Doug Emhoff

Origins and early life

Douglas Craig Emhoff was born in Brooklyn on 13 October 1964 to Jewish parents, Michael Emhoff, a shoe designer, and Barbara Emhoff, and grew up in Matawan and Old Bridge, New Jersey. His family belonged to Temple Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Aberdeen Township, where he had his bar mitzvah in 1977, and when he was seventeen they moved to Southern California. He graduated in communication studies from California State University, Northridge, in 1987 and in law from the USC Gould School of Law in 1990 and was admitted to the bar that year.

Work and career

A litigator in media, entertainment and intellectual property, he opened his own firm in 2000, ran the West Coast offices of Venable after it acquired the firm in 2006, and became a partner at DLA Piper in 2017. Married to Kamala Harris since 2014, on 20 January 2021 he became the first Second Gentleman of the United States and the first Jewish spouse of an American president or vice president, a role he held until 20 January 2025.

On 7 December 2022 he hosted a White House roundtable with a dozen Jewish leaders on rising antisemitism, and on 27 January 2023, Holocaust Remembrance Day, he laid a wreath at Auschwitz and placed a white stone, a Jewish tradition, at the ruins of a crematorium in Birkenau. On the same journey he visited Gorlice, the Polish town his ancestors had left to escape persecution, and in May 2023 he was part of the White House team that launched the first United States National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.

The White House described him as honoured to share his Jewish heritage and culture with the nation, from celebrating Hanukkah at the White House to fixing mezuzahs on the doorposts of the Vice President's Residence. He joined the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher in January 2025, and in July 2025 the USC Gould School of Law, where he had studied, made him a distinguished visiting professor.