The White House announced that Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, will convene a roundtable on Wednesday aimed at addressing rising antisemitism and hate in the United States.
Emhoff, who is Jewish, will host the roundtable in the wake of recent antisemitic comments by Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, and the revelation that the rapper and Holocaust-denying white supremacist Nick Fuentes recently had dinner with former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club.
It also comes after a number of other high-profile incidents, including NBA star Kyrie Irving promoting a link to a film containing antisemitic tropes on social media.
Emhoff, the first Jewish person among the top four officials in the executive branch of government, has become increasingly outspoken about growing bias toward adherents of the Jewish faith, and hate at large, in the United States.
“It’s painful, it hurts,” Emhoff said at an unrelated event on Friday. “I don’t want it to feel normal.”
“I don’t want people to think well it’s just words, it’s just Kanye,” Emhoff said. “No, this matters. This is important. We have to all step up and speak out about this as leaders in your communities.”
Emhoff, in his response at the conference, said he did not want this type of sentiment to “feel normal.”
“I don’t want people to think, ‘Well, it’s just words,’” he said. “We have to all step up and speak out about this as leaders in your communities. So as long as I have this microphone, I’m going to keep speaking up, speaking out, and again, not just about antisemitism but about hatred and bringing everyone else together.”
“This is not OK. It’s not OK,” Emhoff added. “We cannot be silent. We gotta push back. We gotta speak up. And we cannot make this normal. We cannot.”
White House officials, including senior presidential advisers Susan Rice and Keisha Lance Bottoms, and Deborah Lipstadt, special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, were slated to join.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents reached an all-time high in 2021, the largest figure recorded since the group began tracking such occurrences in 1979.
The president and vice president were among a number of officials who expressed outrage in the wake of Ye’s recent comments.
“I just want to make a few things clear: The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure,” Biden wrote on Twitter Friday morning. “And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity.”
“Praising Hitler and denying the Holocaust is vile, appalling, and must be condemned,” Vice President Harris wrote. “Our Administration will continue to stand up against antisemitism and the epidemic of hate.”
