The Reeducation of Josh Shapiro

By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

Sunday, August 11, 2024

 

Left-wing Jews are being squeezed. The far Left has staked out positions on Israel and antisemitism it wants the rest of the Left to adopt, positions that conveniently box out many Jews.

 

It’s happened on college campuses for years, but Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s recent veepstakes experience underscored that the Left’s litmus tests have left the campus lab. And while Shapiro’s losing out on a vice-presidential nod must be personally disappointing, his treatment should be a red flag for Americans more broadly about societal changes.

 

The discussion around Shapiro started out fairly positive. There was talk of his being a Jewish day-school graduate, keeping kosher, and marking Shabbat with his family. But that was quickly marred by the antisemitism CNN commentator Van Jones delicately described as “marbled into” the Democratic Party.

 

The far Left insisted that Shapiro was excessively pro-Israel, even though his profile on Israel resembles other Democrats’, with the possible exception of his pointed commentary on Israel’s prime minister. Shapiro called Bibi Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time” in January and “a destructive force in the Middle East” in February.

 

Shapiro’s detractors still dubbed him “Genocide Josh,” hating that he had criticized antisemitic campus protesters and their protectors. For example, Shapiro called former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill’s congressional remarks last December “absolutely shameful.” And he correctly told the New York Times in May, “If you had a group of white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs every day, that would be met with a different response than antisemites camped out, yelling antisemitic tropes.”

 

Shapiro was likely surprised to be painted as an extremist, though. He has worked hard to be a Democratic coalition member in good standing. For instance, he “joined the multi-state Reproductive Freedom Alliance with 21 other Governors to safeguard abortion access, protect abortion providers, and affirm abortion rights.” Shapiro has pushed to expand legal protections for LGBTQ Pennsylvanians. And he made sure to condemn “Islamophobia and all forms of hate” when speaking at an event marking Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day — that is, the day that specifically commemorates Jewish victims.

 

But none of it was enough. Shapiro found himself facing the sort of stigmatization many Jewish college students now regularly experience, like the Jewish and Israeli students who faced discrimination in a support group for sexual-assault survivors before October 7. Or the Jewish and Israeli students who lost friends, as they mourned after October 7.

 

As with anti-Israel college students who quiz Jewish classmates about their personal position on Israel, the anti-Israel coalition within the Democrats’ base focused on whether Shapiro was the “right” kind of Jew. That Shapiro isn’t an ardent anti-Zionist was already a strike against him for these activists, many of whom are Gen Z and Millennials. Having been taught that Jews are “oppressors,” young voters unsurprisingly told pollsters they viewed Shapiro negatively.

 

For Shapiro to remain a member of the “Community of the Good” — and be nominated for vice president — he had to rebrand. Someone else in that situation might have declined, turned off by people who reject him as is, but Shapiro chose differently.

 

Shapiro distanced himself from his 31-year-old opinion piece, which offered a negative assessment of the Palestinians: “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully. They do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”

 

Had Shapiro not disowned this article, he would have faced a new firestorm over Islamophobia. However, another component of the op-ed merits attention. The young Shapiro deserves credit for going against the grain as an Oslo Accords skeptic; if the accords had worked as Shapiro’s peers hoped, there would have been no Second Intifada, nor October 7. So while Shapiro is entitled to revise his opinions, he has notably moved from a socially riskier, dissenting view toward Democrats’ standard support for the two-state solution, which only 25 percent of Israelis favor.

 

Playing defense, Shapiro’s spokesperson explained that Shapiro’s volunteering with the IDF in his youth was for purely civilian work. Someone even went so far as erasing mention of Shapiro’s IDF volunteer work on Wikipedia.

 

But still, no dice. Predictably, Harris’s passing over Shapiro energized his far-left detractors. An Instagram account linked to the anti-Shapiro campaign “took a victory lap” and the Democratic Socialists of America crowed that Harris’s decision “has shown the world that DSA and our allies on the left are a force that cannot be ignored.”

 

The kicker was Harris’s campaign not condemning the open antisemitism swirling around Shapiro, not even issuing a milquetoast statement about antisemitism having no place in her party. Instead, an anonymous campaign aide told the Jewish Forward that concerns Shapiro was passed over because of the anti-Shapiro campaign were “‘absurd,’ and ‘absolutely ridiculous and offensive.’”

 

Those concerns are, in fact, neither absurd nor ridiculous. What’s offensive is the gaslighting about Jew-hatred. Americans know what they saw. And the more the far Left believes it can win stand-offs against Zionist Jews without real pushback from the rest of the Left, the more such coercion all American Jews will face — and the more antisemitism will define American politics.