Perhaps the most important aspect of the current debate surrounding Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is that we know about it because Josh Shapiro wants us to know about it.
The previews of his forthcoming book have been focused on a question that Kamala Harris’s vetting team asked Shapiro when the former veep was choosing a running mate in 2024: “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?” That was apparently followed-up with a question about whether Shapiro had ever met with an undercover agent of the Israeli government. The vetting team also suggested that Shapiro might be too cheap to buy the upscale clothing his wife would need as second lady, and Harris wanted him to apologize for his harsh criticism of Hamas fans who harassed Jews.
Jewish leaders wasted no time in taking the Harris Committee on Un-American Activities to task for its embrace of the dual-loyalty canard. And Harris certainly deserves every ounce of criticism she and her team have received, and probably more. After all, if Shapiro can be disqualified for having as a teenager visited Israel and volunteering on a kibbutz, it could potentially have a chilling effect on young American Jews, who are already being pressured into hiding their involvement in Jewish communal activities. The attack on Shapiro is an attack on American Jewry.
Which is why Shapiro’s response is so noteworthy. We know about the obnoxious questioning not from an anonymous campaign leak or (don’t laugh) a high-status reporter digging into the undercurrent of anti-Semitism at the highest levels of progressive organizing. We know about it because Josh Shapiro wrote about it, put his name to it, and swung back at his party’s presidential nominee for good measure.
“I wondered,” he writes, “whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running — or if everyone who had not held a federal office was being grilled about Israel in the same way.”
In any event, Shapiro concluded, the whole affair “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”
As to whether Shapiro would, as Harris requested, grovel and beg the forgiveness of people chasing Jews while cheering Hamas’s Nazi atrocities, he “flatly” said no.
What is unusual about this news cycle is not that an ambitious politician with national aspirations sought to put some distance between himself and his party’s failed past leaders, or that he would paint himself as having shown toughness and nerve in his own recollections of the incidents at hand.
Instead, what is striking is that he would do so on the subject of Israel and anti-Semitism. Shapiro isn’t letting them take free shots at the Jews.
The Harris team’s behavior was atrocious, but they might have expected to get away with it on the assumption that no one wants to draw attention to accusations that they are a double agent or a Manchurian candidate. Shapiro, however, refused to play that game. His response was, essentially, OK let’s talk about it. Let’s play “Ask the Jew” in front of the whole country.
Josh Shapiro wasn’t supposed to be confrontational about it. He was supposed to take the hint and know his proper place as a Jew in national politics. He was not supposed to tell them to their faces how offensive their medievalist questioning was, and then to tell the world.
There is probably not one campaign operative in a thousand who would tell Shapiro to center his Jewish pride at a moment when so many progressive activists and organizers are out for Jewish blood. It contradicts the conventional wisdom.
But conventional wisdom didn’t prevent some anti-Semitic and anti-Israel lunatic from burning Shapiro’s house while his family was inside on Passover. Should he apologize to the man who tried to murder his family, too? Surely the Harris campaign would say yes.
Shapiro didn’t ask for this fight, but he’s not running from it. Hopefully it stays that way. The next generation of American Jewish activists and politicians are watching.
