As the election season nears the finish line, leading Jewish political voices from across the political spectrum are sparring with one another – often on podcasts – about which presidential candidate will better serve the interests of the American Jewish community. 

“Unholy: Two Jews on the News,” a podcast hosted by Israeli news anchor Yonit Levi and British journalist Jonathan Freedland, dubbed the dilemma as “the great Jewish debate” over who — former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris — is actually “good for the Jews, to put it bluntly.” The program’s Tuesday episode featured Dan Senor, host of the “Call Me Back” podcast and a foreign policy advisor to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, arguing for the Republicans, and Jeremy Bash, who was chief of staff at the CIA during the Obama administration, representing Democrats.

Bari Weiss’ “Honestly” podcast featured a similar debate over whether the Democratic or Republican Party would better serve the Jewish community. Popular conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro represented Republicans, while neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris represented Democrats.  

Harris said that “more than anything,” his approach to the election was that “I just want this experience of continuous political emergency to end. I want that to be behind us and from my point of view, Kamala Harris, whatever her weaknesses as a candidate, would be just a much-needed return to normal politics.”

Shapiro, meanwhile, said, “I’m going to use a bit of a different model. I think that Sam is coming from the point of view that Trump is preemptively disqualified from the race, just period start to finish, we’re done, and that ends the calculation for me. The question is were you better off in 2019 or are you better off in 2024?”

Harris acknowledged that antisemitism existed on both the left and right, and noted that both men were concerned about the recent uptick in anti-Jewish hate. Still, he said, the “really scary antisemitism” that could lead to violence like that caused by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, “is on the right.” Harris argued that the far right is responsible for “genuinely scary antisemitism,” which he said was “wrapped up in his populist phenomenon of Trumpism.”

Shapiro responded by critiquing Harris’ argument about what can be defined as “genuinely scary antisemitism.”

“There are multiple forms of genuinely scary antisemitism. One is the sort of individual antisemite who goes and murders Jews,” Shapiro said. “Then there is a second type of genuinely scary antisemitism, and that is a system-wide infusion of antisemitic worldviews into an entire party. You are seeing that happen inside the Democratic Party right now, and that is very frightening to me as a Jew and as an American, when the intersectional ideology which suggests that victimization is equivalent to failure, that you failed in life therefore you are a victim of something.”

“You can see that in a lot of grievance politics but you see it in intersectional terms on the intersectional left,” Shapiro continued. “And the idea therefore that if you are Jewish that means that you’re successful, that means you’re an exploiter. That matrix is then applied to international politics in the way that, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been applying it to the Israel-Palestinian situation and that becomes a deeply held belief inside the Democratic Party.”

Weiss herself praised Trump’s foreign policy record before asking Harris to explain his continued opposition to the former president. “I think that probably the strongest argument for Trump is his foreign policy legacy, not just because wars weren’t breaking out, but good things happened like the Abraham Accords, like incentivizing European allies to take more responsibility for their defense. I think the choice sometimes feels like you have perhaps stability but weakness from her and craziness from him. So it feels sometimes like a choice between crazy and weak,” Weiss said. 

Harris responded by suggesting that there were “guardrails in place” during Trump’s first term that kept him in line on Israel and broader foreign policy matters. He argued that the former president “smashed into and has vowed to remove” those guardrails in his second term.

Later on, Harris recognized that the vice president does include a caveat about bringing an end to the suffering in Gaza, but he explained that she does so because she needs the votes of “liberal and confused young people who’ve believed everything they saw on TikTok about the ‘genocide in Gaza perpetrated by the evil IDF.'”

Harris also said he would have preferred to see the vice president select Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate over Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, though he rejected the notion that her decision was based on concerns relating to antisemitic discourse amid reports that Shapiro was a contender for the role. Harris later added that he was “a fan of the Abraham Accords and many of the things that [Jared] Kushner did and that Trump had him do. I think there’s no embarrassment on my side in acknowledging that.”

On “Unholy,” Bash touted Harris’ support for Israel shooting down missiles from Iran and “using military force as appropriate against Iran against Iranian surrogates and proxies earlier this year” to defend the vice president against Senor’s argument that she wasn’t a reliable ally of Israel. He also pointed to Harris keeping President Joe Biden’s language on Israel policy in the Democratic National Committee’s 2024 platform amid pressure from anti-Israel factions of the party to make changes. 

Senor pushed back on this by arguing that it is not Bash’s wing of the party where the grassroots energy is, suggesting that the future direction of the Democratic Party will be more hostile toward the Jewish state. 

“I know these words like I’m quoting precisely because she says it over and over and they’re etched in my head. She [Harris] says, ‘Israel has a right to defend itself but how it defends itself matters.’ Then she proceeds to basically legitimize criticisms of ‘how Israel defends itself.’ I find that outrageous … that kind of language that how Israel defends itself matters, as though there are legitimate grievances to the way Israel has been conducting its response to the seven-front war, it’s a signal, she’s sending a signal,” Senor said. 

Bash responded that by arguing that “This idea that somehow she’s signaling that she supports the claim that Israel engaged in genocide – that’s totally wrong.” 

Asked about Trump’s recent remarks about Jews costing him the election and language used at his Madison Square Garden rally, which featured Tucker Carlson despite the conservative commentator’s continued refusal to apologize for platforming and praising a Holocaust revisionist, Senor condemned both while cautioning that he did not think the rhetoric would translate into policies targeting Israel or the Jewish community. 

Bash said that Trump not condemning such antisemitic and anti-immigrant language at the rally made him untrustworthy. He also pointed to Trump’s response to the Charlottesville, Va., protest in 2017, where white supremacists chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” while marching. 

Senor pressed Bash about Democrats’ inaction on domestic antisemitism, pointing to Senate Democrats’ refusal to hold hearings on the subject or allow for floor consideration on any relevant legislation. He noted the contrast between the White House and Senate, both controlled by Democrats, and the GOP-led House, where the Antisemitism Awareness Act passed with bipartisan support in early May and there were numerous high-profile committee hearings on the subject. 

Bash argued that the White House’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, a sweeping policy initiative that the Biden administration debuted last May, was evidence of Harris and Democrats’ commitment to engaging on the issue. 
Bash then asked how anyone could believe that Trump would stop using “his white nationalist, MAGA footsie-playing, Neo-Nazi, Daily Stormer 1939-echoing campaign tropes once he becomes president,” to which Senor responded, “because he actually had four years as president and you can’t articulate a single policy as it relates to the Jewish community in the U.S. [on] antisemitism that you have a problem with in terms of the first Trump administration.”