The Biden administration, as well as many Democrats, has faced criticism for its reaction to a rise in anti-Semitic actions.
As groups commit hate crimes against Jewish Americans, Kamala Harris launched a new task force to battle—Islamophobia.
Now, her husband is facing controversy over a Hanukkah post he made recently. Despite deleting afterwards, users online are calling him out.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, deleted a post on social media Monday night after facing mockery over getting the story of Hanukkah wrong.
“In the Hanukkah story, the Jewish people were forced into hiding,” Emhoff claimed in the now-deleted post on X. “No one thought they would survive or that the few drops of oil they had would last. But they survived and the oil kept burning. During those eight days in hiding, they recited their prayers and continued their traditions…”
“The rewriting of Hanukkah as a story of Jews hiding rather than Jews fighting against assimilation is absurd, but also very revealing about the attitude of the left,” National Review editor Philip Klein responded. [Source: Daily Wire]
Vice President Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, deleted a post he made to X about Hanukkah. The Jewish man claimed that the holiday commemorates a time when Jews “were forced into hiding.” And while in hiding, their “few drops of oil” lasted for eight days “in hiding.”
This is not the story behind the Jewish holiday. Hanukkah remembers a time when a group of Jewish warriors freed the Second Temple from the hands of Greek emperor Antiochus IV. The miracle of the event was that a small supply of oil for the menorah lasted eight days.
Users online blasted Emhoff for not knowing the story of his own people’s holiday. One commentator pointed out that Emhoff claimed the Jews were hiding, when in reality, they were fighting for their land—something progressives strongly oppose today.
Others mocked the vice president’s husband. Another person asked why nobody “in the East Wing” was knowledgeable enough about the holiday to correct Emhoff.
Critics were particularly brutal to Emhoff, a Jewish man, for not knowing the true story. Jewish children are told the story of Hanukkah at an early age. It is unusual for a grown man not to know it.
To put it into context for non-Jews, this would be like a “Christian” saying Christmas is when Mary and Joseph gave birth to the angel Gabriel.
Perhaps he was deliberately distorting the story to make a connection to the Holocaust—where many Jews were in hiding. Or perhaps, he wanted to evoke a woke message through a sacred Jewish tradition.
Regardless of why he did it, it’s clear it did not go over well.
Author: Kit Fargo