“I love being Jewish,” said Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, the vice president and presidential candidate. “I love it. I love everything about it. I want to shout it from the mountaintops.”
Mr. Emhoff was shouting his love not from a mountaintop, but to a living room filled with Democratic donors in a 13th-floor apartment in the West Loop of Chicago, one week before the Democratic Party would gather in the city to formally nominate his wife to run for president.
In the four weeks since Ms. Harris emerged as the Democrats’ nominee, Mr. Emhoff had made clear one way he intends to help his wife win: outreach to Jewish voters. He has increasingly talked about his Jewish identity and the significance of his faith. And he has signaled that he intends to make the battle against antisemitism a central part of his portfolio as first gentlemen should Ms. Harris win.
The issue has been a major message for Mr. Emhoff since Ms. Harris became vice president and he became second gentleman — he visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Krakow, Poland, last spring. His focus, particularly when speaking to largely Jewish audiences, have intensified, by his account, after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, followed by the backlash against Israel in the United States for its attacks on Gaza.
“This hate, this antisemitism, is a poison,” Mr. Emhoff said at a fund-raiser on an estate in Glencoe, just outside Chicago. “As your first first gentleman, I promise you, as the first Jewish person ever to be a White House principal, I am going to continue this fight against antisemitism.”
It comes as Democrats are deeply divided over the Gaza war, with many on the left assailing President Biden for his support of Israel during the conflict. (Donald J. Trump, Ms. Harris’s Republican opponent, has said that any Jewish voters who support the Democratic presidential ticket need “to get their head examined.”)
Many Democrats view Ms. Harris as more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than Mr. Biden, and she rankled some Jewish voters by passing over Josh Shapiro, the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, in her search for a vice president. Mr. Emhoff’s emerging role seemed intended to try to keep Jewish Democrats on board — including on Tuesday night, when he is scheduled to address the convention.
Mr. Emhoff doesn’t belong to a temple and didn’t raise his children Jewish. By his nature, low-key and self-effacing, and his background, Mr. Emhoff is particularly suited to play this kind of role in the remaining weeks of the campaign.
Thomas R. Nides, a former ambassador to Israel who is close to Ms. Harris and Mr. Emhoff, described Mr. Emhoff as a “cultural Jew.”
“He has spent a bunch of time fighting antisemitism, but to be clear he wouldn’t be doing this unless his wife was all in,” he said. “It kind of fell into his lap. But because he’s not particularly ideological, he’s very credible on this. He can talk to college kids.”
Brian Brokaw, who was a consultant to Ms. Harris when she ran for Senate and attorney general in California, and has known the couple for 10 years, said Mr. Emhoff gives his wife “a fuller picture of the deep importance that U.S. foreign policy has to American Jews.”
For Mr. Emhoff, these past few weeks are the latest chapter in a fast-paced journey that has taken him from being an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles — where he met Ms. Harris on a blind date in 2013, when she was the attorney general of California — to the husband of the Democratic candidate for president.
He has bypassed the rite of passage of most political spouses — the Saturday night community dinners, the knocking on doors, the handing out of leaflets at a local mall — and moved right into the fast lane: surrounded by a phalanx of aides and, later, Secret Service agents, driven through cities like Chicago in a motorcade.
Being the spouse of the nominee, rather than that of the running mate, comes with new scrutiny. Mr. Emhoff was forced this month to acknowledge that he had been in involved in an extramarital affair in his first marriage, long before he met Ms. Harris.
“Sometimes I try to put myself into his shoes,” Mr. Brokaw said. “He went on a blind date in 2013 and 10 years later he’s flying around the world representing the country on a global stage. It’s like, ‘how the hell did this happen?’”
Should Ms. Harris win, he would be the first male occupant of a position for which there is no official job description or salary. Previous holders of the job did it with differing aspirations and ambitions. As first lady, Nancy Reagan embraced a war on drugs, while Hillary Clinton led an unsuccessful effort for a national health care overhaul. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis made a crusade for historical preservation of the White House. Melania Trump’s “Be Best” campaign addressed young people’s social and emotional health.
“There is an outside view that all they do is host state dinners and holiday parties and that is what their role is,” said Jeremy Bernard, who was the social secretary for Barack and Michelle Obama. “They certainly have a role in that. But that really, honestly, is just a minor role.”
By focusing on antisemitism, Mr. Emhoff is engaging one of the most contentious issues facing the Biden White House: Israel and the war on Gaza. Mr. Emhoff, who declined a request for an interview, has avoided discussing the administration’s policies toward Israel and Gaza, calling them policy questions and deferring to his wife.
Mr. Emhoff does not raise the issue of antisemitism at all of his stops. A few weeks ago, when he spoke at a fund-raiser of mostly gay men at Fire Island Pines in New York, he instead used the moment to go after Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio. “Now we’ve got to push back on that despicable person and his little sidekick,” he said.
But associates said Mr. Emhoff, in talking about the significance of his role as Ms. Harris’s spouse, repeatedly returns to his Judaism. “His Jewish identity is part of who he is,” said Deborah Lipstadt, whom Mr. Biden appointed as the special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. “When I first met him, he said to me, ‘I thought the novelty of who I was is that I was the first male in this position. But it’s that I’m the first Jew.’”
“He grabbed onto this,” she said.
As he traveled through Chicago, Mr. Emhoff talked of adhering to the Jewish tradition of posting a mezuza, a case containing a parchment inscribed with a section from the Torah, on doorways in the vice president’s residence, and of holding the first Seder there to mark the Jewish holiday of Passover.
“He’s like a Jewish rock star,” said Halie Soifer, the head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America who was a national security adviser to Ms. Harris when she was in the Senate. “It’s not just the symbolism of him being the first Jewish spouse, but also what he represents and his powerful message: live proudly and openly as a Jew.’”
Mr. Emhoff told audiences in Chicago that he had decided to embrace this cause at his wife’s prodding. Ms. Harris was elected at a time, he noted, when antisemitism was on the rise, evidenced by the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville in 2017 — chanting “Jews will not replace us” — and the killing of 11 worshipers attending services the following year at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
“I was an entertainment lawyer from L.A.,” he said at the fund-raiser. “I had no idea what I was supposed to do. She said, ‘you have this microphone. You have an obligation to use it to speak for the millions of people who are not here. She really, from Day 1, well before Oct. 7, pushed me to do this work.”
But he said that as somber as the task could be, reaffirming his faith — “I’m just as Jewish as the orthodox rabbi,” he said — had lifted his spirits during what has been a difficult period for many Jewish Americans.
“That is the way I want to feel as a Jewish person in this country,” he said. “Even in the face of this crisis of antisemitism that we know is happening. We still can’t lose that joy, that happiness, that thing that makes us all Jewish.”
Michael Gold contributed reporting from Fire Island Pines, N.Y.