WASHINGTON — When Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office as US president and vice president on Wednesday, Jan. 20, Biden was the oldest person ever to occupy the White House, and Harris is the first woman or person of color to be vice president.
Biden’s three children who survived into adulthood all married Jews, making him a grandfather to several Jewish grandchildren. (Biden’s first wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident in 1972.)
Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish. Chanukah, says Harris, is “a celebration of, always, tikkun olam, which is about fighting for justice and fighting for the dignity of all people, and it’s about rededication.”
Most American Jews marry outside the faith — 58% according to the most recent national survey, conducted in 2013 by the Pew Research Center.
Some 45% of intermarried Jews are raising their children in the Jewish religion, according to Pew, up from 28% in 1990.
In the Reform movement, rabbis officiate at interfaith weddings, many temples have non-Jews as members, and certain ritual roles during synagogue services are open to non-Jews.
The Reconstructionist movement in 2015 dropped a ban against accepting intermarried students to the movement’s rabbinical school.
In the Conservative movement, more than one-quarter of all homes include a non-Jewish family member, according to the Pew survey.
The prevailing attitudes of Americans generally toward Jews have changed. In the 1950s and ’60s, large swaths of Americans disdained Jews in one way or another:
In 1958, only 62% of Americans said they’d be willing to vote for a well-qualified Jewish political candidate, compared to 91% in 2015.
A 1964 survey found that 43% of Americans held Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, compared to 26% in 2004.
While 2019 saw a 40-year high in anti-Semitic incidents in the US, it is common for non-Jews with Jews in their families to express pride about their Jewish relatives. Biden, a Catholic, is one example.
Biden’s Jewish son-in-law, Dr. Howard Krein, married Biden’s youngest daughter, Ashley Biden, in an interfaith ceremony in 2012 officiated by a Roman Catholic priest and a Reform rabbi, Joseph M. Forman.
Biden’s son Beau, who died of cancer in 2015, also married a Jew: Hallie Olivere, whose Jewish mother Biden had known since his own childhood.
Biden’s second son, Hunter, recently married for a second time — this time to Melissa Cohen, a Jewish documentary filmmaker from South Africa. The couple had their first child, a son born in Los Angeles, last March.
That brought the number of Biden grandchildren with a Jewish parent to three, adding to Beau and Hallie’s two children.
Biden is not the first US president with a child married to a Jew.
Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka underwent conversion by an Orthodox rabbi before marrying her Jewish husband, Jared Kushner, in 2009.
The couple regularly observe Shabbat, attend Orthodox synagogues and send their kids to Jewish day school.
Chelsea Clinton, the only daughter of former US president Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, married a Jew, Marc Mezvinsky, in 2010, a decade after her father left office. Their interfaith ceremony was co-officiated by a rabbi and a minister. The couple has three children.
Chelsea Clinton is a Methodist. Responding two years ago to an online troll who wrote that she “isn’t even Jewish she’s just ugly,” Clinton responded: “Hi Adam — you’re right, I am not Jewish. Since you find me ugly, feel free to never look at me. The ugly Jew is a vile centuries old anti-Semitic trope so next time, please just go straight to ugly and leave out the rest. Thank you.”
After Congresswoman Ilhan Omar claimed in February, 2019 that AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, pays politicians to support Israel, Clinton tweeted:
“We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism.”
President Barack Obama does not have any Jewish family ties, but so many of his White House advisers and close associates were Jews that Obama held a private seder every Passover during his eight years in the White House.
Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, would have been vice president had Al Gore, who won half a million more votes than George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election, held onto Florida. In a disputed recount, the Supreme Court ultimately awarded the presidency to Bush.
When Harris was sworn in this week as vice president, it marked the first time a Jew will live in one of the top two official US residences: the US Naval Observatory, official home of the vice president.
Lior Zaltzman contributed to this report.
I guess the author of this drivel has not noticed that this election was disputed in six states as opposed to one in 2000. And of course missed all of the anti-semites who now occupy position of power in the Biden* administration. The new designation of Ambassador to Israel being callaed Ambassador to Israel, West Bank and Gaza also slipped the notice. It is certainly a different jewish world now.