Separated at Birth

Are Israeli Miri Regev and Kamala Harris really twins under the skin?

Montage by the author

Miri Regev and Kamala Harris, two women in politics, both of whom are very much in the news have startling similarities in their personal and public lives.

Starting with the physical. They are both 59 years of age, almost the same height when not wearing, as Harris has petulantly reminded us, high heels (Harris 1.63 m – Regev 1.62 m). The Internet is discrete about their weight but judging from television they would appear to be similar in that as well.

If the Times of Israel will excuse me for writing it, they are both are at about the same level of physical attractiveness. Ranking appearance is a very personal opinion but I don’t think there would be much objection to describing them both as attractive women.

Ethnic identity is very much at the centre of their political identity, Harris pushes herself as Black American at every opportunity, although brought up by a subcontinent Indian mother with a distant Jamaican father she could be best described as mixed-race or even ‘Blackish’. Her sometime mentor and inspiration Barak Obama should also be described that way but also leveraged one absent Kenyan parent to sell himself as America’s first Black president.

Regev does it as Mizrahi Israeli although her mother came from France and the language spoken in the Siboni (her maiden name) home is Spanish not Arabic.

Both Regev and Harris have publicly stated their determined opposition to the ‘White’ elites. Yet both women picked as life partners wealthy, professional White, Ashkenazi men (Dror Regev, engineer at Israel Aircraft Industries and Doug Emhoff, entertainment lawyer who also is Jewish allowing me to pin the Ashkenazi label on him).

How we perceive skin colour is a relative concept. If we wish to avoid the racially-loaded label of ‘light-skinned’ both women are tanned. Look at the many photographs online. Neither woman is significantly darker than her spouse or each other.

There is a tendency for haters to accuse both women of being bumpkins. Yet their education is roughly equivalent. Both have university-level degrees, albeit not at Ivy League institutions or their Israeli equivalent. Regev earned a bachelor’s degree in Informal Education and an MBA from Ono Academic College. Harris’s bachelor degree comes from Howard University, with a law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (after 2023 renamed UC Law San Francisco). Graduating any university doesn’t necessarily prove wisdom but intelligence is still required.

One slight dissimilarity. Harris’s alma mater celebrates her candidacy on the homepage of the website. Ono Academic college practically ignores Regev.

She is simply listed on Ono Academic College’s website as notable alumni > see more. To add insult to presumably injured ego Minister of Transport, National Infrastructure and Road Safety, former brigadier-general in the Israel Defense Forces and IDF Spokeswoman, former Minister of Culture and Sport and Acting Prime Minister of Israel Regev is simply listed as Member of Knesset. We can only speculate why as Pnina Tamano-Shata and Omer Yankelovich lead the list of notable alumni because of their ministerial positions.
On the professional level both careers began with the assistance of powerful mentors, Harris as prosecutor and Regev in the IDF, and have continued. Harris was the girlfriend of married Speaker of the California State Assembly and later Mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown. We can have no opinion about whether the same can be said about about Miri Regev in the army but Yesh Atid lawmaker and IDF former IDF major general Elazar Stern implied it. Whether the suggestion is accurate or not anyone seeing Regev fussing around Sara Netanyahu for the camera can be forgiven for thinking she knows how her bread is buttered.

Neither woman had an impressive political start. Regev barely scraped into the Knesset after acquiring the 27^th position in Likud primaries. Harris ran against Joe Biden to be the Democrat candidate for the presidency and won zero delegates before being the first to drop out.

While in office, Harris as Senator for California and Vice President and Regev as Minister for Culture and Sport and currently Minister for Transport both had a reputation for outrageous although successful publicity seeking but limited actual results. Both have been accused of placing their personal advancement before doing their defined job. Both have been accused of greatly enjoying the perks of office.

Harris, for example, notoriously badgered Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh, essentially accusing him of sexual assault. Kavanaugh was nevertheless confirmed. Regev attacked the cultural elites whom she accused being a “cultural junta,” pushing European artistic values at the expense of African-Asian values. That said, I doubt that there has been any significant increase in performance or creation of Sephardi Andalusian music as a result.
In part the headline grabbing is contributed to by dubious, offensive, ‘unparliamentary’ language. Harris has gone as far as publicly announcing her favorite curse word. Even specifying that she pronounces it in the Afro-American style. One can speculate that the language employed by both women is deliberate populism, appealing to the lowest common denominator. A way of saying, “Ignore my high status, I am one of you”.

It is perhaps not surprising that both have quite a record for bitter staff resignations. They may smile, a lot, but neither has a reputation as an easy, grateful boss to work for.

As of writing Kamala Harris has a 50 per cent chance of achieving America’s top office. Miri Regev’s upward trajectory seems to have stalled a bit, if only for the relative weakness of her mentors Bibi and especially Sara Netanyahu but with ambition and luck that could change.

After all Harris’s San Francisco mentor ‘Slick’ Willie Brown warned her that accepting the VP position under Biden would end her career. We will see how that prediction works out, in November.