At the annual Chanukah party at the White House this week, Second Gentleman and token Jew Doug Emhoff lauded Joe Biden’s record on his actions with the Jewish people during his sole term. “I want to thank [Joe Biden]... and your steadfast leadership and commitment to this strategy and making sure we got it done,” Emhoff said.
The strategy he is referring to is the “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” a useless government policy paper that was created to make Biden (and then Kamala Harris) more palatable to Jewish voters in the 2024 election. The reason no one has heard of or cares about this “national strategy” is because it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s useless - because Biden, Emhoff, and the political left have a fundamental distaste for focusing on Jew-hatred.
Jew-hatred cannot be tackled alone, according to the Left. Jew-hatred is just one of many hatreds that exist, so to tackle it means that you must tackle all of them equally. They treat Jews the exact opposite way they treat every other targeted ethnic group. When dealing with race issues surrounding the black community, the notion that lip service would be paid to anti-white bigotry is laughable. But every time “anti-Semitism” is broached, “all hate” or “islamophobia” must be thrown in as well.
That’s why the main stakeholders listed on the “National Strategy” is not limited to the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, or Agudath Israel. It also includes far-left, non-Jewish organizations like the National Action Network, the National Urban League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Sikh Coalition, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Nearly all of these groups, especially CAIR, has shown disdain for the state of Israel and, in some cases, called for its destruction.
So how is that compatible with a “National Strategy to Combat Anti-Semitism”? Well, to make it compatible, Biden adopted a definition of anti-Semitism that no major Jewish organization agrees with. The most common definition used is the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which is a comprehensive definition that includes anti-Zionism. The definition that Biden chose is the Nexus definition.
The Nexus definition was dreamt up in Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at USC by a man named Jonathan Jacoby, who was the first Executive Director of the New Israel Fund (NIF). NIF is a precursor to all the anti-Zionist Jewish groups that are seen today. Publicly, they are for a two-state solution and against the BDS movement, but in reality, they are just as radical as all the groups that demand massive concessions from Israel after October 7. The Nexus definition specifically excludes anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism, claiming that Zionism is a political movement and not affiliated with Judaism.
This is in direct contrast with how the vast majority of Jewish organizations feel, and how Republicans have dealt with this issue. In response to October 7, the Republican House of Representatives passed a bill called the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023. It made the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism the standard definition to be used by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The bill was sent to the Senate, where Democratic Majority Leader and self-proclaimed “Shomer Yisroel” Chuck Schumer never brought it up for a vote.
It should be no surprise that, with this fundamental misunderstanding of and disdain for the root causes of anti-Semitism, Joe Biden is leaving office with the record of the most anti-Semitic instances under his tenure. The media made a big deal of the inflated number of anti-Semitic instances under President Trump’s first term, and yes, they did rise. Trump’s term had an average of 2,000 anti-Semitic instances reported per year.
Biden’s term was far worse. In 2021, it shot up to 2,700. 2022 was 3,700. 2023, the year that October 7 happened and the world reaction to that, anti-Semitic instances shot up to 8,873. Statista, the source of these numbers, does not have a number for 2024, but reporting by the ADL estimates that it’s currently over 10,000 for the year.
This is the Biden legacy on anti-Semitism: a meaningless piece of paper created by haters of the Jewish people and the Jewish state designed to accomplish nothing while ignoring meaningful and actual change all while attacks on Jews increases exponentially. Of course, Doug Emhoff, the man who said that he feels more Jewish because he goes to Easter services with Kamala Harris and claimed the story of Chanukah is about Jews going into hiding, applauds Biden. He knows nothing about Judaism, and that lack of knowledge, care, or understanding was clearly prevalent in the Biden term. What a legacy.
Moshe Hill is a political analyst and columnist. His work can be found at www.aHillwithaView.com and on X at @HillWithView.