The recent revelation that Kamala Harris' team asked Pennsylvania's Jewish governor, Josh Shapiro, whether he was an Israeli agent during the vice presidential vetting process shows the dangerous degree to which antisemitic views have infected American politics. This episode, coupled with wider concerns about rising antisemitism on both the left and the right, raises the concern that antisemitism could be impeding Jewish participation in political life at the highest levels. More broadly, it raises the question of whether the recent surge in antisemitism is a temporary phenomenon in a country that had seemingly moved past the world's oldest hatred, or a depressing return to the natural order of things?
In the United States, at least, this is the wrong framing, as America lacks a founding antisemitic tradition. This does not mean that America has no history of antisemitism, but it does mean that Jews are a foundational part of the American story in a way that they could hardly claim to be in England or France or Russia or Turkey. Our founders imagined themselves in dialogue with Jews and even saw themselves as stand-ins for Jews in a history-and-nation-defining encounter with both nature and God. And just as Jewish thought shaped the people who first settled and then founded this country, that influence has in turn shaped the Jewish engagement with our nation since the very beginning, through what I like to call the four phases of Jewish participation in presidential politics.
Phase one was from America's founding through the end of the 19th century. Because of the philosemitism of the founders, Jews were generally welcome in America even as they had little involvement at the highest levels of government. At the same time, they were in no way precluded from participation, either. The Polish-born Jewish merchant Haym Salomon helped fund the American Revolution, in particular George Washington's decisive Yorktown campaign—and paid the bills of a host of revolutionary figures, including James Madison. As a result, Salomon—who might have made a great character in a Mel Brooks sketch—died broke.
Thomas Jefferson made the first Jewish presidential appointment, of Reuben Etting as U.S. marshal for Maryland. As president, James Madison appointed Mordecai Manuel Noah as consul to Tunis—the first Jewish ambassador, whose appointment was rescinded at the request of the Tunisian government, which did not want a Jew in the role. But it was the antisemitism of a Muslim country, not the United States, that led to Noah losing his position. Other early appointments include August Belmont, New York City fashion plate and founder of the Belmont Stakes, as ambassador to the Hague during the Franklin Pierce administration, and multiple others during the Civil War, including Abraham Lincoln's appointment of a Jewish quartermaster. (U.S. Senator Judah P. Benjamin's participation in the Confederate administration as both secretary of war and secretary of state makes him the most consequential Jewish politician in American history by a mile prior to the 20th century, though it seems that both Jews and many Southerners have since been eager to forget him.)
Antisemitism was not a major problem in America before the Civil War, with popular prejudice and national political organizations like the Know-Nothing Party instead dedicated to countering the subversive influence of Catholics in national life. Things started to change at an elite level following the end of the Civil War with the formation of the WASP class, which brought together often poorly educated Gilded Age tycoons—who were often from socially suspect backgrounds, like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers (Cornelius Vanderbilt was illiterate, and John D. Rockefeller's father, William Rockefeller, was a small-time crook in upstate New York)—with the socially prestigious but broke daughters of Mayflower families and Dutch Huguenots. This new class was ostensibly formed on the basis of race, cultural background, and religion—white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant—meaning that Jews were to be left out. The newly formed WASP elite used anti-Jewish prejudice as a weapon against Jewish competitors—resulting in quotas against Jews across the Ivy League and in elite law firms, banking, insurance companies, and upscale neighborhoods and hotels.
At the same time, the American Jewish population doubled during Theodore Roosevelt's administration, ushering in the second phase of American Jewish involvement in presidential administrations. Roosevelt had strong relationships with many Jews from his time as the police commissioner of New York, and he was the first president to have a Jewish "kitchen cabinet" of advisers on Jewish issues. In 1906, Roosevelt appointed one of those advisers, Oscar Straus, to be the first Jewish Cabinet secretary. Roosevelt bragged at an event celebrating the appointment that Straus' religion had nothing to do with his selection, only to be contradicted by the hard-of-hearing German-accented American Jewish community leader Jacob Schiff, who said, "Dot's right, Mr. President. You came to me and said, 'Chake, who is der best Jew I can appoint Segretary [sic] of Commerce.'"
The expansion of opportunity for Jews in national politics continued even as immigration restriction laws ended mass Jewish immigration to New York and other cities from Eastern Europe. Woodrow Wilson appointed Louis D. Brandeis as the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, and Herbert Hoover selected Benjamin Cardozo as the second Jewish justice. Franklin Roosevelt, who personally held all the generalized WASP prejudices against Jews, appointed Henry Morgenthau as secretary of the Treasury and Judge Samuel Rosenman as his speechwriter. The celebrated New York Jewish financier Bernard Baruch advised both Wilson and Roosevelt, in part because he found Washington more open to Jews than elements of the WASP-dominated New York financial world. In this second phase, Jews found more of a foothold in presidential administrations but also faced more antisemitism, both from WASP institutions and from Catholic and other ethnic rabble-rousers such as Father Charles Coughlin and the pro-Nazi German American Bund.
