By Ron Kampeas

WASHINGTON (JTA) – Heading into Passover, Bernie Sanders set Joe Biden free: The Vermont senator ended his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on April 8, hours before the holiday began, leaving the former vice president the presumptive nominee.

In the race for the White House, President Trump has some major advantages, notably in media play and fundraising. The president has the pulpit of his daily White House pandemic news conferences, which often veer into campaign-style rhetoric. Biden, meantime, is mostly confined to delivering daily pep talks from his Delaware home, where he barely registers online. As to fundraising, The New York Times reported recently that Biden was behind Trump by $187 million, meaning he would have to raise $1 million a day until the election just to catch up with where Trump is today.

Which leaves a slew of questions about Biden’s Jewish campaign: Who will he turn to for fundraising? What does it mean for his foreign policy?

THE FUNDERS

The last time Biden ran for president, in 2008, his financial director was Michael Adler, a Miami developer who is ensconced in the Jewish establishment: For years he led the straight down the center National Jewish Democratic Council and he’s been active with AIPAC. Adler is back on board the Biden train, although not in a senior campaign position. He has held fundraisers at his South Florida home.

Call Adler Biden’s Jewish old guard. He’s joined in that respect by an array of other establishment figures, including Comcast senior executive vice president David Cohen, who also has hosted fundraisers for Biden, and Stu Eizenstat, the veteran Holocaust reparations negotiator who penned an oped for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency favoring Biden.

But there are new Jewish kids on the Biden block, too. They earned their Democratic cred without having come up through the traditional pro-Israel channels, like accruing influence through AIPAC activism and fundraising.

Examples: Penny Pritzker and Bill Singer headlined a Chicago area fundraiser for Biden on April 27. Pritzker, the hotel chain heiress whose brother J.B. is the governor of Illinois, was an early backer of Barack Obama and was his Commerce secretary. Singer, a corporate lawyer, is the wunderkind you forgot about: In the 1960s and 1970s, when he was in his 20s and 30s, he joined the Rev. Jesse Jackson in leading left-wing insurgencies against the Democratic Party establishment. These days he’s on the board of J Street, the liberal Middle East lobby group that is AIPAC’s bete noir.

Notably missing from this array is Haim Saban, the entertainment mogul and major Democratic giver who is close to Israel’s political establishment. Saban, who has a no-table antipathy to Sanders and others on the party’s left flank, said in March that he was waiting out the primaries but has yet to pronounce.

On the Jewish donor angle, one intriguing establishment vs. insurgent skirmish is who runs the party’s digital campaign. According to coverage in The Intercept and Politico, the outfit that Michael Bloomberg launched for his campaign, Hawkfish, is vying for the job. 

The appeal: It’s up and running, it’s already been funded to a significant extent by the media mogul’s cash, and so it is bidding low. The disadvantage: It’s Bloomberg. If there’s a victory that the party’s left can claim, it is booting the former New York mayor’s campaign to the street. Bloomberg was reviled for his corporatism and his record relating to the city’s minorities and as a boss relating to women. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the first-term progressive from New York, has emphatically ad-vised against using the group.

THE GROUPS

Biden has brought into the mix two Jewish Democratic groups that otherwise spent much of the primary season reviling one another: He has the endorsements of both the Democratic Majority for Israel, which is aligned with centrist pro-Israel policy, and J Street. His acceptance of J Street’s endorsement was effusive, although short on specific areas of agreement. Biden, notably, has rejected J Street’s recent policy of leveraging U.S. aid to Israel to influence its policy.

In addition, On April 17, the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America has endorsed Joe Biden for president. “You share the Jewish community’s commitment to the principle of tikkun olam, healing the world, in addition to our commitment to combatting the rise of anti-Semitism and supporting a strong U.S.-Israel relationship,” the council said in a letter to the presumptive Democratic nominee.

FOREIGN POLICY

Biden has told associates that his sharpest differences with Sanders are on foreign policy. So, naturally, much has been made of Biden’s reported readiness to accept Sanders advisers on his foreign policy team. It’s not clear yet whether that’s been the case, but it could be a red flag for the AIPAC crowd – Sanders boycotted the lobby’s conference this year and has said he would leverage aid to Israel.

