Candy Glazer, a Massachusetts delegate to this week’s Democratic National Convention, has been a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the nation’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby, for three decades. Like some other Jewish voters and delegates in Chicago for this week’s convention, Glazer believes that pro-Palestinian demonstrators have the right to express their beliefs but worries that some of them “don’t understand the history of the Middle East.”
She also believes that Vice President Kamala Harris is — and will be — a friend of the Jewish state.
“She’s married to someone who’s Jewish,” the 76-year-old Glazer said, referring to Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff.
As war in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that left 1,200 people in Israel dead, rages on — with tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties, according to the Gaza Health Ministry — some pro-Palestinian activists have sought to use the Democratic convention to pressure Harris to support an arms embargo on Israel.
Glazer backs continued U.S. arms sales to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. But she has complicated feelings about Netanyahu himself — “he’s got to be responsible for Oct. 7 — he sold his soul to the right to stay in power” — and hopes that President Joe Biden negotiates a cease-fire to allow for a hostage exchange, which she says would be “a miracle.”
As vice president, Harris has created some political distance from Biden by emphasizing Palestinian suffering in public speeches and comments. But Glazer, like many of her fellow Jewish Democrats, sees Harris as cut from the same cloth as Biden: a staunch supporter of Israel with deep connections to the Jewish community and the standard-bearer for a Democratic platform that she described as having the deepest commitment to Israel in the party’s history.
When Glazer’s Jewish friends complain about Democrats’ calls for a cease-fire in Gaza — a position that over three-quarters of rank-and-file Democrats support, according to a YouGov poll conducted in April — she has pushed back, reminding them of the Republican alternative.
“What are the values you admire about being Jewish?” she asks her friends. “Somebody who is honest? Somebody who treats everybody equally, somebody whose values are the same? Is that Donald Trump?”
Despite long-standing Republican efforts to court Jewish voters, American Jews have voted for Democrats by large, steady margins for decades. Jewish Democrats at this week’s convention don’t expect those voting patterns to change anytime soon. But some see a rise in antisemitism on the left and are calling for party leaders to more explicitly condemn it.
“We have to acknowledge that politically, we see a simmering kind of antisemitism on the left,” said Ann Lewis, a Democratic Party strategist and former communications director in the Clinton administration.
Emhoff, who delivered a brief speech on Thursday to a crowded room at the Jewish United Fund of Chicago, said that Harris herself had pushed him to spearhead the creation and implementation of the first-ever national strategy to combat antisemitism.
He said he was currently focused on the safe return of students to college campuses.
“If there’s protests, the protests are fine — but when they cross the line into violence, into preventing kids who just want to go to school and have nothing to do with the policies in Israel — they need to be able to go to class,” Emhoff said. “They need to be safe. When Kamala Harris is president and I’m first gentleman, I’m going to make sure of that.”
Jewish Americans are divided about whether the way Israel has conducted its war in Gaza is appropriate. But 9 in 10 Jewish Americans believe antisemitism has increased since the start of the war, according to February polling by the Pew Research Center. And more than 7 in 10 Jewish American adults support continued U.S. military aid to Israel, according to the same poll.
Amanda Berman, the 39-year-old founder of Zioness, a coalition of progressive Zionist activists, decided to bring the newly formed political arm of her nonprofit to the Democratic National Committee as a counterweight to what she described as the normalization of antisemitic tropes by pro-Palestinian activists.
“We really needed to create a space where Jews at the convention could be safe and proud in who they are, that they had the language that they needed and the confidence to know that they were not alone in talking about what it means to be a proud Zionist, a proud progressive and a proud Democrat,” she said.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators’ push for an arms embargo was a point of contention among Democrats during the public drafting phase of the Democratic Party platform this summer, but the 92-page document that delegates approved Monday did not include the demand. No Palestinian Americans have been invited to speak at the convention, and “uncommitted” delegates to the convention — who have been withholding their support for Harris — held a sit-in outside the convention on Wednesday night after being denied a speaker.
Some speakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Biden himself, have acknowledged the war, and the protesters. In his address Monday, Biden decried innocent people “being killed on both sides” and called for the release of hostages, a surge in humanitarian assistance to Gaza and a cease-fire to prevent a wider war.
On Wednesday night, Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, the American Israeli parents of 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whom Hamas abducted from a music festival during the attack on Oct. 7, delivered an emotional plea from the convention stage for the release of the hostages and a cease-fire deal to stop the killing of Palestinian civilians. After the couple recalled in vivid detail what they had discovered about Hersh’s abduction, the crowd started to chant “Bring them home.”
“There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict of the Middle East,” Polin told the crowd. “In a competition of pain there are no winners.”
Harris has often sought to make a similar point about the conflict.
Harris is “an incredible messenger of empathy” for both the Jewish community and Palestinian civilians of Gaza, Jeremy Ben Ami, the president of the center-left Jewish political advocacy group J-Street, said Wednesday during a panel hosted by the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
In July, Ben Ami noted, Harris met Netanyahu and stated her clear and “unwavering commitment to the existence of the state of Israel, to its security and to the people of Israel” — and then called on Americans to eschew a binary view of the war.
“So, I ask my fellow Americans to help encourage efforts to acknowledge the complexity, the nuance and the history of the region,” Harris said at the time. “Let us all condemn terrorism and violence. Let us all do what we can to prevent the suffering of innocent civilians. And let us condemn antisemitism, Islamophobia and hate of any kind.”
Most Jewish Democrats agree, Jim Gerstein, a Democratic pollster and expert on the Jewish vote, argued during the JDCA panel. The overwhelming majority of Jewish voters still consider themselves very liberal and “have no problem … saying it is okay to be critical of Israeli government policy and still be pro-Israel,” he said. “Those things are not inconsistent.”
Halie Soifer, a former national security adviser to Harris in the Senate, argued that Jewish Democrats were far more concerned with the “tolerance and acquiescence of antisemitism being espoused almost daily by Donald Trump.”
Trump, who has a history of trafficking in antisemitic tropes and cozying up with antisemitic figures and white supremacists, has sought to capitalize on divisions in the Democratic Party over the war in Gaza. He recently called Emhoff, the second gentleman, “a crappy Jew” and on Wednesday night took aim at “the highly overrated Jewish” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in a post on Truth Social, claiming that Harris “hates Israel.”
But some Jewish Democrats think Harris could go a step further in standing with the Jewish community and combating antisemitic language by calling herself a Zionist. Biden has repeatedly described himself as a Zionist who believes that “Israel is a safe haven for Jews because of their history of how they’ve been persecuted,” he explained in an interview last month. Harris has not explicitly used the word but has repeatedly identified herself as a staunch supporter of the principle that the Jewish people should be sovereign in the state of Israel.
For Orna Neutra, the mother of 22-year-old Omer, one of the five Americans still believed to be held hostage in Gaza, Harris’s use of the word could help pierce the “alternative reality we are living in,” she said in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday.
“I’d like her to say that because there’s this twisted reality where it’s become associated with all of these other buzzwords like genocide, colonialism and all of that — it’s just a distortion,” said Neutra, who was sporting a shirt with a picture of Omer on it and a piece of tape affixed to her chest that read “319” — the number of days he has been held hostage.
“We’re on the same side, we have a shared goal,” Neutra said of the activists committed to preventing more Palestinian deaths. “We want to bring our loved ones home, we want their people to be out of harm’s way.”
