These are Biden’s Jews

WASHINGTON — We’ve been gone two Thursdays because of the Passover holiday. Lots to catch up on.

Sanders’ formal endorsement five days later made Biden the lone candidate standing earlier than any non-incumbent nominee since John Kerry, who dispatched the field in March 2004.

That gives Biden a head start in his bid to oust Donald Trump from the White House, but Trump has some major advantages, notably in media play and fundraising.

The president has the pulpit of his daily White House pandemic news conferences, which often veer into campaign-style rhetoric. Biden, meantime, is confined to delivering daily pep talks from his Delaware home, where he barely registers online. There is the occasional exception, like the bro session on April 13 when Sanders endorsed Biden. That earned millions of views.

As to fundraising, The New York Times reported this week that Biden was behind Trump by $187 million, meaning he would have to raise $1 million a day until the election just to catch up with where Trump is today.

Which leaves a stew of questions about Biden’s Jewish campaign: Who will he turn to for fundraising? What does it mean for his foreign policy?

The last time Biden ran for president, in 2008, his financial director was Michael Adler, a Miami developer who is ensconced in the Jewish establishment: For years he led the straight down the center National Jewish Democratic Council and he’s been active with AIPAC. Adler is back on board the Biden train, although not in a senior campaign position. He has held fundraisers at his South Florida home.

Call Adler Biden’s Jewish old guard. He’s joined in that respect by an array of other establishment figures, including Comcast senior executive vice president David Cohen, who also has hosted fundraisers for Biden, and Stu Eizenstat, the veteran Holocaust reparations negotiator who penned an op-ed for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency favoring Biden.

But there are new Jewish kids on the Biden block, too. They earned their Democratic cred without having come up through the traditional pro-Israel channels, like accruing influence through AIPAC activism and fundraising.

On the Jewish donor angle, one intriguing establishment vs. insurgent skirmish is who runs the party’s digital campaign. According to coverage in The Intercept and Politico, the outfit that Michael Bloomberg launched for his campaign, Hawkfish, is vying for the job.

The appeal: It’s up and running, it’s already been funded to a significant extent by the media mogul’s cash, and so it is bidding low.

The disadvantage: It’s Bloomberg. If there’s a victory that the party’s left can claim, it is booting the former New York mayor’s campaign to the street. Bloomberg was reviled for his corporatism and his record relating to the city’s minorities and as a boss relating to women. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the first-term progressive from New York, has emphatically advised against using the group.

Biden has brought into the mix two Jewish Democratic groups that otherwise spent much of the primary season reviling one another: He has the endorsements of both the Democratic Majority for Israel, which is aligned with centrist pro-Israel policy, and J Street. Also in the offing this week is an endorsement from the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America.

On Israel, Biden has robustly favored a return to making the two-state solution the paramount outcome of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; Trump has significantly retreated from that goal. The person most identified with Biden foreign policy is Colin Kahl, who was his national security adviser when he was vice president. Kahl, who is not Jewish, was on the team that shaped the 2015 Iran nuclear deal reviled by Israel and Trump has quit.

The Case of the Kosher Signatures: A legal challenge in a Long Island congressional primary hinges on Shabbat observance. We couldn’t make up the bizarre details if we tried.

On the left, the question of whether it is critical to overlook Biden’s centrism and perceived flaws to focus on ousting Trump features various Jewish voices. Sanders, as we noted above, talks about putting aside differences. Since Ralph Nader’s 2000 run for the Green Party, the capacity of the left to disrupt an election has not been an academic question. This time, the Greens and other small parties go to the default answer — they won’t blame themselves for the failure of Democrats to galvanize voters. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Julia Terruso canvasses small parties — and one of them, Bread and Roses, a socialist party founded by Jerome Segal (an academic who helped bring about the Oslo peace process), is sitting out the election in swing states like Pennsylvania.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., posted a quarantine video, as have many others, of his favorite isolation meal: A tuna salad sandwich, microwaved. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., says he needs to get in touch, stat.