, he bemoaned that there are “too many people … downplaying” the carnage of the Shoah. Yet Biden himself has espoused this mindset from the Office of the President: Last October, Biden argued on national TV that Hamas’ attacks were “as consequential as the Holocaust.”
The ludicrousness of this claim ought to be self-evident. According to the numbers Biden himself cited in his address, the death toll from the Holocaust was roughly five thousand times that of October 7. To call Hamas’ attacks, as tragic as they were, even remotely “as consequential” as the Shoah was not just a nakedly tokenizing pretext for the incipient destruction of Gaza, but bordered on Holocaust revisionism. Biden never corrected or apologized for this remark, and yet this gentile now has the chutzpah to lecture others about understanding the Shoah.
August 15, 2017 was one of the most-disgraceful days of a thoroughly undignified Presidency. Three days after a mob of right-wing extremist groups marched in Charlottesville, Virginia — three days after a Neo-Nazi murdered a counterprotestor — Donald Trump declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the demonstration. That infamous quote perfectly encapsulated Trump’s embrace of white-supremacist ideology. Biden even said this incident is what convinced him to run for President.
Last week, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for Biden’s thoughts on the protests across college campuses and the brutality of the police responses. After defensively assuring that the President’s silence on the issues was not a sign of disinterest, Jean-Pierre made a truly jaw-dropping comparison:
And I would just add that no president — no president has spoken more forcefully about combating anti-Semitism than this president.
Let’s not forget, in 2017, he was very clear — what we saw — the anti-Semitic bile that we saw in Charlottesville, on the streets of Charlottesville — he called that out. He called that out.
Equating students demonstrating against genocide with Neo-Nazis. Equating groups made up largely of Jewish protestors with marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Once upon a time, Biden believed such comparisons were beyond the pale.
Biden’s unwavering support for the Israeli campaign is a grotesque perversion of the Jewish values he claims to respect. His disinterest in our beliefs and marginalization when they do not bolster his ideological aims betrays the superficiality of his outward support. And his continued tokenism of Jewish identity for his own political purposes is flat-out anti-Semitic. Joe Biden doesn’t recognize the humanity of people like me. Our community is used to that.
No false equivalence here: There is far more to object to on the right than on the left. I have nonetheless been profoundly disappointed by the rhetoric that people who purport to share my values have been willing to abide.
And something of a pattern for Biden — recall his “you ain’t Black” admonition towards Black voters who did not support his campaign.
The parallel implications of a Black politician approvingly quoting segregationist rhetoric are not for me to judge.
Lew, once again you’ve taken me somewhere I had no idea this article would go. In your telling of the relationship between Biden and Israel and its false equivalency with Biden and Jewish people you’re giving me the nuance that is missing from most of the big news networks.