As election season draws to a close, leading Jewish political voices from across the political spectrum are competing — often on podcasts — over which presidential candidate will best serve the interests of American Jewry.

“Unholy: Two Jews on the News,” a podcast hosted by Israeli presenter Yonit Levi and British journalist Jonathan Freedland, called the dilemma “the great Jewish debate” over who — former President Donald Trump or the vice president. President Kamala Harris – is actually “It’s good for the Jews, to put it bluntly.” The program Tuesday episode featured Dan Senor, host of the “Call Me Back” podcast and foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, defending Republicans, and Jeremy Bash, who was CIA chief of staff during the Obama administration , representing the Democrats.

Bari Weiss’s “Honestly” podcast featured a similar debate over whether the Democratic or Republican Party would better serve the Jewish community. Popular conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro represented the Republicans, while neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris represented the Democrats.

Harris said that “more than anything,” his approach to the election was: “I just want this experiment in continued political emergency to end.” I want this to be behind us and from my perspective, Kamala Harris, whatever her weaknesses as a candidate, would only represent a much-needed return to normal politics.

Shapiro, meanwhile, said: “I’m going to use a little different model. I think Sam is coming from the view that Trump is preemptively disqualified from the race, just from the beginning to the end of the period we are done, and that ends the calculus for me. The question is whether you were better off in 2019 or 2024? »

Harris acknowledged that anti-Semitism existed on both the left and the right, and noted that both men were concerned about the recent rise in anti-Jewish hatred. Yet, he said, the “really scary anti-Semitism” that could lead to violence like that provoked by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh “is on the right.” Harris argued that the far right is responsible for “truly frightening anti-Semitism,” which he said was “wrapped up in its populist phenomenon of Trumpism.”

Shapiro responded by criticizing Harris’ argument about what can be defined as “truly frightening anti-Semitism.”

“There are multiple forms of truly frightening anti-Semitism. One of them is the kind of individual anti-Semite who will murder Jews,” Shapiro said. “Then there is a second type of truly frightening anti-Semitism: it is a system-wide infusion of anti-Semitic worldviews into an entire party. You see this happening in the Democratic Party right now, and it scares me very much as a Jew and as an American, when the intersectional ideology that suggests that victimhood equates to failure, that you have failed in life, therefore you are a victim. of something. »

“You can see it in a lot of grievance politics, but you see it in intersectional terms in the intersectional left,” Shapiro continued. “And so the idea that if you’re Jewish it means you’re successful, it means you’re an exploiter. This matrix is ​​then applied to international politics in the same way that, for example, Ta-Nehisi Coates applied it to the Israeli-Palestinian situation and it becomes a deeply held belief within the Democratic Party.

Weiss herself praised Trump’s foreign policy record before asking Harris to explain her continued opposition to the former president. “I think probably the strongest argument for Trump is his foreign policy legacy, not only because there were no wars, but also because good things happened, like the Abraham Accords, such as encouraging European allies to take more responsibility for their defense. I think the choice sometimes feels like maybe you have stability but weakness on his part and madness on his part. It sometimes feels like a choice between madness and weakness,” Weiss said.

Harris responded by suggesting that there were “guardrails” in place during Trump’s first term that kept him in line on Israel and broader foreign policy issues. He argued that the former president “broke these guardrails and committed to removing them” during his second term.

Harris later acknowledged that the vice president included a warning about ending the suffering in Gaza, but explained that she was doing so because she needed the votes of “young, liberal, confused people who have believed everything they saw in the Gaza Strip. TikTok on the “genocide in Gaza perpetrated by the evil IDF”.

Harris also said he would have preferred to see the vice president choose Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as his running mate rather than Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, although he rejected the idea that his decision was based on concerns linked to anti-Semitic discourse amid reports that Shapiro was a contender for the role. Harris later added that he was “a fan of the Abraham Accords and a lot of the things that (Jared) Kushner did that Trump made him do.” I think I have no shame in admitting it.

In “Unholy,” Bash touted Harris’ support for Israel to shoot down missiles from Iran and “use military force appropriately against Iran against Iranian surrogates and proxies earlier this year” to defend the Vice President against Senor’s argument that she was not a reliable person. ally of Israel. He also pointed out that Harris was retaining President Joe Biden’s language on Israel policy in the Democratic National Committee’s 2024 agenda, despite pressure from the party’s anti-Israel factions to make changes.

Senor countered by arguing that it is not Bash’s wing of the party that focuses popular energy, suggesting that the future direction of the Democratic Party will be more hostile to the Jewish state.

“I know these words as I quote them precisely because she repeats them over and over and they are engraved in my head. She (Harris) says: “Israel has the right to defend itself, but how it defends itself matters.” Second, it fundamentally legitimizes criticism of “the way Israel defends itself.” I find it outrageous… this kind of language that it matters how Israel defends itself, as if there are legitimate grievances about how Israel has conducted its response to the seven-front war, is a signal, she sends a signal,” Senor said. .

Bash responded by arguing that “this idea that she is somehow signaling that she supports the claim that Israel engaged in genocide – is completely false. »

Asked about Trump’s recent remarks that Jews cost him the election and the language used at his Madison Square Garden rally, which included Tucker Carlson, despite the conservative commentator’s continued refusal to apologize for featuring a platform and praised a Holocaust revisionist, Senor condemned both, while warning that he did not do so. I think this rhetoric would translate into policies targeting Israel or the Jewish community.

Bash said Trump’s failure to condemn such anti-Semitic and anti-immigration language at the rally made him untrustworthy. He also highlighted Trump’s response to the Charlottesville, Virginia, protest in 2017, where white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us” during a march.

Senor emphasized Democrats’ inaction on domestic anti-Semitism, pointing to Senate Democrats’ refusal to hold hearings on the subject or allow floor consideration of any relevant legislation. He highlighted the contrast between the White House and Senate, both controlled by Democrats, and the Republican-led House, where the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act passed with bipartisan support in early May and where numerous high-level committee hearings have been held on the subject.

Bash argued that the White House’s National Anti-Semitism Strategy, a sweeping policy initiative launched by the Biden administration last May, was proof of Harris and Democrats’ commitment to engage on this issue.
Bash then asked how anyone could believe Trump would stop using “his white nationalist, MAGA, football player, neo-Nazi,” Daily storm Once he becomes president, he echoes the clichés of the 1939 campaign,” to which Senor responded, “because he was actually president for four years and it’s impossible to articulate a only policy affecting the Jewish community in the United States regarding anti-Semitism. I have a problem with the first Trump administration.”