The Pennsylvania governor might have been vice president and may yet try for the presidency. That said, the Harrisburg arson still illustrates the way Jews are reviled by the left.
Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS)
It seems like a lot longer ago than just eight months since then Vice President Kamala Harris tapped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate. Picking the inept Walz to stand beside her on the Democratic presidential ticket was one of a series of blunders that eventually led to her being defeated by President Donald Trump in November. Indeed, so tone deaf was her campaign to the national mood that it is highly likely that she would have lost even if she had not passed over the far more politically adept Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in favor of Walz.
The arson attack by a person who claimed his motive was support for the Palestinians in their war against Israel on the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg is a brutal reminder of why Shapiro didn’t get a chance to help prop up Harris’s doomed campaign.
Shapiro was a far more impressive candidate than Walz turned out to be. He certainly would have fared better than Walz in the vice-presidential debate against then-Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). He also might have potentially helped flip Pennsylvania into the Democratic column. Instead, Trump won the commonwealth’s 19 Electoral College votes by a relatively slim but decisive 120,000 votes. Though he was as liberal as Walz on most issues, Harris picked the Minnesotan. The main reason was the widely held perception that Shapiro’s Jewish identity was disqualifying for many in her party’s left-wing base that reviles Israel.
In the end, neither that foolish decision nor a year’s worth of kowtowing to campus antisemites and American Muslim supporters of Hamas was enough to help Harris engender much enthusiasm from the intersectional activist wing of the Democratic Party, as working-class voters of all races turned out to help elect Trump and Vance.
Yet, as the Democratic Party rallies to the defense of elite universities being threatened with defunding by Trump because they refuse to stop tolerating and encouraging antisemitism, Jew-hatred remains a problem for Shapiro’s party.
Antisemitism on the left
The arsonist, who reportedly also brought along a hammer with which he said he planned to assault the governor had he met him, was mentally unstable and had a criminal history. Yet much like the way mobs chanting for Israel’s destruction (“From the river to the sea”) and for terrorism (“Globalize the intifada”) have normalized intimidation and violence against Jews, his ravings about “the Palestinian people” and opposition to Israel’s war against Hamas illustrate the impact of the lies being spread about a “genocide” being committed in Gaza.
It goes without saying that had someone who was a Trump supporter committed such an attack, the liberal corporate media would have tied the crime to the president, and it would have remained a top story for weeks, if not months. Instead, the press is quickly moving on from the attempt to murder the Pennsylvania governor, and there are no op-eds in The New York Times or The Washington Post claiming that left-wing Democrats have, at the very least, created an atmosphere in which such violence has become imaginable.
Of course, that’s exactly what Democrats and much of the press were saying in October 2018 when a crazed gunman, who blamed liberal Jewish groups for illegal immigration but also despised Trump because of his support for Israel, attacked a Pittsburgh synagogue and murdered 11 Jewish worshippers at a Shabbat service. Indeed, Shapiro himself, then the Attorney General of Pennsylvania, was saying much the same thing himself in the wake of that atrocity.
Shapiro and Muslims
That Shapiro has become an object of such suspicion and distaste for the left is ironic. When it comes to Israel, he is typical of most liberal Democratic officeholders. He was an early and enthusiastic supporter of President Barack Obama and never wavered from that position during that administration’s eight years of criticism of Israel and appeasement of Iran. He has attacked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “one of the worst leaders of all time.”
On Israel and the war in Gaza, he is far to the left of fellow Pennsylvania Democrat Sen. John Fetterman. Shapiro has also been actively trying to build bridges to the anti-Israel left. During the brief period when he was under consideration for the vice-presidential nomination, he disavowed two entirely reasonable op-eds he had written when he was a student because they stated the obvious truth that peace between Israel and the Palestinians was “virtually impossible.”
And just days before the arson attack on his home, the governor was being criticized by some in the Jewish community for his decision to give a $5 million state grant to a Philadelphia mosque—the largest-ever to a Pennsylvania-based Muslim institution—that is notorious as a hotbed of antisemitism. In doing so, Shapiro was sticking to the left’s disingenuous argument that a mythical wave of Islamophobia was morally equivalent to the unprecedented surge of antisemitism that has arisen since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The decision was announced when Shapiro attended an Iftar dinner at the mosque, where he said the taxpayer funding of the expansion of the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society was a response to what he described as “tumult overseas,” adding that “we’re facing a lot of rising hate here at home.”
Yet none of that has exempted Shapiro from being the object of hatred from the left. The only reason why he is disliked by his party’s left-wing base—and considered “egregiously bad on Palestine” by The New Republic and Slate—is because of his open embrace of his Jewish identity and refusal to completely disavow any support for Israel in the manner of far-left Jewish politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt).
This raises serious questions about more than Shapiro’s political future.
The future for American Jews
Shapiro is one of those Democrats obviously vying for the leadership of his party’s centrist wing. In his case, moderation is more a matter of tone than policy, as demonstrated last July by his graceful reaction to the attempted assassination of President Trump in Butler, Pa. He remains very popular in Pennsylvania, something that will likely be boosted by the sympathy for him and his family after the arson attack. A highly-skilled politician, he is regarded as a heavy favorite for re-election in 2026 and is already on the short list of the most serious contenders for his party’s presidential nomination in 2028.
But it remains to be seen how he will ultimately fare in a party in which radical Israel-bashers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is inheriting Sanders’s position as putative leader of the left, seems to best represent the sentiments of Democrats. They clearly want leaders who are willing to wage war on Trump and the Republicans, rather than at least trying to appear to want to unify the country, as Shapiro does.
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the vilification of nominally pro-Israel Jews, even Obama-supporting liberals like the Pennsylvania governor, has been normalized by the political left on college campuses and in the media. This has created an atmosphere in which Jewish public figures who do not disavow Israel are anathema to the Democrats’ intersectional base.
More than that, it also proves that antisemitism isn’t, as Democrats long asserted, solely a phenomenon of the extremist right. Rooted in “progressive” orthodoxies like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism, it is now primarily a feature of mainstream political discourse on the left. So strong is the hold of these toxic ideas that it has gotten to the point where liberal institutions like Harvard University would rather forgo $9 billion in federal funding rather than adhere to the Trump administration’s attempt to roll back the tide of woke Jew-hatred.
That has not only isolated liberal Jews who have realized that longtime allies in other minority communities have largely abandoned them and institutions where they once felt at home are now hostile environments. It has created exactly the kind of atmosphere in which Jews of all sorts, whether on college campuses or even in the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, cannot consider themselves entirely safe.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
Image: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro provides an update to the media after an arson attack on April 12, the first night of Passover, at the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, Pa., April 16, 2025. Credit: Commonwealth Media Services.
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