Second gentleman Doug Emhoff on Monday will host a half-dozen Jewish students from colleges around the country amid a wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests criticized for featuring antisemitic behavior.
The event, which will take place at the White House, will formally mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, with all the attendees having grandparents who survived the Holocaust. But it’s also geared toward current events. A White House official said it will address rising antisemitism in the country, including “recent events on college campuses.” The official, who spoke about internal planning on condition of anonymity, said the event was put together at Emhoff’s direction.
“On Yom HaShoah, we honor the lives of the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust," the second gentleman said in a statement to POLITICO. "At a time when antisemitism is surging, including threats of violence against Jews, we are reminded that we must never allow history to repeat itself. We must continue to fight antisemitism and hate and educate others on the horrors of the past.”
The event is another illustration of the administration’s efforts to more forcefully insert itself into a campus protest storyline that it has, for the most part, kept its distance from. It also underscores the central role that Emhoff is now playing in crafting the White House response.
Emhoff is the only of the four principals at the White House who is known to have called students who felt targeted or threatened by the demonstrations. In all, he has made two rounds of calls in recent weeks with Jewish students and Jewish community leaders, including Columbia University.
Monday’s event will be the first the administration has held involving students since pro-Palestinian encampments began popping up at colleges weeks ago, with demonstrators demanding, among other things, that their universities divest from Israel.
The half dozen students attending hail from Lehigh University, Bryn Mawr College, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Southern California, The United States Military Academy at West Point, and Muhlenberg College. The White House official said that in addition to meeting students, Emhoff will also be meeting with Holocaust survivors, including Tova Friedman, an 86-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The White House has criticized those protests that have crossed the line into intimidation. But, until recently, it was aides, not the president, who were issuing the condemnations. President Joe Biden had not commented in any extensive way on the matter until last Thursday, when he criticized those protests that had turned violent.
“There is a right to protest but there is not a right to cause chaos,” the president said. “Destroying property is not a peaceful protest, it’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduation, none of this is a peaceful protest.”
On Tuesday, Biden will deliver a speech on Capitol Hill marking the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual “days of remembrance” commemoration. He will “discuss the moral duty to combat the rising scourge of antisemitism,” White House Press Secretary Karine-Jean Pierre told reporters last week.
Emhoff is one of the most prominent Jews in the country and has served as the de facto leader for the Biden administration on combating the rise of antisemitism across the country. For months, he told aides and reporters he’s been concerned about the tinderbox on college campuses. And in November, he told POLITICO that what was happening on campuses was already a “crisis of antisemitism.”
“There seems to be a conflation of not being able to separate the actions of the Israeli government and Jewish people and taking out feelings that they have about the actions of the Israeli government on all Jews, irrespective of how those Jews may also feel about the actions of the Israeli government,” he said.
In recent weeks, he’s become even more outspoken. In a recent interview with NBC, Emhoff said that while the administration supported the right to protest, when “that crosses into violence, when that crosses into calls for genocide, Jews to be murdered — that is completely unacceptable and must be stopped.”
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