Following World War II, we entered a third phase. This period saw a welcome reduction in antisemitism in the United States as a whole, even among traditionally antisemitic immigrant groups from Europe, due in part to widespread revulsion at the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, America's hated World War II enemy. In this period, Jews, unshackled from the ghetto and discrimination, made remarkable gains in the cultural and academic worlds. The postwar years also saw the appointment of significant numbers of Jewish Americans to high-profile White House posts. The Jewishness of these appointees was noted, but generally in a positive light.
Key appointees in this period included speechwriters such as Richard Goodwin in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations and William Safire in the Nixon administration. With the appointment of Henry Kissinger as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon administration, Jews broke through the glass ceiling that confined them to roles as aides rather than as more visible public figures. Following Kissinger's high-profile appointment, it was no longer unusual for a Jew to get top-level positions.
The past few decades of the 20th century saw repeated milestones on this front. Jimmy Carter appointed Stuart Eizenstat as the first Jewish White House domestic policy adviser. Ronald Reagan picked Ken Duberstein as the first Jewish chief of staff. Even the George H. W. Bush team, in what presented itself in many ways as a throwback to older ideas of WASP-dom, had some prominent Jews in key positions, including Bill Kristol as Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff.
Jewish staffers were certainly more plentiful in the Bill Clinton administration. Kenneth Baer, a speechwriter for Clinton Vice President Al Gore, told me that it seemed that in those years, "25%-30% of the people I interacted with were Jewish." Baer said that there was even a joke about Al Gore having only "one speechwriter—a balding bespectacled Jew with an Ivy League education."
As the United States entered the 21st century, Jews reached another milestone. In August of 2000, Gore, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, selected Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman as his running mate. What was notable about this selection was the way in which Lieberman's conspicuous Jewish observance was widely seen as a political advantage rather than a disadvantage—making him palatable to northeastern liberals and God-fearing conservatives alike.
Gore and Lieberman lost the election—barely—but not because of Lieberman's Jewishness. In the aftermath of the Lieberman pick, it seemed that the White House doors were now wide open to Jews. George W. Bush picked a Jewish press secretary, Ari Fleischer, and later a Jewish chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, to serve as the public face of his administration. According to Jay Lefkowitz, a senior White House aide to Bush, Jewish presence in American politics reflected Jewish presence in elite institutions. As he put it, Jews have been "ubiquitous in upper echelons so [they have also been] ubiquitous in politics."
In recent years, high-level Jewish appointments have been so common that they barely attract much attention. The Obama administration had two Jewish chiefs of staff, Rahm Emanuel and Jack Lew. Baer, who also served under Obama, began listing senior Jewish appointees in the Obama administration, saying, "Emanuel, Gordon, Zients, Summers, Furman, Sunstein—I could go on for days ..."
Beyond the appointments are the familial connections of Jews to 21st-century first families. As former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz writes in her recent book, As a Jew, "Presidential candidate and then secretary of state Hillary Clinton's daughter and President Donald Trump's daughter both married Jews, as did all three of President Joe Biden's children and his vice president, Kamala Harris, who became the Democratic nominee for president."
In the first Trump administration, the president's most influential aide was his son-in-law Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew. The Biden administration was the first and probably will be the only presidential administration to have only Jewish White House chiefs of staff: Ron Klain and Jeff Zients. Remarkably, five of the 14 chiefs of staff in this century, in both Democratic and Republican administrations, have been Jewish.
Hiring openly identifiable Jews has not slowed down in the Trump administration and may have even increased. The current Trump administration has a Jewish staff secretary, deputy chief of staff, and commerce secretary—even as there are also some complaints about openly antisemitic appointees. The law professor Josh Blackman applies this analysis to judicial nominees as well, observing that "if you consider the percentage of Trump's Jewish judicial nominees against the percentage of Jews in America, we are punching way above our weight class." In addition, he adds, "the Trump Administration is stacked with Jewish people. A friend remarked that he recently had dinner with about ten Orthodox Jews who work in the administration."
Unfortunately for American Jews, the story does not end there. Only 25 years after the Lieberman selection, and the seeming integration of Jews through talent and marriage into the upper echelons of America's leadership class, it now seems plausible that the rise of antisemitism on both the left and the right may be creating a fourth phase of the Jewish relationship with the executive branch—a phase that promises to be more turbulent and perhaps more dangerous than its predecessors.
