Some Jewish Democrats wonder if America is ready for a Jewish vice president

(CNN) — Josh Shapiro’s advisers debated the early seconds of his first ad of the 2022 Pennsylvania governor’s campaign: He was going to start by saying that he makes sure to be home every Friday night for dinner with his family. But should his script call it “Sabbath dinner”? Should the shot of the table show a challah bread?

After all, the last time a guy named Shapiro had been elected governor of Pennsylvania, he had years earlier anglicized his name to Shapp.

The answers were yes and yes. Shapiro’s wife Lori even baked the braided loaves herself.

Now, with Shapiro very much in contention in Kamala Harris’ rushed running mate search, the Democratic world – already divided over the politics of Israel in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack – is wondering whether the US would really be ready for a Jewish vice president — and the first Black and South Asian woman president, who happens to be married to a Jewish man.

While there is another Jewish governor, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, who has also already been through two rounds of vetting interviews with Harris’ staff, it’s the Pennsylvania governor – with his outspoken views on Judaism and Israel – who has been the focus as Harris aides are looking at who would help the ticket. Shapiro’s home battleground state isn’t the only factor; the conversation is also about his potential wider appeal in the “Blue Wall” states, about how Jewish populations are bigger than the 2020 margins of victory in many battlegrounds, and how his selection would play with the Arab American population in Michigan and progressives overall.

Some pro-Palestinian organizers, amplified by groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Sunrise Movement, have been taken to calling him “Genocide Josh” on social media — even though the governor has never cast a vote on any foreign policy issue and the statements he has made about Israel have been more pointed than other prospects, but not substantively different.

“I’m not aware of how his position on Israel differs from the other potential vice presidents,” Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, who is both Jewish and a proud progressive, told CNN.

Among even many Jewish Democrats who are Shapiro fans, excitement about the prospect of his being the pick is mixed with pride, anxiety and fear of what sort of divisions and conspiracy theories his selection could set off.

“Is the antisemitism going to increase because now you’d have the person who sleeps next to her and the person who would be her closest political ally are both Jewish?” asked one Jewish former Democratic statewide leader outside of Pennsylvania who is a Shapiro fan. “Does it make it more dangerous for those of us in the Jewish community?”

Rep. Greg Landsman – an Ohio congressman whose tattoos include a passage from the Book of Micah in Hebrew on his left shoulder – said it’s a real question of whether America would be ready for a Jewish vice president, or at least a Jewish running mate.

“Some folks would be, others no,” Landsman told CNN. “There is a lot of Jew hate out there. I’ve experienced it. We all have. And there are folks on the far right that have made it worse, and folks on the far left that have made it worse. But that’s true for most issues.”

Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen, who was the president of a synagogue in the Las Vegas suburbs before getting into politics, said she’d be “thrilled” if Shapiro were the choice.

“It’s really great to have representation and to have someone who understands what it means to work to fight antisemitism and all forms of hate, what it means to do a lot of these things,” she said.

Simone Zimmerman – a co-founder of the group IfNotNow, made up of Jews opposed to the Israeli offensive in Gaza and American support for the Israeli government – said Shapiro would be a problem with the party base because he has “significantly more divisive positions on one important issue that a lot of us care about in a way that is disqualifying.”

“Chalking all of this up to antisemitism,” Zimmerman said, “is once again a way to distract from an honest conversation about his agenda.”

Others argue that the risk of dividing the party is too high.

“The party is incredibly united at this moment. Of the VP’s choices, Shapiro is the one who stands out as the most divisive and could put a stop in everyone being on the same page,” said one Jewish Democratic operative. “We have to be realistic. We have to understand the stakes and what it takes to win and that’s going to require a lot of Democratic energy.”

Shapiro has set a record for getting more votes than any other Democrat in Pennsylvania in each of his races, although he faced weak GOP opponents. Along the way, he earned support from Black ministers who have talked about connecting to him through faith, Catholics who trusted him when he took on the church in a massive abuse scandal he investigated and prosecuted while state attorney general, and just this week a Muslim leader wrote an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer about how the governor for years has “had our back.”

But Shapiro is a different kind of Jewish politician than many who have come before. He’s not an Orthodox Jew like the late Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman — whose stringent adherence was so infamous that his friend, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, even made a joke about it at his memorial service in Washington last week. Shapiro is nonetheless more observant than many in public life and more apt to talk about it. There have been more than two dozen Jewish governors in the US, but he’s the first to perform the ceremony making the kitchen in the governor’s mansion kosher, and nearly every speech he gives includes a riff on a famous Jewish teaching that “no one is required to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from it.”

His aides and advisers argue that rather than a liability, Shapiro’s faith has been a way of making connections, of building trust. They say polling can’t empirically measure the impact, but argue it demonstrates his authenticity and helps explain his high popularity in a big and diverse state with a very small Jewish population.

“He’s been pretty powerfully talking about his faith in a way that doesn’t just appeal to Jews, but folks across a pretty wide swath who are religious and not religious,” said one Jewish Democratic operative who has worked with Shapiro. “It is a part of how he’s been able to earn such significant support across different parts of the electorate.”

But that was all running on his own, not as the potential addition to a ticket going up against a Republican nominee who this week agreed with a radio host that second gentleman Doug Emhoff is “a crappy Jew,” said that Harris herself “doesn’t like Jewish people” or that Jews who vote for Democrats “should have their head examined.”

