Biden’s Plan to Protect Jews

In politics, the timing of when you choose to say something can be just as important as what you say. That’s why politicians often release unhelpful information on a Friday afternoon, when voters are less likely to be paying close attention to the news before heading into a weekend. The only better way to bury a story is to go public just before a national or religious holiday, when the audience’s time away from current events coverage will be even longer.

President Biden deserves significant credit for developing a national strategy for combatting antisemitism. But the plan was made public on Erev Shavuot, greatly diminishing the likelihood that most of the Jewish community would hear the news. The announcement was also made as the nation was preparing for Memorial Day weekend and when the national press corps was preoccupied by the deadline for raising the government’s debt limit. Unless the president’s advisors had waited until the day before Rosh Hashanah or the morning of Super Bowl Sunday, it would have been difficult for them to do anything more to avoid attention any further.

The release went as they hoped, causing barely a ripple in the news pond. Jewish media rushed out their stories before shutting down for the holiday. Most mainstream news organizations also did abbreviated coverage and were unable to provide follow-up analysis or context until the following week. (As of the time this article was submitted, the Los Angeles Times had not covered the story at all.)

Why would the White House not want to highlight such an important proposal?  It laid out an impressive set of security-related goals, including additional funding and law enforcement support for synagogues, parochial schools and other religious nonprofit organizations, and better coordination for reporting and preventing hate crimes between agencies at different levels of government. It also included an array of more amorphous but commendable education and awareness initiatives designed to take on the daunting task of changing public attitudes.

All in all, it’s a respectable collection of ideas, the type of thing that a president should feel comfortable bragging about. But Biden and his advisors knew that the growing divide within the Democratic Party over issues relating to Israel and the Middle East could overshadow the announcement, specifically the ongoing debate over the definition of antisemitism. At a time when the White House could ill afford a public fight with either Jewish leaders who aggressively defend Israel from criticism or progressive detractors of the Jewish state, they scheduled the release for a time when they knew it would not attract a great deal of public attention.

In the weeks leading up to the plan’s announcement, Jewish advocacy groups and other Democratic-aligned organizations spared no effort to influence the White House on which definition of antisemitism should be employed. The standard outlined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has already been adopted by the U.S. State Department, as well as forty other countries around the world. But opposing voices fought to convince Biden’s advisors that an alternative definition should be used instead, one that asserts a much weaker link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

The White House ultimately tried to have it both ways, elevating the IHRA definition while recognizing that other standards also exist. 

The White House ultimately tried to have it both ways, elevating the IHRA definition while recognizing that other standards also exist. Given that a strategy to protect Jews that does not enjoy unified Jewish support is unlikely to succeed, this something-for-everyone approach is probably the best that Biden could do. But it did not spare the president from criticism from both sides of the debate, ensuring that the positive aspects of the proposal would be eclipsed by our internal argument.

Biden’s plan is not perfect, but it contains some valuable ideas that will aid in the fight against antisemitism. However, his strategy also reminds us of the limits of what sort of cultural and attitudinal changes can be accomplished through government action – there’s no way to legislate against hate. And most importantly, it should force us to realize that resolving these divisions within our own community is not the president’s responsibility — but our own.

Dan Schnur is a Professor at the University of California – Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine. Join Dan for his weekly webinar “Politics in the Time of Coronavirus” (www.lawac.org) on Tuesdays at 5 PM.