One direction that the fourth phase may take is rising antisemitism coupled with continuing widespread high-level Jewish participation in presidential administrations. According to Noam Neusner, who served in the George W. Bush White House, antisemitism is a reflection of Jewish power. In this fourth phase, "Jews have reached such a level of power that people are OK with criticizing them." In this scenario, reemerging antisemitism in American society won't necessarily limit entry to administration jobs. As Obama official Jarrod Bernstein told me, "We went all in on civic participation," and now, as a result, "we are in and not going anywhere." Bernstein relayed to me that a high-ranking Jewish Obama official told him, "We are 2% of the population but we are 20% of the meetings."
Yet this same dynamic of high visibility combined with inter-elite competition and grassroots hatred may bring about a period of unprecedented friction and danger for Jews, in which high-level Jewish political involvement proves irksome to antisemites and even to other inter-elite competitors—who, in turn, will have no shortage of Jewish rivals to scapegoat. This dynamic would likely be mirrored throughout the rest of society. Disaffected individuals or groups may also target prominent Jewish officials as a way of gaining sympathy for violent actions. We saw an element of this with the Passover firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro's mansion by a disturbed anti-Israel activist.
Another, also unpalatable, possibility is that this fourth phase could couple rising elite and popular antisemitism with diminishing opportunities for Jews, as national politicians fear that prominent Jewish appointees might alienate key voting blocs, be they Muslims in Michigan, progressive Israel critics, or anti-globalists on the right. In the summer of 2024, for example, Gov. Shapiro's Jewishness clearly seemed to count against him in the Democratic vice presidential selection process, as demonstrated by the offensive question from the Harris team of whether Shapiro was an Israeli agent. Bypassing Shapiro resulted instead in the choice of the less-talented Tim Walz as Kamala Harris' running mate.
In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the increasing mainstream acceptance of antisemitism in both major parties may already be causing the pipeline of future higher-level Jewish appointees to dry up. Baer, for one, suggested that the high-level Jews in the Biden administration could be a lagging indicator, reflecting high Jewish participation in the Clinton and Obama years rather than the current reality. According to Baer, some Jews faced challenges breaking into the lower levels of the Biden administration, which could affect Jewish participation in future Democratic administrations. This could stem from both discomfort with Jews from anti-Israel Democrats and reductions in qualified Jewish applicants being admitted to top schools—driven by that same discomfort. In the future, Baer feared that opportunities for Jewish staffers "might be hitting a brick wall depending on where the Democratic Party goes."
Related to this are concerns about a broader decline of Jews in elite institutions. As Jacob Savage wrote in his widely read 2023 Tablet article "The Vanishing," "Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing ... In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline." If it continues, this scenario could be bad for Jews and bad for America, as countries that mistreat their Jews often struggle with other pathologies. Bernstein, however, is less worried, noting that the likely 2028 Democratic candidates have "plenty of Jewish senior people around."
A third direction that the future may take is that the current surge in antisemitism will wane, and the fourth phase will be a better version of the third phase, with opportunities rising and antisemitism dwindling. This scenario is optimistic about both the Jews and America. As former Obama and Biden aide Chanan Weissman notes, "The Jewish story is the best story that America tells about itself." He adds, "Societies that treat their [Jewish] communities well, benefit." His scenario may not be one that many Jews see as likely at the moment, but it would be in keeping with the generally positive trajectory we have seen up until now. The problem with it is that straight-line extrapolations are often lacking in predictive power; in this case, they ignore the recent reemergence of antisemitism—which appears to be quite real.
The long history of the Jews and power in America is ultimately unique because of how little public controversy it has caused. Jews and Jewish ideas have been an essential part of this nation since its founding. While the current attacks on Jews from both the left and the right are by no means unique in the context of Jewish history, they are alien to American political culture—which is what makes this moment frightening. The attempt to mainstream antisemitism on both the left and the right should be properly understood as an attack by extremists in both parties on the existing political culture and on the principles of the American founding.
The American tradition is far more closely linked to the Jews and their many contributions to it than it is to the antisemites of the left or the right, whose hatred of the Jews reveals a rejection of that tradition—which they hope to reorder and replace with various European-born ideologies, from communism to fascism to theocracy, that have proven toxic to their political hosts. As Americans, Jews must lean in rather than retreat in the face of antisemitism, which in turn entails an embrace of this nation's philosemitic and Enlightenment-based founding principles.
In America, Jews belong everywhere, from the White House on down. Any future White House that rejects Jews would be reflecting its own rejection of the American founding tradition.
This project was undertaken with the support from the University of Pennsylvania's Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, which is publishing a longer version of this essay.