The number of Jews in the world peaked 85 years ago at about 16.6 million people. After the horrors of World War II, that number rose to 11 million. Today there are fewer than 8 million Jewish adults and 2.5 million Jewish children in the United States, most of whom live in the Northeast. Only 1 in 10 call the Midwest home. About 2% of Michiganders are Jewish, most of whom live on the East Side.
Seventeen-year-old Sam Ostrow lives on the West Side.
specialist in thought
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LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports and news in the United States.
So, among the hundreds of people who gathered in a sea of diversity to welcome the “second gentlemen” earlier this week, Ostrow’s kippah was the only one I saw.
“I can’t vote, but I feel like Doug Emhoff is a face that a lot of Jews can look up to right now,” she said. “It’s been a tough year and he’s always been a constant voice for us.”
On Thursday morning, as Vice President Kamala Harris was in Georgia preparing for her first interview since announcing her presidential bid, her husband Emhoff was with supporters at a brewery in western Michigan.
How important is this state for Harris’ campaign?
This is Emhoff’s first public appearance since the Democratic National Convention. After announcing Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate, Harris and Emhoff spent their first two days in Michigan canvassing for unions.
A critic of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign didn’t bother to visit a UAW union hall. That’s like leaving “I’ll Always Love You” off Whitney Houston’s greatest hits list.
On the contrary, Donald Trump Michigan received special attention in 2016.including three times in the final week of the election campaign. Of Michigan’s 83 counties, Trump canceled 12 of them.
Democrats are falling behind. They have receipts to show: Through January 2021, the state has added nearly 400,000 jobs, including more than 20,000 clean energy jobs. More than 60 clean energy projects worth $26 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act championed by President Biden. In fact, a week before Biden dropped out, Harris stopped campaigning about an hour south of where Emhoff began his campaign Thursday morning.
Chants of “Doug, Doug, Doug” heard throughout the convention briefly echoed throughout the spacious brewery. Emhoff, along with “Coach Waltz,” spends his time in Chicago displaying a version of masculinity that doesn’t taunt others or rip off T-shirts. If Harris breaks the gender barrier to become president in January, Emhoff will set a precedent and have a platform.
The “boys” thing will be new for us. The fashion choices of wives of former presidents have landed them on the cover of Vogue. What will Emhoff’s fashion choices be like? Will fashion lovers care?
Just as President Obama’s election changed the way we discuss race in America, if Emhoff occupies the amorphous position of “first gentleman,” it will mean much to us as a nation.
And then there’s the fact that he’s Jewish. For Ostrow, Emhoff’s junior at the Michigan rally, that means more than anything.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” he said. “The rise of anti-Semitism as the war in the Middle East continues. I have faced a lot of anti-Semitism and so have all my friends. It just grew and surprised us.”
I asked Ostru what had happened.
“It goes from ‘why are they killing Palestinians?’ to denying the Holocaust, making light of it and things like that,” she said of high school life since Oct. 7. Social media has created the worst emotions, Ostrow said, “because you don’t have to tell them a person’s face.”
Ostrow recently traveled to Israel and visited the site of a music festival where Hamas killed about 400 people. His cousin was among the 3,000 people who attended. On the day of the attack, while he was hiding in the bunker, he called Ostrow to tell him he was alive.
Ostrow said that in one class at her school, they talked about the war because it was so scary. And I remember the laughter from the front of the classrooms and the laughter.”
Ostrow said he partially wears his kippah to show he is not afraid.
He said watching Emhoff on the campaign trail gives him hope that things will get better.
“I’ve always had this connection to Israel,” he told me, “to witness the horrors that have been committed, but also to see the strength of our people and to know that we are not alone.”
When Emhoff took the microphone, he encouraged Harris by chanting her name before focusing on his economic plan. He talked about the jobs that have come to the state during the Biden-Harris administration, the investment in infrastructure. And he acknowledged the responsibilities of unions.
“Every time I see my wife, she says, ‘Go away,’” Emhoff joked, because “she knows we have 68 days and every minute and every day counts.”
He also took a brief moment to talk about his faith.
“I didn’t have to explain to him who I was as a Jew,” he said of Harris. “He just knew. He knew who we are, what our traditions are, what our values are.”
In a speech lasting about 20 minutes, this was all he had to say on the matter.
You may not know it, but for at least one teenager in the crowd, that’s exactly what he heard.
