Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Michelle Obama, described the “original version[s] of the Constitution” and the Old Testament as “evil” and “an abomination” in an interview with David Axelrod, chief strategist of Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns and a senior advisor to the president during the first term of the Obama administration.

Hurwitz spoke with Axelrod on the latter’s podcast, the Axe Files, for an interview published on December 23. Partial transcript below:

AXELROD: Some of the language is kind of, well, archaic, impenetrable, so how do you derive from that modern meaning? HURWITZ: Yeah. The Torah, which is the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament, it’s 2,500 year old. News flash, it’s really old. Constitution, more than 200 years old. If we lived by the original version of the Constitution, that would be evil. It would be an abomination. Same if we lived by the original version of the Torah. You reinterpret it. We amended the Constitution to get rid of slavery, thank God. We amended it to let women vote, thank God. We continue to amend this document. Same with the Torah, right? We have spent 2,500 years reinterpreting, reimagining it, to make it consistent with our moral sensibilities of the time.

Hurwitz went on to praise same-sex marriages performed by Jewish clergy as a modern function of what she described as a moral reimagination and reinterpretation of the Torah.

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Axelrod invited Hurwitz’s comments on the multiple murder shooting at a kosher market in Jersey City, NJ. Hurwitz linked President Donald Trump to the antisemitic crime, which was perpetrated by suspects linked to the “Black Hebrew Israelites,” a black racial nationalist movement.

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Hurwitz said:

I don’t think it’s a secret that this [antisemitism] has been rising over the last few years. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think that when you have a national political leader — and a number of people who enable that person — who deliberately foments anti-Muslim sentiments, anti-immigrant sentiments, racist sentiments, when you have someone deliberately riling up those types of sentiments, and empowering and enabling folks who hold those sentiments, that affects Jews, as well. You don’t meet many white supremacists or neo-Nazis who say, ‘I love Muslims, but I can’t stand immigrants,’ or, ‘I adore African Americans. I just don’t love Jews.’ When you empower them and embolden them and inspire them, that affects all minorities.”

Hurwitz added, “I do think that the current president, yeah, I think that a lot of this falls to him.”

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