Biden’s team | Jewish general

Much has been written about the diversity of Joe Biden’s new cabinet. Less known so far that this diversity includes a large group of American Jews. Never before has a cabinet been as Jewish as that of the Irish-born Catholic Joseph Robinette Biden.

Antony Blinken (Foreign Minister, 58): The offspring of a Jewish family of Hungarian origin from New York experienced diplomacy as a child: his father Donald was the US ambassador to Hungary, his uncle Alan to Belgium. His stepfather, Samuel Pisar, with whom Blinken moved to Paris at the age of nine, was a Holocaust survivor from Poland who escaped during one of the notorious death marches during the evacuation of the camps and finally came to the USA.

Meir Blinken, Antony’s great-grandfather, was a well-known Yiddish writer from the shtetl Pereyaslav, the same place in today’s Ukraine from which the Yiddish great poet Scholem Alejchem comes from at the beginning of the 19th century.

Harvard graduate Antony Blinken practiced as a lawyer in New York and Paris before entering politics. Blinken worked on the National Security Council under Bill Clinton. He was Deputy Foreign Minister under Obama and is considered an opponent of China and Iran.

Avril Haines (Intelligence, 51): She grew up in Manhattan as the daughter of a painter. After her mother’s untimely death and high school graduation, Avril Haines went to Japan to learn judo.

Back in the USA, she studied physics and rebuilt old airplanes. She started doing research for a doctoral thesis, but dropped out, opened a bar and turned it into a bookstore – which became very successful. From 2003 Haines worked in the Foreign Ministry. In the Obama administration she became deputy security advisor and vice-CIA chief. She is the first woman in her post.

Janet Yellen (Finance, 74): The child of Polish Jews from Brooklyn was the first or only at all important professional stages. That started with her PhD in economics at Yale in 1971 – as the only woman. She was the first woman to head the US Federal Reserve during the Obama administration and into 2017 – and will now be the first woman to head the Treasury. The retired economics professor from the University of Berkeley is considered the most successful central bank chief when it comes to the job market. She was also successful after the temporary end of her financial career. According to the Wall Street Journal, she made $ 7 million speaking in 2019 and 2020 alone. For one of their performances, organizers pay between 50,000 and 300,000 dollars.

Merrick Garland (Justice, 68): His grandparents fled anti-Semitic pogroms in Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. His parents raised him like conservative Jews in the USA. Garland, who comes from Chicago like the former President Barack Obama, studied law at Harvard after initially flirting with medicine. He began his career in 1981 in the Justice Department, then made a name for himself as a lawyer and legal advisor.

Since the Clinton administration, Garland has been appointed to several high judicial posts, but failed in 2017 because of the Republicans’ blockade policy – 293 days after President Barack Obama’s nomination as a candidate for the Supreme Court. His appointment as Minister of Justice therefore has something of belated political justice.

Alejandro Mayorkas (Homeland Security, 61): He was born in Havana as the child of a Jewish Cuban and a Shoah survivor from Romania. After the revolution and Fidel Castro’s takeover, the family fled to Florida in 1960. President Bill Clinton made the top attorney in 1998 as a federal attorney for Los Angeles. Mayorka’s attitudes to national and local security, he says again and again, “were shaped by the lack of security that I experienced as a Jew in Cuba.” Alejandro Mayorkas will be the first Hispanic refugee child and the first foreign-born to rise to the helm of the Department of Homeland Security.

Ron Klain (Chief of Staff, 59): The Harvard lawyer has been Biden’s confidante for many years and was already Biden’s chief of staff when Biden was vice president. Klain was previously Chief of Staff for former Vice President Al Gore. In the Obama administration, Klain made a name for himself as a coordinator against the Ebola pandemic. He is also the brain behind the Covid-19 action plan that Joe Biden put at the center of his election campaign. Ron Klain comes from a Jewish family in Indianapolis. His three children from his marriage to his non-Jewish wife Monica Medina were raised Jewish, but celebrate Christmas with the family as well, as Klain said in an interview with the New York Times in 2007.

Eric Lander (Science Advisor, 63): The Brooklyn-born mathematician and geneticist previously headed the renowned Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He attracted attention early on because of his natural science talent, winning silver at the Math Olympiad for the USA. He is the first to represent science at the Cabinet level in the White House. Clear words are expected from him about corona and climate change.

She is also in cabinet rank Deputy National Security Advisor for Cybersecurity, Ann Neuberger (45). She is from Brooklyn’s Orthodox Borough Park neighborhood. Her parents, George and Renne Karfunkel, were among the passengers on the Air France flight in 1976, which was kidnapped by terrorists to Entebbe in Uganda and rescued by Israeli commandos. Neuberger has been working for the National Security Agency (NSA) since 2009.

Also David Cohen (58) has cabinet rank. The 58-year-old from Boston will deputy director of the CIA and thus the most senior Jewish American in the legendary federal agency.

As the first woman and therefore the first to become Jewish Wendy Sherman (71) from Baltimore Deputy Foreign Minister. From 1997 to 2001 she was special advisor to US President Bill Clinton and political coordinator for North Korea. She then headed the board of directors of Oxfam America, an international development and disaster relief organization. In 2011 she returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and became head of the Political Affairs Department. Sherman was the chief negotiator behind the controversial nuclear deal with Iran.

The pediatrician Rachel Levine (63) should Deputy Minister of Health will. She is transgender and was born Richard Levine in Massachusetts. In 2011 she decided to live as a woman in the future. She grew up in a family that felt close to conservative Judaism, but today describes herself as a reform Jew, as the reform movement is more open to transsexual people. Levine studied medicine at Harvard University in the late 1970s and then worked in leading positions at major American clinics. Since 2017, she has been the State Secretary of Health and Professor of Child Psychiatry at Penn State University. Levine will be the first transgender person to sit in an American cabinet.

And then there is Doug Emhoff (56) – Job description: first second gentleman of US history. The husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, whom friends recently call “Second Mensch”, teaches law at Georgetown University and has a tremendous influence on his wife, who is called “Momala” in the family – which sounds like Mamele in American terms …