Why Liberal Jews Are Right to Feel Worried About Kamala Harris Bypassing Josh Shapiro (Opinion)

Scrolling through the coverage of the Tim Walz VP announcement Tuesday morning, I received a message from a friend, a prominent Jewish American doctor who identifies as a moderate.

“This makes me very sad,” she wrote.

The friend had already been teetering on the cliff’s edge about Trump, believing him a better choice on antisemitism for her family, which includes a daughter studying on a hotbed college campus. Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, opting against Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro pushed her over that edge; to this friend, it was evidence the candidate had caved to anti-Jewish forces. And who’s to say she wouldn’t do that in office, too? “I didn’t say she was antisemitic,” she clarified. “I said that she could not stand up to those who are.”

I fought back vigorously.

Like Shapiro, Walz has been outspoken on antisemitism and the horrors of Oct. 7, I said.

As a folksy Midwesterner, the Minnesota governor brings electoral advantages that Shapiro and his coastal polish didn’t, I noted.

Not choosing a Jewish running mate is hardly disqualifying for office, I argued. If it was, every presidential candidate in history save one wouldn’t make the grade.

Also, I reasonably pointed out, it’s not like Harris trashed Shapiro. She’ll stand arm in arm with him at rallies, gratefully bask in his endorsement and maybe even give him a Cabinet position if she wins.

And then I stopped. There was never going to be a way to definitively know why Harris chose Walz over Shapiro. What is known is that the choice happened after a conscious progressive social-media campaign to brand Shapiro as “Genocide Josh” and paint him as some Netanyahu water-carrier when his positions on Israel were standard Democratic two-stateism (and sharply anti-Netanyahu). And that carries with it the stench of something else.

Across Hollywood and beyond, liberal Jewish Americans today feel a sense of unease. I don’t claim to speak for anyone but myself. But my thoughts seem to be echoed among the solidly liberal Jewish American producers, agents and executives I’ve talked to — namely, that even if the pick was the result of electoral calculations, those calculations come with baked-in antisemitic assumptions about the electorate.

Harris has drawn the support of a large number of Democrats in Hollywood who identify as Jewish, from Jeffrey Katzenberg to J.J. Abrams to Barbra Streisand. That won’t change. But it comes with a tinge now. As one producer I spoke to said, “Of course I’ll stay on the train — Walz seems like a good dude. I just keep asking why it isn’t a Shapiro train.”

To be sure, there are Arab American voters in Michigan and elsewhere who have strong feelings about Israel’s war in Gaza and would vote on that basis. As they should. But as a factor in bypassing Shapiro, this is beside the point. As Florida Democrat Jared Moskowitz recently noted, “Josh’s position on Israel is almost identical to everybody else, but he’s being held to a different standard. So you have to ask yourself why.”

Or as Dana Bash said on CNN on Monday, “The attacks on Josh Shapiro for his stance on Israel and protests — he has the same stance as the non-Jewish contenders and they’re picking at him, and we should not let that go unsaid.”

And so liberal American Jews who support the idea of a viable Jewish state regardless of its policies — it’s where half our brothers and sisters live, after all — find ourselves, once again, in an impossible position, a political equivalent of the closing in of the walls from The Temple of Doom. Fending off right-wing friends who see in the Walz pick an antisemitic conspiracy and proof of Democratic abandonment, we turn around and see spikes coming at us from the other direction, in the form of campaigns to target a proud Jewish official and the exuberance that they worked.

These people wouldn’t have been this gleeful, I thought as I scrolled through some progressive reactions, about the near-miss of J.B. Pritzker or anyone else less proudly Jewish. But they were about Shapiro, a traditionally observant Jew who attended private Jewish day school and embraces his faith openly.

Such reactions draw many liberal Jews back to the weeks after Oct. 7 and the shattering question we asked then — is the ground being pulled out from under us? For the first time in a while, today evoked Debra Messing’s line from the pro-Israel rally on the Mall last November. “I know you feel misunderstood and maligned,” she said to the many Jews in attendance. “I know, because I do too.”

Those comments sparked a backlash at the time. But many liberal Jews in Hollywood, media and tech identified with her remarks.

To some non-Jews I talked to, today’s news was just a case of a tribal rooting interest not going our way. “Oh well, you’ll get the next one,” went their vibe. But when a Jewish leader this popular from a state so necessary gets passed over, it becomes more than just a matter of losing a round of identity-politics poker — it touches an existential nerve.

Some Jews have also noted that in choosing Walz, Harris was simply trying to stay away from raising Gaza as an issue. But outside of antisemitic projection, why would it do that? The idea that a candidate would automatically want to talk more about Israel simply because he’s Jewish raises ugly tropes of dual loyalty, or worse.

Wary of seeming killjoyish, some liberal Jewish Americans also sought to find a silver lining — at least now Jews wouldn’t be blamed for administration failures, they said. They cited The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg, one of the most eloquent expositors of the double standards applied to Shapiro, who in a recent piece expressed some reservations about what a Shapiro vice presidency would bring.

“Anti-Semitism conceives of Jews as clandestine puppeteers who control the world’s governments and economies, fueling political and social problems,” he wrote. “A Jewish vice president would provide the perfect canvas for these fevered fantasies — a largely ceremonial figure onto whom bigots could nonetheless project all of their conspiracies, casting him as the real power behind the Resolute Desk.”

Rosenberg has forgotten more about the history of antisemitism than most of us will ever know. But this train of thought has always struck me as self-defeating. The response to fears of prejudice can’t be, “Let’s hide the Jews to prevent us from finding out about it.” 

A Jewish vice president would have been important not only because it would have signaled the latest progress of one ethnic group in America as thrillingly as Harris’ candidacy does for Americans of Black and Indian heritage, but also because it would have drawn antisemites out from the crevices, shining Louis Brandeis’ disinfecting light brightly upon them.

(That Harris’ husband is Jewish, incidentally, should do little to quell the unease. Jewish affiliations are proof of nothing except the reminder of past justifications. It calls to mind those who several years ago said Taika Waititi’s Nazi comedy Jojo Rabbit couldn’t be antisemitic because Waititi was Jewish. It wasn’t antisemitic. But that wasn’t the reason.)

Walz is a solid candidate with a strong record of speaking out against antisemitism. Just this spring he told Twin Cities PBS that, “I think when Jewish students are telling us they feel unsafe in that, we need to believe them.”

But Walz’s pro-Jewish bona fides don’t mean the decision to put him on the ticket — or the reaction to his appointment — can’t also be shadowed with antisemitism. Both can be true.

And so here liberal Jews again find ourselves, hopelessly marooned between a belief that Democratic policies are fundamentally better for our interests and yet worried we are not welcome in our own home — feeling a gentle nudge that perhaps we might find ourselves more comfortable in another place but unsure, in the end, of where else to go.