No, Josh Shapiro Wasn’t Snubbed for VP Because He’s Jewish

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she was picking Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. This meant that she was not picking Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, and who had drawn the ire of progressive critics during the two weeks of veepstakes over his support for Israel and attitude toward anti-Israel protesters.

After the news of Harris’s decision broke, people began speculating about why Shapiro had been snubbed. One theory quickly gained traction: that his Jewishness had doomed him.

The New York Times offered, “Vice President Kamala Harris faced a difficult choice when it came to Israel and her running mate: Selecting Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania could mollify many Jewish voters and other centrists over a subject that has bedeviled the Biden-Harris administration for nearly a year, Israel’s war in Gaza,” and argued that antisemitism was surging on the left. On CNN, Van Jones spoke of “antisemitism that has gotten marbled into this party” and asked “how much of what just happened is caving into these darker parts of the party.”

Republicans were all too happy to take this line and run with it, with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump telling Fox News that he had “very little doubt” that Shapiro wasn’t chosen “because of the fact that he’s Jewish, and they think they’re going to offend somebody else.” 

Let us, for a moment, put aside that, in this same interview, Trump once again said that American Jews who don’t vote for him—which, to this point, has been roughly two-thirds of American Jews—should have our “heads examined.” Let’s ignore Trump’s long history of pushing antisemitic conspiracy theories related to Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist George Soros; his history of embracing white nationalist figures and Holocaust deniers. and that he reportedly praised Adolf Hitler. And let us move on from the fact that, if not picking a Jewish running mate means a person is antisemitic, Trump, too, is guilty of that charge, since his running mate is JD Vance, who is Catholic. 

Let us do this so that we can focus on the story that not choosing Shapiro was an act of antisemitism. And it is just that: a narrative, one as cynical as it is fictional. 

Firstly, by all accounts, the reason that Harris chose Walz over Shapiro is that she thought Walz would be a better fit with and for her. He was reportedly charming and, importantly, more deferential in his interview, whereas Shapiro, per one account, seemed to be negotiating the parameters of the job. It is not difficult to understand why a person who is running for president instead of her older boss might take the person who says he has no greater ambitions over the obviously extremely ambitious person who is 10 years her junior. 

But secondly, while I do not doubt that there were some people in this wild and varied country of ours who did not prefer Josh Shapiro because he was Jewish, I have to note that, to the extent that Shapiro was criticized from the left, it was not only for his support for Israel—as some noted, all of the candidates under consideration support the state to varying degrees (though, in fairness, critics of Israel might feel differently about someone who volunteered for the Israeli military and worked briefly for the Israeli Embassy)—but because the place where he stood out was where support for Israel bumped up against American democratic principles.