Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
This week, Doug Emhoff was informed of his removal from the US
Holocaust Memorial Council, alongside other Biden appointees, by the Trump
administration. Emhoff responded in a statement to the New York Times, which
said, in part, “Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized.
To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous
— and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum
was created to preserve.”
Emhoff, of course, is missing the point. His ouster is not about politicization
but about failure—about being bad at one’s job. To put it bluntly, the Biden
administration’s approach to remembering the lessons of the Holocaust ain’t
working. Witness the campus
protests exploding on college campuses since October 7, with professors
gushing that they found the massacre “exhilarating” and with students assaulted
for being Jewish and afraid to go to their classes.
Antisemitism proliferated and became widespread during the
Biden years. So tell us, Doug Emhoff, why would President Trump still want you and
your pals in charge? And what does it tell us about you that this explosion of
antisemitism happened on the watch of your closest associates, including your
wife?
No, getting rid of Emhoff is not about politicization, nor is
it about scoring points. New administrations clean house. Biden unraveled
Trump’s first-term policies with a vengeance. Now Trump is restoring order, installing
his own people—people who care about making America great again—which includes making
Jewish students safe again.
Given Trump’s unapologetic support for Israel and admiration
for the Jewish people, it’s only logical he’d want to appoint Holocaust
Memorial Council members who would advocate for Jewish students drowning in a
sea of campus hate. The Biden years, on the other hand, were basically a replay
of Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. The uproar on German campuses then,
were no different than those on American campuses today. This is where Biden
and company, including Doug Emhoff and the symbolic, synthetic Holocaust
council he sat on, led us.
Which is why Emhoff and his ilk just weren’t going to make the cut once Donald
Trump turned his sights on the mess they’d made, the out-of-control antisemitism
spreading across America like an oil spill, something very difficult to clean.
Trump had perfectly viable reasons to fire Doug Emhoff’s butt.
Beyond Trump, the Jewish people should themselves be questioning Emhoff’s
suitability to sit on a Holocaust memorial council. Doug Emhoff, born Jewish,
married non-Jewish women—first his ex, then Kamala Harris. His children? Not
Jewish. By choice, Emhoff severed his Jewish line, a voluntary echo of the deliberate
destruction Hitler inflicted on Jews who had no choice in the matter. What
could be more antithetical to the Holocaust’s memory than a Jew who, with eyes
wide open, ends his branch of the tribe? If that’s not a betrayal of Jewish continuity,
what is?
Why would we want this person deciding how the memory of the
Holocaust and the murdered should be preserved when he himself has ended his
own Jewish chapter? A man who doesn’t
even know the meaning of Chanuka?
Then there is the matter of Emhoff’s non-Jewish daughter, Ella, who raised money for UNRWA whose staffers have killed Jews alongside Hamas—a group whose charter calls for annihilating the Jewish people.
Ella calls Kamala
“Momala,”
as if Harris were some Jewish matriarch, while helping those who would erase
her father’s people. Kamala herself? Hardly
a friend to Israel before or since October 7, as we well know.
This is the
Emhoff-Harris clan: Jewish when it suits the optics, divorced from Judaism when
it counts.
I always tell friends whose parents or grandparents survived
the Holocaust that their children are a victory over Hitler. One branch that evil
didn’t manage to snuff out. Emhoff? He is the opposite of that, a victory
handed to Hitler on a plate. Because Doug is the absolute end of his line. And
he did it seemingly without a second thought—twice.
Emhoff may be an expert in the Final Solution, having killed off his line. But in no way should we consider Doug a suitable person to honor the memory of those who had their lines cut short by Hitler and his “Final Solution.” A Jew who voluntarily cuts short their own line is doing Hitler’s work for him and should not be serving on a Holocaust Memorial Council. The Holocaust Memorial Council should be peopled by those who embody the Jewish will to endure, not those who shrug as the legacy of their ancestors fades away.
Not long ago, on Quora I was asked, “Why
is being pro-Israel but anti-Zionist considered by some as being extremely
antisemitic?”
I kept my response simple, saying that anti-Zionism is by definition
antisemitic, because to be anti-Zionist is to be against Jewish rights. I didn’t
specify which rights. I left it at that. But of course, Zionism is the right of
the Jewish people to be sovereign in their indigenous land.
The opposite of that, of course, is to agitate to ethnically
cleanse Israel of Jews from the river to the sea.
Which is why Ella Emhoff’s fundraising for UNRWA isn’t a
call to help the people of Gaza—but a call to eliminate the Jews and steal
their rightful heritage, the Land of Israel. Ella’s father Doug, by extension,
is complicit not only in his own line’s demise; but in the efforts of his spawn
to undermine the survival of the Jewish people as a whole. How can such a man
sit on a council meant to honor those who died for being Jews? Should this
person, whose actions and those of his family are antithetical to the preservation
and rights of the Jewish people get to decide things about the Holocaust?
To my own children, I often say, “Never mind the rest.
Just have Jewish babies.”
Because nothing on earth is more important than that. It’s the
most righteous and most philosemitic response to Hitler I can think of:
add Jews to your family tree—continue the line.
Continue the line. The rest is only sound and fury,
signifying nothing. Which is pretty much the story of Doug Emhoff’s small
little life.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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