The Most Meaningful Moment of the Campaign for Me

What Democrats can Learn from Remarks from Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg at the DNC

I wanted to share with you what was one of the most meaningful moments for me when I worked on the campaign as Vice President Harris’s National Director for Jewish Outreach. That moment came at the Democratic National Convention when Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin spoke. In retrospect, that moment takes on a different, much sadder context with Hersh’s tragic murder by Hamas only eight days later that devastated so many both in Israel and in the American Jewish Community. Still, I think it is important to talk about what that speech and that moment said about where Democrats are as a party on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and where we go as a party and where Jews go as a community.

The convention started only four days after I joined the campaign and the situation was fraught. There was real concern that going into the convention, protests about the war in Gaza would create a 1968 moment and overshadow all of the other news. We also had challenges in that we had to organize Jewish specific programming off campus in a secure location to avoid potential protests - mind you much of the programming had nothing to do with Israel or Gaza. Meanwhile, Arab-Americans were also having their own challenges. While there was a first of its kind panel on Palestinian human rights in the convention program - at the end the campaign chose not to have a Palestinian speaker address the convention. That is a separate conversation that I will not get into at the moment, but it triggered protests and deep frustration in the Arab and Muslim American communities.

As for me, I had an opportunity to sit down with the American hostage family members earlier in the week. It was deeply moving to hear their stories and I promised them the only thing I could, which is that on the campaign we would use the huge stage offered to us to do what we could to advocate on their behalf. Still it felt very dissatisfying. There wasn’t much I could offer beyond that. It had been a little different at the White House, where the policy and negotiations were being driven out of, but on the campaign that wasn’t my role.

As it came time for the speech, I was sitting in the United Center with knots in my stomach. I was terrified that the Goldberg-Polin’s would be protested or booed. If that happened not only would I feel terrible for them, but frankly as a campaign staffer responsible for engaging with the Jewish community it would also be a total political disaster.

When they came on stage, I held my breath. The audience immediately broke into prolonged applause. And then a spontaneous chant rose up from the crowd – “bring them home. Bring them home.” I felt this incredible rush of relief, but also joy. I felt as a Jew in this moment that with all the terrible things that happened to Jews and to Palestinians over the past year, this audience was genuinely recognizing and feeling Jewish pain. This empathy and support is something that had unfortunately over the past year been lacking many times in progressive spaces. I cried a bit. I don’t do that very often. A lot of people in the arena were crying as Jon and Rachel spoke.

Afterwards, a number of young campaign staffers - some Jewish some not - in their twenties came up to me and told me how moving Jon and Rachel’s remarks had been. They thanked me for my work on this issue (though full disclosure since I’d only started a few days earlier, I really had little to nothing to do with decisions about the DNC program or the remarks by the Jon and Rachel. And more full disclosure, I was much older than most of my colleagues on the campaign…)

What can we learn from this moment? First, the Democratic party is not full of antisemites or Hamas supporters for those who may have been wondering. That room was the leadership of the party and the activist base. No room more represents the heart of the Democratic party than the convention hall at the DNC. And the fact that they broke spontaneously into “bring them home” and that no one booed or protested says something about the party. Don’t get me wrong. The surge in antisemitism on the left is a real thing. I’m sure some of the small number of people who I saw protesting outside the convention hall as I entered that night may hold those views or express sympathy for Hamas. But the Democratic Party is not those people.

The second lesson that was striking to me was the message that Jon and Rachel delivered. Obviously, they are incredibly sympathetic and effective messengers, but the words themselves mattered a great deal. This from Jon Polin really struck me:

There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East. In a competition of pain, there are no winners. In our Jewish tradition, we say kol adam olam um lo’o, every person is an entire universe. We must save all these universes. In an inflamed Middle East, we know the one thing that can most immediately release pressure and bring hope to the entire region, a deal that brings this diverse group of 109 hostages home and ends the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza. he time is now.

This message is ultimately a humanitarian one that connects with both Jewish and liberal values. It is also a message that reflects liberal Zionism and is entirely in sync with where the overwhelming majority of both American Jews, Democrats, and the American people are. This message resonated in the room. It resonated with the young activists and political operatives who were my colleagues on the campaign. That small focus group for me was very important. Those are the people that American Jews and Israel need to win back. That’s the demographic that is going away from Israel.

What does that say about the way forward? If the American Jewish community and the Democratic party can unify behind these type of values and vision, which I believe is where Vice President Harris’s message was during the campaign. And if Israelis can elect a government that reflects more of these values that goes away from the extreme hard right policies of the past few years (A Labor left government is highly unlikely, but at least the type of inclusive national unity government we saw in 2021-22), there is hope to bring together the growing divide between American Jews, Israel, and the Left.