Ed Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor who is Jewish but was never affiliated or observant, recalled a time in his first campaign, for Philadelphia district attorney in 1977, when he was introduced to a local political leader as running against “some Yid.” Rendell said then that he had been so shocked and so cowed that he didn’t even point out the slur technically applied to him as well.

Rendell said he believes things have changed in the last 45 years.

“There were a lot of people who don’t like Jews who voted for Josh Shapiro because they said he’s different,” Rendell said.

Activist Jewish roots all the way back to his bar mitzvah

Shapiro has been keeping a low profile through the vetting process and declined through a spokesperson to be interviewed. But speaking to CNN on his campaign bus riding through western Pennsylvania in late October 2022, days before being elected governor, Shapiro said he was eager for people to know about his connection to Judaism.

“That is what motivates me. It really is. I think if you want to be someone’s governor, they’ve got to know who you are as a person, what motivates you,” Shapiro told CNN. “That’s why I always talk about it. I talk about my faith because I want people to know what calls me to service.”

Shapiro brushed aside questions about how his Republican opponent in that race attacked him for going to a Jewish day school, trafficked in antisemitic tropes and faced criticism for his ties to a website known for its antisemitic content.

“I’m not going to let him or his attacks on my faith dictate how I practice my faith or how I speak. But I will say his attacks, this might surprise you, don’t bother me personally,” Shapiro said at the time. “They really don’t. What bothers me is the way he shows others that he’s disrespecting them by virtue of how he attacks my faith.”

Long before Shapiro started plotting his political career, he and his father traveled to a variety of Jewish communities to raise awareness about the “refuseniks,” or Soviet Jews who felt oppressed but were being stopped from emigrating to Israel or the United States. He formed a group called Children for Avi, named after his pen pal, of 50 kids across the country writing letters protesting the situation. An article in the local paper in 1986 about Shapiro’s bar mitzvah includes a photo of the rabbi blessing the 13-year-old future governor and the Soviet boy, who was able to attend because Sen. Ted Kennedy appealed to Mikhail Gorbachev to get the family out of the country after 14 years of their trying.

That sensibility carried through Shapiro’s political career including in June, when he and Emhoff were among the featured speakers at a groundbreaking for the new Tree of Life synagogue outside of Pittsburgh to replace the building where, in 2018, an antisemite with an assault rifle killed 11 and wounded six others at Saturday morning services.

Shapiro used the Hebrew phrase referring to the connection between generations and the Yiddish word for praying. He spoke about seeing the bullet holes when he toured the sanctuary with his children.

“Remembrance cannot be a passive act,” he said, and later decried that at this moment, “Some leaders at times offer permission slips to hate.”

Claims of ‘singling out the Jewish candidate’

With these roots, several people who have known Shapiro for years say it’s no surprise that he has stood up strongly in support of Israel and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time,” but that when he saw some protests on campuses tipping into antisemitism, he felt the need to speak out.

Pushing back on some advisers who urged him to hold back, Shapiro said he was listening to the tone of some of the protests and believed that that the atmosphere was getting dangerous.

After joining the criticism of the university presidents who struggled to condemn antisemitism during congressional hearings last fall, Shapiro said universities were failing in their obligation to keep students safe. He said that people who had moved into antisemitic chants and behavior were being excused and that there would be no tolerance for people “dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia,” outraging some pro-Palestinian activists with the comparison.

Shapiro’s popularity stayed high in Pennsylvania throughout. But some of the loudest voices on the left, perhaps most prominently the Democratic Socialists of America and related groups, are now pointing to that rhetoric to argue he should be disqualified from Harris’ consideration. And some are using that to claim Shapiro is not actually a progressive, pointing to issues like his support for school vouchers or suggesting that he was too pro-police as attorney general.

Criticizing Shapiro about policy disagreements is fair, said Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO Amy Spitalnick, but “when you are running a campaign around ‘Genocide Josh’ and he is the only potential candidate being labeled as such, that is singling out the Jewish candidate.”

“I think it’s clear why. You’d be hard pressed to find any Jewish member of Congress that hasn’t on occasion faced a similar double standard,” said Adam Schiff, the California congressman and Senate candidate. “It’s offensive and wrong and I regret that Governor Shapiro has to endure this.”

Even a “Case for Tim Walz for Vice President” document circulated by supporters – which a spokesman said is not connected to the Minnesota governor – makes an implicit reference to Shapiro’s perceived liability, arguing, “He has no known personal skeletons, major drawbacks or divisive stances that might depress Democratic base enthusiasm (eg. Israel/Gaza policy, charter schools, etc.)”

Several Jewish Democratic operatives confided privately to CNN that though they think the attacks on Shapiro may be unfair and have at least tinges of antisemitism, they are anxious about him being the pick because of what putting him on the ticket could set off, from renewed protests at the Democratic convention later this month to larger splits in the party.

But calling what’s coming at Shapiro “pure antisemitism,” Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat, warned against that defensive way of thinking.

“I strongly disagree with the notion that because bad actors would act badly that we should therefore avoid the possibility of those bad actors acting badly. That way lies madness,” Goldman said. “That’s how extortion happens — where the victims avoid what would be a confrontation with the bullies.”

CNN’s Morgan Rimmer, Owen Dahlkamp and Haley Talbot contributed to this report.

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