On Israel, Biden has robustly favored a return to making the two-state solution the par-amount outcome of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; Trump has significantly retreated from that goal. The person most identified with Biden foreign policy is Colin Kahl, who was his national security adviser when he was vice president. Kahl, who is not Jewish, was on the team that shaped the 2015 Iran nuclear deal reviled by Israel and Trump has quit.

The Brookings Institution’s Thomas Wright says that the centrist Democrats who ad-vised Obama – and are likely to shape Biden’s outlook – have retreated from wanting to engage in the Middle East. He says they “now favor a significant reduction in U.S. goals” there.

THE  FIGHT BIGOTRY ANGLE

Last year, Biden highlighted what he called the echoes of bigotry in Trump’s governing style – citing Trump’s Charlottesville response, for example, in the center of his campaign rollout. Sanders has said that the same threat is a major part of the reason he is endorsing him, and has cited that threat in shushing former aides who will not back Biden. The word is that this will be the preeminent feature of the Jewish Biden campaign.

On Monday, April 27, Biden marked the one-year anniversary of the deadly shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, with a proposal to add protections for Jews and other targets of hate attacks. “These are acts of terrorism, plain and simple,” Biden said in a statement to JTA. “They are bound together by the common thread of perpetrators using fear and violence to undermine individuals’ ability to freely exercise their faith.”

Biden’s three-point plan would increase the $90 million the Department of Homeland Security now hands out for securing nonprofit institutions by “multiples.”

MISHPOCHA

Biden has three children-in-law – all are Jewish. His Passover statement emphasized the loneliness that Jewish families would suffer during their pandemic seders. His personal relationship with Jews, in his families and during a long political career, also will be highlighted in his campaign. A Delaware rabbi’s story of encountering Biden at a laundry room shiva has already featured multiple times on the campaign.

Biden would keep US Embassy in Jerusalem, his foreign policy adviser says

By Ben Harris

(JTA) – An adviser to Joe Biden said the former vice president would keep the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem if elected president.

Tony Blinken, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s senior foreign policy adviser, said that reversing President Donald Trump’s decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv “would not make sense practically and politically,” Jewish Insider reported. Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, made the comments in a webinar Tuesday, April 28, hosted by the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

The event also featured Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a top Biden surrogate. Both Blinken and Coons declined to specify what Biden might do if Israel proceeds to annex parts of the West Bank, though Coons expressed hope that Benny Gantz and Gabi Ashkenazi, both longtime Israeli military leaders who are preparing to join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a unity government, would counsel the premier against such a move.

Biden marks year after Poway shooting, releases plan to address hate crimes

(JNS) Former U.S. Vice President and presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden honored the one-year anniversary of the shooting at Chabad of Poway in Southern California, where a 60-year-old Lori Kaye was killed and three others injured on April 27, 2019, including the synagogue’s senior rabbi, Yisroel Goldstein.

He has since retired. His son, Rabbi Mendel Goldstein, now leads the congregation.

He also released a three-point plan on how he would protect those targeted by anti-Semitism and hate-motivated attacks.

“These are acts of terrorism, plain and simple,” Biden told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday, April 27. “They are bound together by the common thread of perpetrators using fear and violence to undermine individuals’ ability to freely exercise their faith.”

The plan would include increasing funding by “multiples” for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program.

“Upon taking office, Biden will convene the faith-based community with DHS to identify an appropriate funding allocation,” said the plan alongside Biden’s statement.

Another part of the proposal would be the U.S. Department of Justice prioritizing prosecuting hate crimes and calling for legislation that increases punishments for attacks on religious institutions. Current hate-crime law already increases punishments for crimes that have a motive of racism or prejudice.

The third part of the plan would be to “convene faith communities to consider ‘whole of society’ reforms that would address hate attacks, including improving information sharing among law enforcement agencies, improving mental health care as a means of inhibiting the violence and demanding that “social media and technology platforms do more to root out toxic extremist content,” reported JTA.

Main Photo: Joe Biden speaks in Wilmington, Del. (Credit: Michael Brochstein / Echoes Wire/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)