WASHINGTON — Coming down the stairs in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City in 2017, Kamala Harris saw the Western Wall and knew what she had to do.
Harris, then a California senator, reached into her pocket and pulled out a blue kippah and clips she had prepared for the occasion. She told her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, to bend down a bit and fastened the kippah to his head.
Halie Soifer, then Harris’ national security advisor, took a candid photo of the moment, which she says embodied Harris’ relationship with the Jewish community: The senator knew what to expect at a moment of Jewish significance.
“She prepared for it because she knew it would be meaningful for Doug,” said Soifer, who is now the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “Part of the reason that trip was so special for both of them was because it was his first time in Israel.”
The trip was Harris’ third time in the country.
Harris went on to become vice president and has now been catapulted to running for the country’s highest office after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed her.
Over the course of her life and career, she has been surrounded by Jews, from her schoolmates to her colleagues to her closest family members. That background has given Harris, 59, a familiarity with Jewish spaces, say those who have interacted with her.
She has encouraged Emhoff to embrace his Jewish identity. For the first time, mezuzahs have been installed at the vice presidential residence, and Emhoff has taken a leading role in the administration’s efforts to fight anti-Semitism.
But Harris has also stirred concerns. She has staked out positions on Israel’s war with Hamas, and the student protests against it, that are to Biden’s left and that are sympathetic to some of the war’s strongest critics.
In her entry in the visitor’s book at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, she said she was “devastated by the silent testimonies of those who died in the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for the Holocaust not commonly used outside the Jewish community.
In a 2017 speech to AIPAC she referenced “those Jewish National Fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel,” when she was a child in the Bay Area.
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, says that Harris is in lockstep with Emhoff in chairing Biden’s task force to counter anti-Semitism.
“We are being presented with a wake up call, the blast of the shofar,” she said last Rosh Hashanah about the growth of anti-Semitism. “We are dealing with very powerful forces that are attempting to wage what I think is a full-on attack against hard-won freedoms, liberty.”
She has also been the lead administration spokesperson on combating abortion restrictions.
But when it comes to Israel, her detractors see her as closer to the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, which has become increasingly critical of Israel. Critics of Israel share that assessment of Harris — but see it as a positive.
Both point to a speech Harris gave in March when she called for an “immediate ceasefire” in the conflict for at least six weeks to pave the way for a release of Israeli hostages. Biden had not used the same phrase to call for a truce.
“Biden made many mistakes regarding Israel, but he is miles ahead of Harris in terms of support for Israel,” David Friedman, who was ambassador to Israel under the Trump administration that forged the Abraham Accords, told the Jerusalem Post.
“She is on the fringe of the progressive wing of the party, which sympathizes more with the Palestinian cause.”
Lily Greenberg Call, a Jewish staffer who quit the Biden administration to protest its backing for Israel and who worked for Harris’ unsuccessful presidential run in 2020, said she was hopeful Harris would scale back Biden’s pro-Israel policy.
Harris’ backers say she understands Israel’s security needs. On the 2017 visit to the country, Soifer recalled her viewing Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and its cybersecurity capabilities.
She is friendly with Israel President Isaac Herzog.
Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, a Jewish Democratic donor, said that Harris recently screened a documentary on the sexual violence that Hamas perpetrated on Oct. 7, when its terrorists raided Israel, launching the current war.
“She came out very, very strongly” against some pro-Palestinian activists denying the rape accounts, Laszlo Mizrahi said. At the screening, Harris said, “We cannot look away.”
Just months after Harris joined the Senate in 2017, one of her first speeches was to AIPAC, where she said her first act as a senator was introducing a resolution that condemned a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel.
Her sponsorship separated her from the just-departed Obama administration, which had allowed the Security Council to pass the resolution. Another sign of her cultivating AIPAC was that she declined the endorsement of J Street. This year, J Street has endorsed Harris for president.
“I believe that a resolution to this conflict cannot be imposed. It must be agreed upon by the parties themselves. Peace can only come through a reconciliation of differences and that can only happen at the negotiating table,” Harris told AIPAC.
“I believe that when any organization delegitimizes Israel, we must stand up and speak out for Israel to be treated equally.”
Israeli officials worry that Harris has changed, pointing to her March speech, where she blamed Israel for a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Harris’ critics also take issue with sympathy she’s evinced for the nationwide student protests against the Gaza war which, Jewish students said, created a hostile atmosphere for them and saw cases of anti-Semitic harassment.
“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” Harris told The Nation earlier this month.
“There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”
Discussing the recent protests in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Harris said that when she was a prosecutor, she would tell police, “If there’s vandalism, I’m charging them. If there’s violence, I’m charging them, you can be sure.”