Anti-Israel “Progressives” Organize to Keep the Jew Off of the Democratic Ticket

Kamala Harris will announce her choice for running mate by Tuesday, when she and her pick will speak together at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Many already expect that the choice is the governor of that state, Josh Shapiro, who, if elected, would become the first Jewish vice president of the United States, and a practicing Jew at that. The vice president’s residence would become a kosher household.

The expectations come from the choice of venue for the announcement and attrition on the short list. Governors Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan have removed themselves from consideration, and Whitmer appears to be boosting Shapiro. The Harris campaign sent signals to Wall Street to hurry in their donations by Sunday, because special campaign finance laws apply if a state governor is on the national ticket. That appears to dampen the prospects for Senator Mark Kelly, whom is also opposed by labor unions for some of his past votes.

That winnowing appears to leave only Shapiro and Kentucky governor Andy Beshear as serious candidates on the short list. While Beshear would make an excellent vice president, and he is strongly pro-Israel, he is a bland campaigner, and his deep-red state is not in contention; whereas Pennsylvania is the key battleground. Aside from Shapiro being extremely popular in his state, Pennsylvania has the fifth largest percentage of Jews of the fifty states; and Jews make up about 5% of the electorate in Pennsylvania. It could even be argued that if Shapiro is not the pick, Pennsylvania Jewish voters will be offended. Passing over Shapiro, when he is the leading choice in a poll of Democrats nationwide, would at least be seen by some as anti-Semitic.

Some on the left have propelled Minnesota governor Tim Walz as an alternative, though Walz seems to lack either credentials or a constituency. His main claim to fame is that he failed to control the riots in Minneapolis, following the George Floyd killing in 2020. Walz is nondescript by intention; he has avoided taking strong positions on major issues, including Israel-Palestine, and he is also blamed for not addressing the political problem posed by Ilhan Omar, from her perch in a gerrymandered Minneapolis congressional district. (We can bet that Omar is the real force propelling Walz.) Ryan Cooper, writing in The American Prospect, thinks this is an asset, as any position on Israel-Gaza would “open wounds,” but the best he can say about Walz is that “they don’t come whiter.” If Cooper thinks that being a whitebread-mayonnaise Minnesotan who shies away from controversy is enough to win back Pennsylvania Jewish voters, he needs to spend a few days at a Philadelphia deli. And the Dems do need to win back Jewish voters; we have wounds that are already open.

Speaking of that problem, between 65% and 75% of Jews voted for Biden in 2020, making it critical that the Democratic ticket retains something close to that percentage for victory, especially in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona, the battleground states with the largest Jewish percentages. (Pew says that Biden got 70% and Trump 27% in 2020.) An American Jewish Committee poll in June found Biden slipping from those numbers, with 61% for Biden and 23% for Trump. However, there is strong polling evidence that Jews in northeastern cities turned sharply against Biden during the months when the US president was berating the Israeli prime minister at every opportunity. A Siena poll in February of 2024 found Trump leading Biden by 53% to 44% in New York, foretelling disaster if this disenchantment applies also to Philadelphia. Biden allowed his grudge match with Netanyahu to undermine his own domestic political support, perhaps an effect of Biden’s dementia.

Kamala Harris alone is an even harder sell for Jews, because she was assigned a bad-cop role, scolding Israel, on her trip to the Middle East in March of this year, when she called for an “immediate ceasefire” – a nonsensical demand that was surely aimed at appeasing the left wing of the Democratic Party in the United States. Harris surely now regrets that performance, at least after seeing the effects on polls of US Jewish voters, and that may be one reason that Josh Shapiro is seen as the necessary teshuvah (roughly the Jewish equivalent of penance).

Meanwhile, lonely Rashida Tlaib is refusing to endorse Harris over the Gaza “ceasefire” issue, though it’s unclear what that means any more since Hamas is the party rejecting a ceasefire. Some Democratic mainstreamers are tugging in the opposite direction. Ohio congresswoman Marcy Kaptur is withholding a Harris endorsement until she picks a running mate from “battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Wisconsin.” With the current short list, that means Shapiro.

