WASHINGTON \u2014 Midway through one of the most forceful speeches of his presidency, President Joe Biden noticed a woman in the audience had teared up.
He stopped and looked at Sheila Katz, one of the Jewish leaders gathered at the White House just four days after Hamas terrorists slaughtered more than 1,300 people in Israel, including young children.
\u201cYou OK, kiddo?\u201d he asked, pausing behind a lectern he\u2019d been pounding as he described taking his children to see the Nazi death camps.
\u201cI felt really seen by him,\u201d Katz, the CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, recalled in an interview. \u201cIn that moment, to have the president of the country pause his remarks to check in on me was really moving.\u201d
Not everyone at the White House is OK these days. Hamas\u2019 attack has shaken an administration that feels a deep emotional bond with Israel and the Jewish community.
Biden and members of his team \u2014 some of whom have family members in Israel \u2014 have been grieving over reports of hostage-takings and mass murder. They\u2019re juggling ordinary White House business with a crisis that\u2019s anything but, all the while coordinating a response to a war that has upended the Middle East.
\u201cWe\u2019re bracing ourselves for what comes next,\u201d said a White House aide who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss how colleagues are coping with the war.
Emotional toll in the White House
A White House official working on the response to the attack said that at different times this week, every member of the team has looked at one another teary-eyed. In meetings, people will start speaking and their voices will crack, another official said.
Some Biden administration aides have family members or friends who are serving in the Israeli military. As the body count rises, they\u2019ve been carrying out assignments while texting loved ones to make sure they\u2019re safe.
\u201cWe deal with mass casualty events with some amount of frequency on the national security team,\u201d a senior official said. \u201cBut this one has at times felt like more than any one person can bear. It\u2019s clear people are carrying their grief with them.\u201d
Whatever officials may be doing, the war inevitably intrudes. On Tuesday, Biden revealed that U.S. citizens are among Hamas\u2019 hostages. The next day, the administration said the number of American deaths had climbed to nearly two dozen.
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on X “horrifying photos of babies murdered and burned by\u201d Hamas terrorists, writing that he had shown them to visiting Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
An Israeli official said in an interview that the photographs are important, as they \u201cmake it so much more real to see it.\u201d
\u201cIt hurts in your stomach and your gut in such a way that you can\u2019t stay indifferent to it,\u201d the official said. \u201cIt\u2019s not in order to persuade. When it comes to anybody who is human and calls himself a human being, you don\u2019t need these images to persuade.\u201d
While the scenes coming out of Israel, including the beginnings of what\u2019s expected to be a long, bloody war, hang heavy over the White House, Biden and his aides also appear determined not to let the crisis consume them.
Before he addressed Jewish leaders Wednesday, Biden announced a new push to limit \u201cjunk fees\u201d charged by businesses. On Friday, he\u2019ll travel to Philadelphia for an event devoted to clean energy jobs, and on Monday he\u2019ll be in Colorado to discuss his economic agenda.
Even in the first two days after the attack, Biden was dedicating time to other priorities. Between meetings and phone calls at the White House, he sat for interviews with a special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents from his time as vice president.
Behind the scenes, Biden also has taken the time to ask for regular updates about staff members with loved ones living in Israel, an official said. An internal email from White House chief of staff Jeff Zients told staffers about various counseling services available to them and their families.
The emotional toll inside the White House has at times spilled into public view.
Listening to CNN host Jake Tapper recite the abuses inflicted on Israeli women and children, a polished White House spokesman and retired Navy rear admiral, John Kirby,\u2002lost his composure. He turned from the camera to collect himself before answering.
\u201cExcuse me,\u201d he said. \u201cVery difficult to look at these images, Jake.\u201d
Dozens of Jewish aides work in the White House; they are tight-knit. Blinken is Jewish, the stepson of a Holocaust survivor. Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019 husband, Douglas Emhoff, is also Jewish, and together, the couple hosted a celebration at their residence last month for the High Holy Days. Jewish aides mark religious holidays together and in past years have lit a menorah in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Tom Nides, who left his job as U.S. ambassador to Israel in July, said he had just gotten an email from a friend who wrote that his daughter had been found \u2014 dead.
\u201cIt\u2019s breaking my heart,\u201d Nides said. \u201cI know all these people. I know all my staff who are there and their families. It\u2019s impossible to describe what is happening in the country. It\u2019s beyond comprehension.\u201d
Deeply personal for Biden
In the days since Hamas launched its attack, Biden has spoken with a measure of clarity missing in past presidential speeches. The war seems to have energized him, imbuing him with equal parts rage and resolve.
At Wednesday\u2019s event with Jewish leaders, Biden raised his voice in recalling how he took his children to see the death camps the Nazis built to massacre Jews during World War II.
\u201cI wanted them to see,\u201d he shouted, \u201cthat you could not not know what was going on walking through those gates! You could not fail to understand as a country what was going on.\u201d
White House aides said Biden has been deeply involved in crafting the speeches he has delivered this week.
In a speech Tuesday, Biden made a point to mention details of the atrocities Hamas committed in breaching Israeli boundary lines. The comments weren\u2019t part of his original script, aides said. He had just gotten off the phone with Netanyahu, who had told him of women being raped and children being kidnapped and killed.
\u201cThe conversation with Bibi definitely had an effect on him and the way he delivered the speech,\u201d an administration official said.
Biden, who is Irish Catholic, has ties of his own to Israel and the Jewish diaspora.
Biden recalls as a young senator in 1973 visiting then-Prime Minister Golda Meir, who made an indelible impression when she disclosed to him Israel\u2019s \u201csecret weapon.\u201d
\u201c\u2018We have no place else to go,\u2019\u201d she told him, as Biden has recounted the visit.
\u201cHe feels what the Jewish community has been through,\u201d said Ted Kaufman, a former Biden Senate aide and onetime Democratic senator from Delaware. \u201cIt\u2019s the Irish in him. He is someone who feels people\u2019s pain.\u201d
Biden\u2019s home state, Delaware, was an incubator for his kinship with the Jewish community. He is close to Congregation Beth Shalom in Wilmington, a synagogue with about 450 families. Michael Beals, the senior rabbi, said he considers the president \u201cpart of the ‘mishpocha,’\u201d Yiddish for family network.
In the months before Biden became a candidate in the 2020 presidential race, Beals wrote him a letter. At the time, Biden was an ex-vice president whose age was considered a reason he might choose to sit out the race. Beals urged him to run, telling him that \u201cin the Jewish tradition, age is an asset \u2014 wisdom \u2014 and you shouldn\u2019t count yourself out because of your age.\u201d
On Jan. 24, 2019, Biden sent back a handwritten letter on vice presidential stationery.
\u201cYou are \u2018my Rabbi,\u2019 and my friend,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI\u2019ve had the great honor to meet and be mentored by so many remarkable women and men from \u2018Golda\u2019\u201d Meir to Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor.
\u201cI am indebted to you and to the community in so many ways.
\u201cYou are familiar with the Talmudic saying, \u2018What comes from the heart enters the heart.
\u201cYour sentiments entered my heart.\u201d
He signed it \u201cJoe.\u201d
Three months later, he announced his candidacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n