What is the purpose of a campaign “Jewish liaison”? Kamala Harris, who just hired a campaign Jewish liaison, doesn’t seem to know.

Ilan Goldenberg will serve in the position for Harris. Rather than liaising with the organized Jewish community, Goldenberg’s job, it seems, is to circumvent the practice of liaising with the Jewish community.

I’ll explain. The Jewish community in America is a wide and diverse cross-section of the tribe—“two Jews, three shuls” and all that. The closest thing we have to an umbrella representative is the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which was created for this purpose and for several others. The CEO of the Conference of Presidents is William Daroff, an experienced hand within the Jewish organizational world who also has experience on the Hill. For the needs of a political campaign, you don’t have to hire a Jewish liaison, because we in the Jewish world have already done that for you. Just call Daroff—or whoever is in that position.

A White House liaison, on the other hand, is arguably necessary and certainly helpful. After all, a president has just gone through a campaign filled with partisanship and identity politics, and it never hurts to signal that the president is the president of everyone.

A campaign liaison does not play that role. Especially in a campaign like Harris’s, where Zoom rallies are organized based on skin color and gender and other markers of one’s biological demographic. The purpose of a campaign Jewish liaison in this situation is to rally the organized Jews already on Harris’s side and prepare them to defend her from any and all criticism no matter how legitimate. She is hiring a Jewish shield, not a Jewish liaison.

She might want to get a shield for the shield. Goldenberg is a puzzling choice. He is ideologically to the left of the current Democratic administration—of which Harris is vice president—which is a strange signal to send. He is also, more importantly, a man of poor judgment. He has made a very public show of his opposition to just about every move intended to help Israel over the past decade or so.

Goldenberg was against moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem in recognition of its Jewish significance or of Israeli sovereignty; he wanted, instead, for it to eventually be moved only when the Palestinians had lifted their veto and decided they had what they wanted. Speaking of Israeli sovereignty, he doesn’t like that the U.S. recognizes the Golan Heights in northern Israel. It is mighty strange to have a “Jewish liaison” who opposes Jewish sovereignty every time he’s asked.

In 2020, he was an adviser to the presidential campaign of Elizabeth Warren, one of Israel’s loudest and most ignorant critics in the Senate. He was a champion of the Iran nuclear deal, in which the Obama administration legitimized Iran’s drive for a bomb in return for Tehran delaying its nuclear breakout until after Obama was out of office.

There are other examples, but the key point is not that Goldenberg was wrong but how he was wrong. Moving the embassy would likely trigger a wave of regional violence, he predicted. (It didn’t.) Recognizing the Golan “damages Israeli security and undermines American interests in the Middle East and beyond, while stirring a hornet’s nest that didn’t need stirring,” he wrote. (It didn’t.) The Iran deal, he said, “will create a situation in which Iran will be deterred from ever pursuing a bomb.” (It didn’t.)

It seems as though Harris’s idea of a Jewish liaison is someone who will tell the Jewish community they’re wrong.

She has a slightly different idea of a liaison to the Arab/Muslim community (her campaign combines the two). Nasrina Bargzie, Harris’s choice for Arab/Muslim liaison, has worked for the vice president before. She also has a long record of defending the groups responsible for building up the anti-Semitism crisis on college campuses. One particular example stands out: In 2012, she and her coalition presented a report to the United Nations complaining about Jews on campus who objected to the anti-Semitic activism that has become so common.

The complaint went so far as to object to Jews having Title VI protections under civil-rights law—a debate that has come roaring back now that pro-Hamas encampments have been found to have unequivocally infringed on the basic rights of Jewish students. In other words, Harris’s Arab/Muslim liaison has spent years helping to bring the anti-Semitism crisis on campus to a boiling point.

Harris’s message to the Arab and Muslim communities is one of quiet solidarity with the Iran-backed tentifada’s guiding worldview. Her message via her Jewish liaison is one of appeasement of Iran. One wonders why a single liaison couldn’t handle both jobs.