The podcasts feature pre-election debates about which presidential candidate is best for Jews.

As the election season winds down, leading Jewish political voices from across the political spectrum are debating with each other—often on podcasts—over which presidential candidate will best serve the interests of the American Jewish community.

The podcast “Unholy: Two Jews in the News,” hosted by Israeli news anchor Yonit Levy and British journalist Jonathan Friedland, called the dilemma the “great Jewish debate” over whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris really is. “Good for the Jews, frankly.” Program Tuesday edition featured Dan Senor, host of the Call Me Back podcast and foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, representing the Republicans, and Jeremy Bash, who was the CIA chief of staff during the Obama administration, representing the Democrats.

Bari Weiss’ “Honestly” podcast discussed a similar debate about which party would better serve the Jewish community: the Democratic or Republican Party. Popular conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro represented the Republicans, while neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris represented the 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 to put this behind us, and in my view, Kamala Harris, whatever her weaknesses as a candidate, will just be a much-needed return to normal politics.”

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

Harris acknowledged that anti-Semitism exists on both the left and the right, and noted that both men were concerned about the recent surge in anti-Jewish hatred. However, he said, the “really terrible anti-Semitism” that could lead to violence like that carried out by terrorist Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City “is on the right.” Harris argued that the far right is responsible for “a really scary anti-Semitism” that he said is “embedded in his populist phenomenon of Trumpism.”

Shapiro responded by criticizing Harris’s argument about what amounts to “really scary anti-Semitism.”

“There are many forms of truly frightening anti-Semitism. One of them is an individual anti-Semite who goes out and kills Jews,” Shapiro said. “There is a second type of truly frightening anti-Semitism – this is the system-wide introduction of anti-Semitic worldviews into the entire party. You see this happening within the Democratic Party right now, and it really frightens me as a Jew and as an American, with an intersectional ideology that assumes that victimization is equivalent to failure, that you have failed in life therefore you are a victim. something.”

“You see it in a lot of grievance politics, but you see it in intersectional terms at left-wing intersections,” Shapiro continued. “And so the idea that if you’re Jewish means you’re successful, it means you’re an exploiter. This matrix is ​​then applied to international politics in the same way that, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates applied it to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and it becomes a deeply held belief within the Democratic Party.”

Weiss herself praised Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments before asking Harris to explain his ongoing opposition to the former president. “I think probably the strongest argument for Trump is his foreign policy legacy, not just because wars didn’t break out, but good things happened, like the Abraham Accords, like encouraging European allies to take more responsibility. for your defense. I think sometimes when making a choice it feels like you may have stability, but you’re weak from it and crazy from it. So sometimes it feels like you have to choose between crazy and weak,” Weiss said.

In response, Harris suggested that during Trump’s first term, there were “guardrails” that kept him in check on Israel and broader foreign policy issues. He argued that the former president “rammed into those fences and vowed to remove” them during his second term.

Harris later acknowledged that the vice president did issue a warning about ending the suffering in Gaza, but explained that she was doing so because she needed the votes of “liberal and confused young people who believed everything they saw in Gaza.” TikTok about “genocide in the Gaza Strip perpetrated by the evil IDF.”

Harris also said he would have preferred the vice president choose Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as his running mate over Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, although he rejected the idea that her decision was based on concerns about anti-Semitic remarks amid reports that Shapiro was a contender for the role. Harris later added that he was “a fan of the Abraham Accords and a lot of the things that (Jared) Kushner did and that Trump made him do. I think there is no embarrassment on my part in admitting this.”

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

Senor objected to this, arguing that grassroots energy was not concentrated in the Bash wing, suggesting that the future direction of the Democratic Party would be more hostile to the Jewish state.

“I know these words that I quote precisely because she repeats them over and over again, and they are imprinted in my head. She (Harris) says: “Israel has the right to defend itself, but how it defends itself matters.” She then proceeds to actually legitimize criticism of “how Israel defends itself.” “I find it outrageous… this kind of language about how Israel defends itself matters, as if there are legitimate complaints about how Israel conducts its response to the war on seven fronts, it is a signal, it sends a signal,” said Senor. .

Bash responded to this by stating that “this idea that it somehow signals that it supports the claim that Israel engaged in genocide is completely false.”

Asked about Trump’s recent remarks that Jews cost him the election and the language used at his Madison Square Garden rally attended by Tucker Carlson, despite the conservative commentator’s continued refusal to apologize for platforming and praising a Holocaust revisionist , Senor condemned both, warning that he does not do this. I think that this rhetoric will develop into a policy directed against Israel or the Jewish community.

Bash said Trump’s failure to condemn such anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant remarks at the rally made him untrustworthy. He also pointed to Trump’s response to a protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us” during a march.

Senor pressed Bash about Democrats’ inaction on domestic anti-Semitism, pointing to Senate Democrats’ refusal to hold hearings on the issue or allow debate on any related legislation. He noted the contrast between the Democratic-controlled White House and Senate and the GOP-led House, where the Anti-Semitism Act was passed in early May with bipartisan support and has seen numerous high-profile committee hearings on the issue.

Bash argued that the White House National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, a sweeping policy initiative the Biden administration unveiled last May, is a testament to the commitment of Harris and Democrats to engage on the issue.
Bash then asked how anyone could believe Trump would stop using “his white nationalist, MAGA-playing, neo-Nazi, Daly Stormer 1939 – repeating the stereotypes of the campaign when he becomes president,” to which Senor replied, “because in fact he was president for four years, and you cannot formulate a uniform policy towards the Jewish community in the United States (on) anti-Semitism, which you have a problem with the first Trump administration.”