White House event for Jewish American Heritage Month celebrates, frets
WASHINGTON – In songs and in speeches, an event at the White House marking Jewish American Heritage Month celebrated the presence of Jews in America since colonial times – and fretted about threats to American Jewry today.
“For some reason it’s come roaring back in the last several years,” President Joe Biden told a crowd of Jewish supporters in the White House’s East Room on Tuesday evening. “Reports have shown that antisemitic incidents are at a record high in our history – a record high in the United States.”
The emphasis on antisemitism was evident even in the entertainment – which featured a selection of songs from Parade, a Broadway musical about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man. That theme was a departure from past White House Jewish American Heritage Month events, which focused on Jewish accomplishments and spotlighted legendary Jewish athletes, scientists, artists and performers.
Biden says he was shaped as a child by his father’s fury with the United States for not doing enough to stop the Holocaust. On Tuesday, he spoke again of how he was spurred to run for president in 2020 after the deadly Neo-Nazi march three years earlier in Charlottesville, Virginia – and former president Donald Trump’s equivocation when he was asked to condemn the marchers.
“That’s when I knew… our work was not done,” he said, turning to address a delegation of Jewish Democratic lawmakers who were attending the event, and who have pressed for a more aggressive response to antisemitism. “Hate never goes away.”
This was the first Jewish American Heritage Month event at the
White House since 2016. Trump’s administration paid less attention to the commemoration, which
was enshrined in a law passed with bipartisan support in 2006. Biden’s hopes of staging an event were delayed in the past couple of years by the coronavirus pandemic.
Describing current antisemitism, Biden referred not just to attacks from the far right, but to attacks on visibly Orthodox Jews, which have proliferated in the northeast, and to the threat some Jewish students describe on campuses. He listed incidents including “violent attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses, Jewish institutions under armed guards, Jews who wear religious attire [being] beaten down in the street, Jewish students harassed and excluded from college campuses, [and] swastikas on cars and cemeteries and in schools.”
BIDEN’S EMPHASIS on a broader understanding of antisemitism, beyond the far Right, came after a number of Jewish groups met in December with Doug Emhoff, the
Jewish Second Gentleman, and asked him and other top officials to consider a more holistic approach to the problem.
A task force led by Emhoff, who also spoke at the event on Wednesday, is expected to release a strategy to counter antisemitism in the next few weeks.
Biden, in his remarks, said the strategy “includes over 100 meaningful actions that government agencies are going to take to counter antisemitism.” He did not detail any of those actions, except to say that the strategy would increase understanding of antisemitism and Jewish heritage, provide security for Jewish communities, reverse the normalization of antisemitism and build coalitions.
“It also includes calls to action for Congress, state and local governments, technology, and other companies, civil society, faith leaders to counter antisemitism,” he said.