Second gentleman Doug Emhoff slipped into New York on Thursday for a small meeting with youth leaders selected from across the Jewish American, Muslim American and Palestinian American communities, marking the administration’s latest move in its evolving response to the Israel-Hamas war.
The event, hosted by United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Rashad Hussain, the US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, was kept quiet by administration officials hoping to facilitate a conversation, rather than a debate or another opportunity for the protests that have followed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris across the country.
But Emhoff is not involved with administration policy, so the discussion was not about a ceasefire nor negotiations over a hostage release nor the White House’s maneuvering with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Nor was it about ongoing political fallout, according to a person in the room. It focused on how the situation has affected people in America, billed as “a roundtable discussion on the sharp rise in Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate after the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.”
In January, the Anti-Defamation League recorded a 361% rise in reported antisemitic incidents in the three months after the Hamas attack began on October 7 compared to the same period in 2022. In November, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said it had received an “unprecedented” rise in reported anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias incidents in the month following the start of the war.
“These communities have felt real pain, fear, and isolation,” Thomas-Greenfield said in a statement to CNN. “In this moment in which it’s all too easy to focus on what divides us, we must carve out moments like today’s roundtable to remember…
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