Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden at a campaign rally in Kansas City on March 7, 2020. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty)
WASHINGTON — Monday, April 27, was supposed to have been a good news day for Joe Biden: The venerable New York congresswoman Nita Lowey convened hundreds of women on a phone call to launch a new group, Jewish Women for Joe.
The timing, though, was not auspicious. The same day, Business Insider published the first on-the-record corroboration of a sexual assault claim leveled in March by Tara Reade, an aide to Biden in 1992-93.
That landed like a bombshell for the feminists and others who hope to oust President Donald Trump in November.
“This is the most persuasive corroborating evidence that has come out so far,” Michelle Goldberg, a liberal opinion columnist for The New York Times, said on Twitter. “What a nightmare.”
Last month, Goldberg concluded a column about Reade by saying that she had “doubt about Biden and doubt about the charges against him.”
Jewish feminists, including those who have been active in exposing sexual impropriety in the Jewish organizational context, were bowled over by the revelation, too.
Avigayil Halpern, a rabbinical student in New York, posed the question on Twitter: “I’m hoping that the newly launched @JewishWomen4Joe will react swiftly to these increasingly compelling allegations of sexual assault.”
Julie Schonfeld, the Conservative rabbi who was one of the founders of the grassroots Jewish Women for Joe, said she was waiting out the latest Biden allegations to see if they had legs.
Schonfeld mentioned a column by Ruth Marcus, a Jewish Washington Post opinion writer who wrote a book about the sexual assault allegations in 2018 against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
On April 29, Marcus considered the new evidence and said Biden “needs to answer the legitimate questions about the allegations.”
Lowey, the New York Democrat who is retiring this year and 30 years ago helped lead the charge against the confirmation to the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas, who was accused of sexual harassment, did not return a request for comment.
Biden as a senator and then as vice president to Barack Obama was closely identified with some of the key feminist gains of Lowey’s generation, helping to author the Violence Against Women Act and advance equal pay initiatives.
Biden’s record with women is not unblemished. Feminists still criticize his handling of the 1991 Thomas hearings, which he chaired, saying that he did not protect Anita Hill, Thomas’ accuser. Last year he apologized after multiple women, including, Reade, accused him of unwanted touching.
“As someone who has enthusiastically volunteered for both Obama and Clinton, I’m not yet at a point where I feel comfortable actively campaigning for Biden,” said Michaela Brown, 25, a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Boston.
Evangelical Christians back Trump because they see him as a vehicle that advances their moral priorities, including restrictions on abortion and loosening strictures on church activism in public life. He does not need to be a model of morality himself, they argue.
Katie Halper, the Jewish podcaster who first aired Reade’s allegations, said keeping Reade at arm’s length as a means of electing Biden is “shameful.”
“Tara wants Biden to step down, understandably, as do others who see him as a disastrous candidate,” Halper, who backed Biden’s rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries, wrote last month in the Guardian.
“Others wish Tara had been listened to before Biden was the last man standing, but now see no alternative. Both positions are understandable and neither should be shamed. But what is shameful is ignoring or belittling Tara because it’s politically inconvenient to grapple with her story.
“We are in an excruciating situation with no easy solutions.”
