PRESENTED BY CITY NATIONAL BANK*

April 17, 2023

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

By Courtney Subramanian Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Monday, April 17. I’m Courtney Subramanian, a White House reporter writing from The Times’ Washington, D.C., office. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff always expected to play a supporting role for his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, when he traded in the tony streets of Brentwood for the confines of the second couple’s residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. But the longtime Angeleno, who made his career as an entertainment lawyer, found the accidental spotlight in an issue he never expected would come to define him: his faith. In my latest story, published last week, I chronicled Emhoff’s journey from the White House candle-lighter and matzo-maker to the administration’s chief voice against antisemitism. Kanye West, now known as Ye, had a hand in it too. The rapper’s antisemitic spiral last fall, which led to a group unfurling a banner over the 405 Freeway bearing the words, “Kanye is right about the Jews,” left Emhoff fuming. He wanted to do more than just convene officials on tackling antisemitism at the White House. So he decided to take the issue to the world stage, traveling to Poland and Germany in late January to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day and visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. It was a fraught mission punctuated by personal moments, none more visible than when he made a detour to the Polish town where his great-grandparents lived before they fled persecution more than a century ago. In Gorlice, a two-hour drive outside of Krakow, Emhoff was confronted with the long shadow of the Holocaust. He walked through the quaint, cobblestone streets, listening as the mayor guided him through the town’s more than 650 years of history. But when he got to the old synagogue, which was empty and under repair, he felt a gut-punch: There was no rush to fix it because no Jews live here now. “These were ordinary people just living their lives but because of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, antisemitism and hate, it led to mass murder,” he told us later. It made him think about what was going on back home, and the drumbeat of hair-raising antisemitic episodes happening across California and elsewhere. The number of incidents in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Kern counties alone jumped 30% in 2022, compared with the previous year, according to the Anti-Defamation League. After the tour, we asked him what it felt like to visit his forebears’ town —and the very address where they lived. What would he tell his parents, who were unaware of his plans to visit Gorlice? He paused and choked up, admitting there would “probably [be] a lot of tears.” In the months since Emhoff — the first Jewish spouse of a vice president or president — made the historic visit, he hasn’t let up. The week after he returned from Europe, he delivered a speech at the United Nations calling for an international response to combat a resurgent antisemitism. He’s crisscrossed the country to continue speaking out about tackling antisemitism, or “the oldest hate,” and held the first Jewish women leaders summit at the White House in March. “This issue is so raw and important to me as an American Jew,” he told me in Berlin. “I’ve got to get this right and I’m working really hard to do that.”