In Shelley Greenspan’s early meetings with Jewish communal leaders after she assumed the role of White House liaison to the Jewish community in the summer of 2022, she heard the same request over and over again from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Federations of North America: that President Joe Biden should draft a national strategy to fight antisemitism.

The request was a lobbying priority for Jewish groups but was not yet on the radar of the White House officials who would need to actually craft that document. Greenspan resolved to make it happen. 

“It wasn’t easy. It had never been done before. It isn’t something that we set out to do from the onset of this administration,” Greenspan recalled in a recent interview with Jewish Insider, where she offered a peek at how the kosher sausage gets made as she gets ready to leave her post after more than two years. “I kept hearing this from stakeholders from across the community, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, L.A. to New York and in between, that this was something that many of them were advocating.” 

She wrote a memo to “shop around to many internal teams, get buy-in, build trust.” It didn’t work, at first. Learning to navigate the opaque pecking order at the White House would be a requirement if she wanted to make anything happen in the job. 

“I kind of had to work backwards,” she said. If no one at the White House would commit directly to creating the strategy, she had to figure out who might be able to influence them.  

The result was a roundtable at the White House in December 2022 with more than a dozen Jewish leaders, where they made the ask themselves to Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and several other senior White House officials. “I created this venue for Jewish leaders to speak directly to senior White House officials and make their request for this national strategy,” she said. 

Getting Emhoff on board, as a White House principal, “made a really big difference,” Greenspan said. A week later, Biden announced the creation of a committee that six months later would release the national strategy after months of listening sessions. 

“Because they were able to speak directly to senior leadership and present why this was so important and why antisemitism was rising at such scary levels, a week later is when the president announced that we were going to create this interagency policy committee, which then led to the drafting of the national strategy, the most comprehensive and the first ever in U.S. history,” said Greenspan.

Even in quiet periods, serving as the White House’s liaison to the Jewish community is a thankless job. 

Someone is always calling to ask for an extra invite to the White House, for a Hanukkah party or Rosh Hashanah reception. Any statement from the president that touches on Israel or antisemitism will be scrutinized by Jewish advocates in the same painstaking way that law students pore over case law. Someone you’re close to might take to Twitter to call out your boss. You’ll never make everyone happy, but convincing Jewish leaders across the religious and ideological spectrum that you are at least trying to listen to them is possible — with humility and a Herculean dose of diplomacy. 

And even though the Jewish community was already living in a time of sky-high antisemitism when the antisemitism national strategy was released in May 2023, it would in hindsight be seen as a relatively quiet period — at least compared to what came several months later, when the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza sparked a sharp rise in anti-Jewish hate worldwide.

Greenspan, who was five months pregnant at the time of the terror attacks, got right to work.

“We just went into crisis mode, and you had to put off your own personal grief for the time being to make sure we can actually be there for the community,” said Greenspan. As a touchpoint in the U.S. government for the Jewish community, her work took on a surreal rapid-response quality, as people desperately reached out to learn the fate of their loved ones in Israel.

“My inbox was flooded. People weren’t sure if their loved ones were alive or being held hostage,” said Greenspan, who soon became an indispensable contact for the families of American hostages. “People were also looking to be evacuated from Israel to America. I never thought I would have to have these conversations.” 

She started thinking about symbolic actions, too — like her suggestion to light up the White House in blue and white. 

One of Greenspan’s first jobs in Washington was at AIPAC, and she maintains that her support for Israel is one of the reasons she went to work for Biden. 

“I am so proud of the way that this president responded. I think he’s the most pro-Israel president we’ve ever had in this country. He says he’s a very proud Zionist,” she said. 

As the war in Gaza dragged on, public opinion on the left began to turn more sharply against Israel, with calls even from some Democrats on Capitol Hill to condition or entirely cut U.S. aid to Israel. Greenspan declined to weigh in on the future of the Democratic Party, after the octogenarian Zionist president leaves office next week. 

“At the end of the day, I’ll let the political pundits analyze where the party is. All I can relate to is where our president has been, especially since Oct. 7,” she said. “That’s the reality and truth that I’m holding onto.”

Greenspan worked in the same White House where some of her colleagues were releasing anonymous open letters criticizing Biden’s support for Israel. 

“I definitely had to lean into my own chutzpah and my own moral courage at times, especially when navigating the complexities of these diverse perspectives. There were challenges internally and externally,” she acknowledged. “That’s the most I’ll say on that.” 

But politics wasn’t the main thing driving Greenspan in the job. 

“Our actions have really reinforced the fact that Jewish culture and Jewish values are essential to the character and vibrancy of America,” said Greenspan, who pointed to big things — like a Sukkot celebration at Blair House with ambassadors from Muslim-majority nations, and the first White House Rosh Hashanah event — and small ones, like having educators from the Hartman Institute lead a Torah study at the White House. (It’s the small moments, too, that will stay with her, like the time she was preparing Biden for a phone call with rabbis, and he insisted on calling her father to tell him how proud he should be of his daughter.)

As she vacates the role, Greenspan has one piece of advice for the incoming Trump administration: to listen to Jewish voices. President-elect Donald Trump did not have a formal Jewish liaison in his first term, nor did he have a Jewish outreach director on his presidential campaign last year. If he does things differently this time, she wants to be a resource to that person.

“If they do appoint someone to serve as my successor, I’m more than happy and willing to work with them however I can to ensure that they are set up for success,” said Greenspan. “I think, honestly, these issues are bipartisan, whether it’s combating hate, support for Israel, these are issues that transcend party lines, and should be kept that way.”