WASHINGTON (JTA) — US presidential candidate Donald Trump is again planning to highlight the threat of antisemitism and accuse his opponent, US Vice President Kamala Harris, of enabling it — the latest spotlighting of a Jewish issue in a presidential election that has seen a heavy focus on American Jews.
On Thursday, the former president will join one of his leading donors, Israeli American casino magnate Miriam Adelson, to roll out what the campaign bills as a “Fighting Anti-Semitism in America Event.”
The event will take place at a Washington DC hotel just 90 minutes before Trump is set to speak at a conference of the Israeli American Council. Earlier in the day, he is scheduled to visit a Jewish restaurant in the heavily Hasidic neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Much of the announcement of the event sought to associate Harris, Trump’s rival in the November presidential election, with Hamas terrorists and antisemites. It noted for instance that she attended the inauguration of Honduras’s president and vice president in January. The country’s vice president, Salvador Nasralla, had once appeared to accuse Israel of controlling a political rival.
This is the second time that Trump and Adelson have joined together to decry antisemitism at a campaign event. Trump has said that electing Harris will spell the end of Israel within two years and that Harris presages the oncoming of a second Holocaust.
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Democrats have also accused Trump of posing a danger to democracy; a Jewish Democratic group has accused Trump of being an antisemite and has drawn a connection between him and Hitler.
US Vice President Kamala Harris, gesturing during an unscheduled campaign stop at Community College of Philadelphia, September 17, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
On Tuesday, a slate of Jews who have deep ties in the Jewish organizational world endorsed Harris, saying she was best suited to advancing the US-Israel relationship and combating antisemitism.
The statement released Tuesday by 78 Jewish figures, most of them Democrats, was made in their capacity as “Jewish communal leaders.” It included past members of the board and a past director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, past top officials and founders of pro-Israel groups and members of the Schusterman family, a major donor to Jewish and Israel-related causes.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, “are champions of the prosperity, security and freedoms that are vital to our community and all Americans,” the statement said. “That is true across the spectrum—including strongly advancing the US-Israel relationship and fighting antisemitism.”
It quoted at length Harris’s pledge upon accepting her party’s nomination last month to continue supporting and defending Israel.
Susie Stern, a philanthropist who has held senior lay positions with the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Federations of North America, said the statement was necessary to underscore the broad Jewish communal support she believed Harris had, even as Trump is seeking to depict the vice president as alienated from Jews.
“People signed in their own names, but they are people who have been leaders, national leaders, and pretty much the ABCs of the Jewish organizations, but really from all ends of the spectrum,” Stern, who is the incoming chairwoman of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in an interview. “It demonstrates a broad based support from our community.”
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