Doug Emhoff Puts His Jewish Identity at the Center of His Campaign Outreach

As he campaigns for his wife, Kamala Harris, Mr. Emhoff has said he will make fighting antisemitism a top priority if he becomes the nation’s first first gentleman.

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Doug Emhoff spoke in May at a White House reception celebrating Jewish American Heritage Month.

“I love being Jewish,” said Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, the vice president and presidential candidate. “I love it. I love everything about it. I want to shout it from the mountaintops.”

Mr. Emhoff was shouting his love not from a mountaintop, but to a living room filled with Democratic donors in a 13th-floor apartment in the West Loop of Chicago, one week before the Democratic Party would gather in the city to formally nominate his wife to run for president.

In the four weeks since Ms. Harris emerged as the Democrats’ nominee, Mr. Emhoff had made clear one way he intends to help his wife win: outreach to Jewish voters. He has increasingly talked about his Jewish identity and the significance of his faith. And he has signaled that he intends to make the battle against antisemitism a central part of his portfolio as first gentlemen should Ms. Harris win.

The issue has been a major message for Mr. Emhoff since Ms. Harris became vice president and he became second gentleman — he visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Krakow, Poland, last spring. His focus, particularly when speaking to largely Jewish audiences, have intensified, by his account, after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, followed by the backlash against Israel in the United States for its attacks on Gaza.

“This hate, this antisemitism, is a poison,” Mr. Emhoff said at a fund-raiser on an estate in Glencoe, just outside Chicago. “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.”

It comes as Democrats are deeply divided over the Gaza war, with many on the left assailing President Biden for his support of Israel during the conflict. (Donald J. Trump, Ms. Harris’s Republican opponent, has said that any Jewish voters who support the Democratic presidential ticket need “to get their head examined.”)

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