Terrified by the upswell for Shapiro, the anti-Israel left in the United States has organized to stop him. The Hill reports that a coalition of so-called “progressive Democrats” has written a letter to Harris ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dw4ymIdDfGbb8ji8Dhkk7l6SWvGGK8Pv/view ), urging, or threatening her, that she had better choose “the correct vice presidential candidate” – specifically not Shapiro, who is the only Jewish candidate under consideration. The letter never mentions Israel or Palestine or Gaza, but this is game-playing, like a group of white supremacists who say, “we don’t like that candidate’s position on fishing license expiration dates,” without mentioning that the candidate is black. What would “progressives” say about a letter specifically warning a politician to not pick a a running mate who happens to be the only woman or the only Muslim in the race? How convenient that the anti-Israel “progressives” were able to find other flaws (which are actually trivial) in the Shapiro candidacy, without mentioning the glaring identity issue that motivated their letter.

We know their motivation from the identity of the letter-writers. The two self-identified authors are Fatima Iqbal-Zubair and Amar Shergill, current and former chairs of the California Democratic Party Progressive Caucus, an organization that led the national BDS movement, deeply splitting the California Democratic Party on that issue (and losing). Iqbal-Zubair is a Muslim Arab born in Dubai. Shergill is a California lawyer, who also helped organize a “Democratic Party Leaders Solidarity Statement” in November, 2023, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, calling for “an immediate ceasefire” in line with Hamas demands.

That statement began by identifying the American Muslim Democratic Caucus of Florida, the Muslim Democratic Caucus of Texas, and the American Muslim Democratic Caucus as somehow representing the Democratic Party, which they do not. While Shergill is a Sikh, he is a leader of “Sikhs for Palestine,” and his Facebook page is emblazoned with Palestine support motifs. Though neither the letter to Harris, nor the Hill article about it, mention Israel or Palestine, we can surmise that their problem with Josh Shapiro is something other than a desire to help Kamala Harris win the Electoral College vote.

The anti-Shapiro letter is signed by forty-three other individuals with stated affiliations across the country, groups like “Feel the Bern” and “Our Revolution,” including again the Muslim Democratic Caucus of Texas. Of the forty-five signers including the authors, twenty-five are in Texas and California, and none of them identify as elected office holders. This is the fringe anti-Israel left, so unacquainted with the rudiments of American politics that they did not even realize that a hit letter singling out the one Jew among the shortlisted running-mate candidates (“Governor Shapiro, although a valued member of the Democratic coalition, has made too many controversial policy decisions…”) would violate every principle that Kamala Harris has espoused during her lifetime. Harris herself just had to fend off Donald Trump’s attack on her biracial identity.

As reported in the Algemeiner, a similar letter to Harris targeting Shapiro was sent by the Philadelphia chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is neither democratic nor socialist nor very American. DSA has been anti-Israel from its founding. The New York chapter of DSA sponsored a “Pro-Palestine” rally only days after October 7, which turned so violent that it was condemned even by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

We need to appreciate what these anti-Shapiro letters represent. All of the shortlisted candidates for running mate are pro-Israel. Shapiro is being singled out for attack only because he is Jewish. This is the age-old trope of accusing Jews of having dual loyalties, the very accusation that got Ilhan Omar into so much trouble when, in 2019, she said in reference to American Jews: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says that it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

The 2024 “progressive” anti-Shapiro letter ends with the following veiled threat: “We know Walz and Beshear will make that [organizing] job easier while Shapiro will be an unnecessary obstacle to grassroots organizing, fundraising, and excitement. Your campaign simply cannot afford to make a mistake in this crucial decision. We have confidence you will get it right.”

Why would Josh Shapiro be an obstacle to grassroots organizing, since he is the most popular of the short list candidates, beside the fact that he is Jewish? Yes, there is antisemitism in America. Are the letter-writers suggesting that we cave to it? Or more, are they actively making an anti-Semitic threat that they won’t support the ticket, because they think Shapiro has a dual loyalty to Israel? Would it be such a loss if these anti-Semites don’t support the ticket, especially since Texas and California are not in contention? How do they plan to help with organizing in Pennsylvania and North Carolina?

Josh Shapiro will not hurt the ticket. He has overwhelming support in Pennsylvania, where the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting shows that antisemitism is virulent. Shapiro would demolish Vance in a debate. Guess which state has the most territory in Appalachia, the region that JD Vance disparages? Yep, Pennsylvania.

Yes, if elected vice president, Shapiro will be a lightning rod for anti-Semitic attacks. The Harris campaign needs to prepare for that. It can begin by beating down the attack on Shapiro by the anti-Israel left, and making Josh Shapiro the nominee for vice president. If elected, Harris needs to avoid the generic reproofs against antisemitism. She needs to call out the anti-Semites in her own party by name. She has the names on the anti-Shapiro letters.