O ye of Jewish faith: Josh Shapiro for president?
One evening last April, an arsonist set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, not long after Governor Josh Shapiro and his family finished their seder celebrating the first night of Passover. The seder is one of the most common ways American Jews express their Jewishness, its central theme of freedom resonating with both our American and our Jewish values, and its emphasis on gathering with friends and family to eat a delicious meal satisfying our need for connection. And so, I suspect I was not alone when I reacted to news of the fire with horror at this latest instance of violent antisemitism and also a little bit of pleasure and pride at how this horrible event was also drawing attention to a defining ritual of American Jewish life.
“Governor Shapiro,” I thought, “he’s just like me, and his family is just like mine.”
Shapiro’s new memoir, Where We Keep the Light, was recently published, and the media attention it’s receiving is focused on two interrelated questions: is the book part of a larger plan to run for president of the United States in 2028, and what does his Jewishness mean to him? In the interviews I’ve heard, the first question is one the potential candidate avoids answering directly, but the way he answers the second question makes me believe that, yes, Shapiro has an eye on the White House.
Why? Because when Shapiro talks about being Jewish, he talks about his “Jewish faith.”
There’s a long and continuing debate on the nature of Jewishness, with no one category being quite right. The differences in languages, literatures, and customs between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews limits the degree to which we can think of Jewishness as an ethnicity or culture; that the Nazis thought of it as a race would be enough to make a racial definition distasteful, though the twin facts that Jews are of many races and that it is possible to become a Jew by conversion rather than biology already rule it out. In Israel, Jewishness is a nationality, but here in the US, we are Americans, so that’s not the right category either.
Speaking of Israel, the idea of Jewish peoplehood gained favor after the creation of the Jewish state as a way of building connection between Israeli Jews and their far-flung diaspora cousins. But helpful though it is, peoplehood is not a concept with wide recognition outside the Jewish community or a category on the census; and here too, there’s some tension with being part of the American people too. Defining fellow Jews as cousins suggests Jewishness is rooted in kinship ties, but this faces similar limitations to the “race” label.
And so, more often than not, we are left defining Jewish identity as belonging to the category of religion. Insofar as it’s generally accepted that being a Jew means that you aren’t a Christian, a Muslim, or a member of most any other religious group, thinking of Jewishness as a religion works well enough. Of course, there are certainly families that are simultaneously Jewish and belong to another religion because the parents are from two different backgrounds. But unsurprisingly, individuals born into these situations often feel pressure to choose one over the other, even if they maintain traditions from both.
The problem is that most Americans with strong Jewish identities don’t consider themselves to be particularly religious, and they often don’t belong to synagogues or believe in God. So, is it really a religion?
Well, the conundrum we find ourselves in is one we’ve inherited. In her book, How Judaism Became a Religion, Scholar Leora Batnitzky has detailed the ways that Jewish thinkers since the Enlightenment have pushed and pulled to explain Jewishness as Judaism or to limit a broad, all-encompassing way of life into something much more limited, namely, a religion.
In other words, religion is a category our more recent ancestors imposed on Jewishness, not one that emerged from it organically, at least not entirely so.
The category of religion, furthermore, has Christian, specifically Protestant roots that tie it to belief. To be a Christian is to hold certain beliefs about God, to accede to certain creeds. There is behavior associated with these beliefs, but they are what separates the Christian from the non-Christian. Jewishness has behaviors and values and traditions, but belief is either taken for granted or seen, by many Jews, as irrelevant. Either way, among most Jews, belief is not a condition of belonging.
Because of its emphasis on belief, Christianity describes itself as a faith, and living as we do in a country where most of its current inhabitants are Christian well, religion is defined by faith above all. The fact that Jewishness doesn’t fit this mold – or any other mold – doesn’t change this.
And so, when I say that I’d be willing to bet that Shapiro is planning a run for president because he is talking about his Jewish faith, this is what I mean. Talking about one’s faith is a move an American Jew makes when they want their Jewishness to make them recognizable and relatable in our Christian country. Shapiro is trying to communicate: because I’m Jewish, you can trust that I, like you, believe in God, I, like you, have solid morals and values, and I’m just like every other man thus far who has been president. For they all too had faith or at least knew how to talk about it.
American Jews have complicated feelings about Jewish politicians who speak openly about their Jewishness. When we hear them, we often experience another version of that combined sense of pride and fear that the arson attack last spring brought on for me. It’s a joy we call nachas (if we’re Ashkenazi) or nachat (if we’re Sephardi) in a fellow Jew’s accomplishment; it’s an anxiety about that accomplishment bringing too much negative attention, and carrying too much risk.
It’s with that in mind that I can say I mostly look forward to the day when an American Jew is president. Even more so, though, I look forward to American Jews being known on terms we can define ourselves and not forcing ourselves into a box designed by someone else just to be recognized.