JTA — Tony Blinken, US President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state, is the stepson of a Holocaust survivor whose stories shaped his worldview and subsequently his policy decisions, including in the Middle East.
Biden named Blinken to the post on Monday, a day after news leaked about his plans to bring on the Jewish former high-ranking official in the Obama administration.
Blinken, 58, has been one of Biden’s closest policy advisers for over a decade and espouses the opposite of President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda, which prioritized nationalist goals over international diplomacy. Multiple reports say that Blinken will seek to rejoin many of the international agreements that Trump left as president, notably the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran nuclear deal (an agreement with major diplomatic consequences for Israel).
Under Blinken, the State Department will usher in a much different foreign policy era, including on Israel. Like Biden, Blinken has close ties to the country forged from his decades of strong support of the Jewish state.
Here’s what you need to know about the new top diplomat, who hasn’t been much of a household name until now.
His Jewish parents were influential in their own right
Blinken was born in New York City, where he spent most of his early years. His father, Donald, co-founded the hefty E.M. Warburg Pincus & Company (now Warbug Pincus) investment firm and served as the US ambassador to Hungary for four years under president Bill Clinton’s administration. There is an archive at George Soros’s Central European University in Hungary named for Donald Blinken, now 95, and his second wife, Vera, who survived the Holocaust, in part for their support of the “democratization process in the United States and in Hungary.”
Donald Blinken’s grandfather Meir Blinken was a noted Yiddish author whose stories were published in a book in the 1980s that features an introduction by scholar Ruth Wisse.
His stepfather’s Holocaust experience shaped his worldview.
Tony Blinken’s mother, Judith, remarried Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor and attorney who advised president John F. Kennedy and multiple French presidents. Pisar, who survived three concentration camps, also worked for the United Nations, wrote a libretto titled “Kaddish-A Dialogue With God” at the behest of Leonard Bernstein and penned an award-winning memoir about his Holocaust experiences.
Blinken has said that Pisar’s experiences have informed his vision for the “engaged” role that the United States should play on the global stage.
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In 2008, Biden tapped Blinken to help his presidential campaign, and when Biden was chosen as Barack Obama’s vice president, Blinken followed, becoming one of his national security advisers. In 2014, Obama elevated Blinken to deputy secretary of state under John Kerry.
During those years, Blinken was heavily involved in the crafting of Middle East policy, including the landmark Iran deal.
Blinken has been described as a centrist and an interventionist, and he’s said to have a “mind meld” with Biden on foreign policy — an area of governance in which the president-elect specializes and wants to prioritize in the Oval Office.
Blinken is more hawkish on issues such as Russia, whom he considers a foe (he helped Obama’s team respond stiffly to Vladimir Putin’s encroachments into Crimea).
On Israel, Blinken’s views reflect the Democratic mainstream
Within the Democratic Party, a minority of lawmakers and advocates have been trying to shift the party to the left on Israel issues. Progressives including Bernie Sanders have suggested that aid to Israel ought to be conditioned on certain policy choices.
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Blinken is a centrist here, too. He has said that a Biden administration will not condition aid to Israel on policy choices, will keep the embassy in Jerusalem and will staunchly support Israel at the United Nations — a body that often singles out the Jewish state for human rights abuses without condemning offenders such as Syria and China. In May, Biden wrote that he “firmly” rejects the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and Blinken has backed up that stance.
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As he told a ‘Sesame Street’ character, Blinken is compassionate toward refugees
Trump prioritized closing off US borders and punishing immigrants who sought asylum in a policy set by a Jewish adviser, Stephen Miller.
Biden has said his approach to immigration — an issue important to many American Jews — will be much different. Blinken explained his attitude about refugees in a 2016 video with the “Sesame Street” character Grover, in which he explains to the fuzzy blue puppet that refugees should be treated the same as “you and me.”
This school year, some kids will have new classmates: refugees. @Grover & I discuss how to make them feel welcome in their new communities. pic.twitter.com/gKInM2Ahuw
— Antony Blinken (@ABlinken) September 21, 2016
“We all have something to learn and gain from one another, even when it doesn’t seem at first like we have much in common,” Blinken said after asking Grover to imagine how challenging it must be for someone to feel so unsafe that they decide to leave their home.
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https://www.timesofisrael.com/where-...ion-to-israel/
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