President Biden, standing in front of six candles symbolizing the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, on Tuesday issued the strongest condemnation of anti-Semitism by any sitting US president.
For Jews watching a spike in hate crimes and instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric amid pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, Mr. Biden's speech at a Holocaust memorial ceremony at the Capitol was both deeply necessary and much appreciated. The Anti-Defamation League, which has been monitoring anti-Semitic incidents since the 1970s, says the number of such episodes has reached record highs in four of the past five years.
“At an unprecedented moment of rising anti-Semitism, he delivered a speech that no modern president has needed,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “There has not been a moment like this since the founding of the State of Israel. We said it will never get worse, but it has.”
But even though the president thought he might change his mind with his emotional and deeply personal speech — in which he recalled his father's discussions about the Holocaust at the dinner table and took his grandchildren to visit former concentration camps — there were few signs that he had caused many to reconsider their positions. . Instead, initial reactions were along ideological lines.
Republicans dismissed his comments as meek, while supporters of the Palestinians on the left attacked him for mixing criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
Warren David, co-founder of the Arab America Foundation, an advocacy group, said it was disappointing that Mr. Biden has not spoken more forcefully against anti-Arab racism and the death toll in Gaza.
“I wish he would also give a speech and talk about the lives of Palestinians that have been lost, and the pain and anguish that we feel as Palestinians and Arab Americans,” said Mr. David, who added that he condemns anti-Semitism. “Biden must pay more attention to Palestinians and Arab Americans in his discourse.”
The president spoke seven months after the terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7. About 1,200 people were killed along Israel's Gaza border and more than 200 were taken hostage in the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Echoes of the Holocaust loomed in the background of the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Activists have relied on slogans evoking the Holocaust, both to defend and attack Israel. While supporters of Israel chant and post the phrase “Never Again Now” on social media, critics of Israel often invoke the idea that “never again means never again to anyone.”
On Wednesday, several leaders of three public school districts will be questioned by members of a House committee that has already questioned four university presidents about anti-Semitism on campus, leading to the resignation of two theirs.
For months, Mr. Biden and other Democrats have faced relentless protests over steadfast support for Israel. But the speech Tuesday and his comments last week about the protests on campus indicated that the president appears more concerned with bolstering support among moderates than with rallying his party's left flank.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, who spoke before Biden on Tuesday, drew applause as he denounced racism, sexism and Islamophobia, along with other forms of hate. Mr. Biden continued to take a sharper focus on anti-Semitism, offering an “iron commitment” to Israel, its security and its existence as an independent state “even if we disagree.”
“To the Jewish community, I want you to know: I see your fear, your pain, your hurt,” Mr. Biden said. “Let me reassure you, as your president: you are not alone, you belong, always have been and always will be.”
Representative Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat who is Jewish and has family members who escaped or died in the Holocaust, called Mr. Biden's speech a much-needed moment of “moral clarity.”
“When we turn on the TV and we see all these people protesting on college campuses, there are people old enough to remember what happened on universities in Germany,” Mr. Moskowitz said. 'They weren't uneducated people on the streets. It was also the intelligentsia part of German society that got involved.”
He added that “parents of Jewish children are scared” because “they see this increase happening and it reminds them of the stories their grandparents told them.”
Just days before Mr. Biden's speech, Sharon Kleinbaum, the rabbi of the Beit Simchat Torah congregation in Midtown Manhattan, received a bomb threat targeting her synagogue, which caters to LGBTQ Jews.
“He walks a very fine line in referring to Jews and others, but this was Holocaust Remembrance Day and we feel vulnerable in America,” she said. “While I don't think all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, there are places where anti-Semitism flourishes. It's been messy.”
Diana Fersko, a rabbi in New York City and author of a book on anti-Semitism, said she heard the president's comments as a kind of pastoral salve.
“There was an attempt to hold the Jewish people emotionally – so many of us have been so deeply traumatized that it was reassuring to hear those reassuring words,” she said. “We don't feel like our pain has been seen and heard among people we once considered friends, so the recognition both then and now has been very affirming and empowering.”
Republicans have used the campus protests as a tool political cudgel against Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party. Donald J. Trump has the protesters “angry madmen' and praised the police officers for their arrest. Last month, Speaker Mike Johnson held a press conference at Columbia University, where he suggested Biden should do just that send in the National Guard to suppress protests. Mr Johnson also spoke at the event on Tuesday, comparing the protests to what happened in Nazi Germany.
Matt Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, accused the president of not doing enough to support efforts to defeat Hamas.
“This is a sad example of President Biden saying one thing publicly and privately and working behind the scenes to do something radically different,” he said by phone while traveling in Israel. “It's typical Joe Biden: he tries to tell everyone what they want to hear, but the reality of what they do is very different.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J-Street, a left-wing lobby organization that supports Israel but is highly critical of the current government, called the speech “very welcome” and praised the president for broadly tackling anti-Semitism.
“The battle over a millennia-old hatred should not be a partisan issue, but it has become a political football and that is a shame,” he said.
David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles and director of the Initiative to Study Hate, said the president soberly acknowledged the “extraordinarily surreal dark place we live in after October 7, with all its profound political and political ramifications of that. moral complications.”
But, Mr. Myers said, the president could have said more about the universal message of the lessons of the Holocaust, including the treatment of civilians. “It would have been a courageous and important statement to make clear that support for Palestinian freedom and justice is not necessarily anti-Semitic,” he said. And he added that Mr. Biden also missed an opportunity to explain that the current spike in anti-Semitism in the United States first emerged from the far right during Mr. Trump's rise.
Shane Goldmacher reporting contributed.