Featured Commentary: As Jews, we’re voting for Kamala Harris

As Jewish members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, serving others and bettering our community is not just a calling. It’s a commandment — one informed by our values, our faith and the legacies of our family members who survived pogroms and the Holocaust. These experiences move us to uphold our values every day, but especially this election year. We urge our fellow Jewish Pennsylvanians to join us in voting proudly for Kamala Harris.

Her resume reads as a how-to for one of our religion’s most important maxims: “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” She became a prosecutor to bring safety and dignity to the most vulnerable. She stood up for the everyman against modern-day plagues like big banks and for-profit colleges. As vice president, she fought to protect women’s health care and rights, lower the cost of prescription drugs, and rebuild our country’s roads and bridges.

She has also been a true friend and ally to the Jewish community. We saw this commitment in Pennsylvania when the vice president and her husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, visited the Tree of Life Congregation to mourn and heal with us.

Throughout her career, Harris has supported Jewish Americans. In the last four years alone, she has helped draft the first-ever National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism and advocated for increased funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which would help keep synagogues and Jewish community centers safe.

This commitment to American Jews is both principled and personal. Harris grew up with close Jewish friends, classmates and colleagues. In 2017, when she visited Yad Vashem, she showed enough familiarity to refer to the Holocaust as the “Shoah.” As the spouse of an American Jew, she understands our triumphs and tragedies better than most.

Don’t take it from us. At a recent event, her husband kvelled: “She was the one who has encouraged me to live openly and proudly as a Jewish person … . She’s the one who encouraged me to make sure we have a mezuzah at the vice president’s residence.” Emhoff has pledged that he and Harris would affix a mezuzah to the White House, too.

This commitment to the Jewish American community dovetails with Harris’ steadfast support of Israel. As she announced at the Democratic National Convention, to raucous applause, she “will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself” and she is “working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

Compare these principles with the flagrant antisemitism of her opponent. Donald Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people.” He called Jews who vote for Democrats “fools” who “hate their religion.” He smeared our own Gov. Josh Shapiro as a “highly overrated Jewish Governor” who “refused to acknowledge that I am the best friend that Israel, and the Jewish people, ever had.” According to The Washington Post, Trump has used antisemitic tropes at minimum dozens of times — outmatched only by his number of felony convictions.

Again and again, Trump has touted his support of Israel to appeal to Jewish Americans. But his advocacy has already proven conditional on his interests: When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged Biden’s win in 2020, Trump told a reporter, “—— him.” After Oct. 7, Trump exploited the attack to promote his own leadership and praised Hezbollah militants as “very smart.”

As Jews, we know better than to trust leaders who put their safety above our own. And we know, as the Torah instructs us, that we must “not oppress a stranger … having (ourselves) been strangers in the land of Egypt.” From Haitians to Mexicans, Muslim Americans to Black Americans, Trump has shown that bigotry comes as easily to him as a golf swing.

In Hebrew, we define mitzvot as “good deeds.” But the direct translation is more telling: “commandment.” Our faith commands us to care for communities, cultivate equity, and pursue justice. Only one presidential candidate answers the same call. This November, we must pray with our feet all the way to the voting booth. We must cast our ballots for tzedakah, for kehilla, for tikkun olam — and for Kamala Harris.