From antisemitism to Israel, the Jewish topics to watch for in the Biden-Trump debate

When Donald Trump and Joe Biden met for their first debate back in September 2020, the most explosive moment was notable to many Jewish viewers: Trump stopped short of condemning white supremacists and told the Proud Boys, a far-right group, to “stand back and stand by.”

This Thursday, as Trump and Biden meet in Atlanta during their second race, for what will be their third debate in total, viewers are likely to see more moments of Jewish significance — from disagreements over the Israel-Hamas war to a discussion of antisemitism. The Jewish identity of both of the moderators, CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, might also be a factor.

In addition, expect segments on several issues that, polls show, are usually on Jews’ minds at the voting booth, such as abortion, climate change and the future of US democracy. Immigration, a topic of historical Jewish concern, will almost certainly be a focus.

Here’s a look at what to expect when the two candidates meet onstage on Thursday.

Trump will likely attack the moderators as well as Biden.

Both CNN moderators, Bash and Tapper, are Jewish — and have woven their Jewish experiences into their news analysis. That’s especially true for Tapper when he has reported on Trump's authoritarian tendencies and those of his defenders. 

Most recently, Tapper has likened Trump’s rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s. Tapper has said that the former president’s claims that migrants to the United States are “poisoning the blood” of Americans echo passages in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

Trump's nickname for Jake Tapper is 'Fake Tapper'

That has put Trump into fighting mode: His nickname for the CNN anchor is “Fake Tapper.” So expect him to lash out. Whether either anchor’s Judaism comes up alongside references to the Hitler comparisons, however, is more of an open question.

Trump will likely challenge Biden on his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

Historically, incumbents are at a disadvantage when it comes to crises: Their challengers, free of the burden of making hard decisions and facing their consequences, say they would handle whatever instability is unfolding better than the incumbent has.

That’s how Biden dinged Trump on COVID-19 when the two men faced each other in 2020. Now Trump has been paying Biden back in spades — especially when it comes to the Israel-Hamas war. He has said Hamas would not have even dared launch the war on his watch.

“An attack happened that should have never been allowed to happen, both from the Israeli standpoint and from the United States standpoint,” he told a right-leaning Israeli outlet, Israel Hayom, in March. “If they respected our president, which they don’t, they have no respect for him whatsoever. That’s why it wouldn’t have happened with me.”

The same month he told Fox News that Israel should be free to “finish it up and do it quickly.” He also has said he would be tougher on Iran than Biden has been, claiming he had the Islamic Republic on its heels when he left office.

The debate comes at a touchy time for Biden’s relations with Israel. The president is enduring tensions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has accused the administration of slow-walking weapons deliveries — an accusation the White House has denied.

Biden should expect hard questions on that front. He may be asked about mounting casualties in Gaza and how he reconciles his longstanding support for Israel with pressure he’s gotten from the left, younger Democrats, and Arab American and Black Democrats to scale back or end his support for Israel.

Trump, for his part, will probably refer back to his own presidency, when he had close relations with Netanyahu and pivoted longstanding US policy in a wide range of areas toward the preferences of Israel’s right wing. He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran and recognized Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights. Israelis particularly celebrated the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab countries that the Trump administration brokered.

But Trump has been light on details when it comes to what he would do in the Middle East now — and that’s where the moderators and Biden may press him. How does Israel “finish it up” quickly without crumbling its Abraham Accords relationships? How does Trump intensify pressure on Iran as it threatens an all-out war with Israel? How do the Palestinians factor into hopes for expanding the Abraham Accords?

Trump is also not without vulnerabilities when it comes to Israel. When the war started, Biden was outspoken in his support of Israel, and became the first president to visit the country in wartime. Trump, meanwhile, chastised Israel for being unprepared, called Hezbollah “very smart” and attacked Netanyahu. The two men broke from each other after Netanyahu and congratulated Biden for winning in 2020, and Trump later said, “F— him.”

Expect both candidates to face questions on antisemitism.

A major Biden strength in 2020, at least in his campaign for the Jewish vote, was his emphasis on the correlation between the rise of violent antisemitism since 2016 and Trump’s rhetoric.

He said he was inspired to run after Trump equivocated in condemning the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia. The man who carried out the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018, the deadliest attack on Jews in US history, was spurred by a baseless take on immigration that Trump has echoed.

In May 2023, to much fanfare, Biden unveiled a national strategy to combat antisemitism.

Now, however, in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack and the backlash to Israel’s response, antisemitism has become a vulnerability for Biden – and Republicans are noticing. Some pro-Palestinian protests that are largely associated with the left, both on campuses and on the streets, have included antisemitic signs and slogans. And some progressive Democrats who have harshly criticized Israel, such as Jamaal Bowman, the congressman who this week lost his New York primary — have used rhetoric their rivals say crosses into antisemitism.

Biden has publicly reviled these outbreaks of hostility, but his Republican critics say his party is implicated in the protest movement and that he has not produced results. His Education Department is investigating antisemitism on multiple campuses, but most of those probes are not yet completed, or their outcomes are not yet tangible. It is the Republican-led US House of Representatives that has most prominently shone a light on vulnerabilities that some Jewish students say they feel on campus — and that has brought about the resignation of two Ivy League presidents accused of not taking a strong enough stand against antisemitism.

Trump and his acolytes, including one of his top Jewish surrogates, anti-immigration activist Stephen Miller, say without evidence that the protests are spurred by foreign students. Trump has said, likewise with no proof, that Biden’s visa policies will lead to a Hamas takeover of American streets and universities. Trump has said that Biden’s immigration policies generally make the United States more vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Biden is likely to seek to turn the antisemitism tables on Trump during the debate. A key theme of Biden’s campaign in recent weeks is the threat that Biden says Trump poses to democracy — it has become a centerpiece of Biden’s video ad campaign — and the Biden campaign has sent reporters multiple fact sheets listing the ways Trump’s authoritarianism leads to antisemitism.

Those fact sheets include Trump accusing, on multiple occasions, Jews of not being loyal, reports of his admiration for Hitler, his dinner last year with two well–known antisemites and a recent Trump campaign social media post that appeared to celebrate the return of a “unified Reich” — a term associated with the Nazis. (Trump’s campaign said the post was a low-level staffer’s error.)