Josh Shapiro’s alarmist response to campus protests should disqualify him from being Harris’ running mate
Democrats need to unite a left divided over Israel. Shapiro’s actions this spring will hurt that enterprise
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro speaks during a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris, July 29, Ambler, Pennsylvania. Photo by Hannah Beier/Getty Images
Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential running mate must not be Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has shown a startling interest in quashing free speech, and fueled a moral panic about Jewish safety in encouraging a crackdown on those fighting for an end to Israel’s brutal siege on Gaza.
The Democratic party is struggling to keep voters who are horrified by the support President Joe Biden’s administration has shown for what the majority of Democrats deem a genocide in Gaza. As Biden’s vice president, Harris faces serious scrutiny over his policies around Gaza, despite consistently voicing support for Palestinians. Now, she has an opportunity to make the case to Democratic voters, 83% of whom support a permanent ceasefire, that party leaders will stop ignoring them — an absolutely essential move in clearing her path to the White House.
Given Shapiro’s record on Palestinian issues, if Harris chooses him, she’ll not only be ignoring the demands of a crucial bloc of voters, she’ll be squandering a valuable opportunity to rebuild the broad coalition that beat former President Donald Trump in 2020.
During the wave of campus protests against the war this spring, Shapiro compared protesters to white supremacists and the KKK, contributing to rhetoric that led to state and vigilante violence against protesters across the country. He applauded the decision to send police to disband a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Pennsylvania, even though the school’s own faculty members condemned the “arrests and suppression of non-violent, anti-war protests” after riot gear-clad forces cleared and arrested students.
Early in that encampment’s existence, as student protests broke out across the country and world, Shapiro joined those suggesting that the protests — whose participants included a significant number of Jewish students — were a threat to Jewish safety. “What we’re seeing in some campuses across America, where universities can’t guarantee the safety and security of their students, it’s absolutely unacceptable,” he said.
That was a popular talking point among those opposed to the protests. And it was deeply wrong.
Shabbat services were a common occurrence at encampments across the country; I saw one myself during a visit to the encampment at Columbia University. That wasn’t surprising, as the majority of Jewish people aged 18 to 49 favor a permanent ceasefire. It was clear that the encampments were places that valued and supported Jews.
The leap of logic in which Shapiro engaged by suggesting they posed a threat to Jewish safety relies on a perception of Jews who are pro-Palestinian as less Jewish than Jews who are pro-Israel, and a belief that any ideological disagreement with pro-Israel Jews is a kind of violence. After all, the right-wing mobs who brutalized and doxxed student protesters, and the police who violently arrested them, also put the safety of the Jewish students at risk.
Other liberal Jewish governors took a much more nuanced line — one that is much more compatible with the monumental task of helping to lead a country, and party, facing enormous rifts over U.S. support of Israel’s behavior.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who is also Jewish, and also in consideration to potentially serve as Harris’ running mate, refused to join campaigns calling for the ouster of Northwestern’s president after he reached an agreement with protesting students in which he promised to be transparent about where the school invests its funds. Pritzker chose to be the adult in the room, drawing remarkably clear lines as to the various motivations behind the protests. “Let me be clear,” he said. “There are anti-war protesters out there. There are people who are anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, which is different than just being anti-war. And there are some bad actors, too. There are people who are yelling antisemitic epithets and are, and have forever been, bigoted … We want to protect free speech rights but not hate speech rights.”
This kind of balanced, clearer-eyed response should be a requirement for Harris’ running mate. Shapiro does not meet it.
His comparisons of student protesters to white nationalists are particularly alarming. With white nationalism a driving force within the Republican Party, it’s essential that Harris mount a full throated campaign against that ideology in order to draw in uncommitted voters alarmed by extremism. A vice presidential candidate who wrongly charges leftists whose votes Harris’ campaign badly needs to win with being akin to white nationalists is a threat to her campaign, and to our chances at defeating former President Donald Trump.
The rest of Harris’ rumored running mate candidates did substantially better when it came to the campus protests. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers said he was observing the campuses and believed student encampments were in “good faith.” Others, like Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, made no comment on the campus protests. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz avoided any comments on the University of Minnesota encampments.
Shapiro also stood out from his Democratic colleagues in an alarming way when he was a key ally to the GOP-led campaign to remove the president of the University of Pennsylvania in April. He not only joined Republicans in smearing Liz Magill over her answer to a bad-faith question in a congressional hearing about whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate school policies. He appeared to show support for the idea that Penn’s board should fire her in the wake of that interchange, which was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the campus protests, the vast majority of which did not call for violence against Jews.
It was clear that the Republicans’ goal was not to protect Jewish students, but to advance their anti-DEI campaign against universities. Shapiro shamefully made himself a pawn in that effort.
The fact that Jewish students were involved on multiple sides of the campus debates, the fact that Democrats like Harris tend to value freedom of speech more than Republicans, and the open secret that the GOP have long been waiting for an excuse to defund and delegitimize American universities might explain why nearly all the other candidates Harris is considering as her running mate for vice president didn’t fall into the same trap.
As a Jewish person, I understand how exciting the prospect of a Jewish vice president might be. What I’m not understanding are the charges of antisemitism being directed at critics of Shapiro. He’s not the only Jewish person in the running — see, again, Pritzker — so it’s hard to imagine anyone hatefully singling him out for being Jewish while ignoring the other Jewish candidate.
And unlike Shapiro, and even Biden, Harris has shown a nuanced approach on antisemitism. When Rep. Ilhan Omar was under attack for her comments on the Israeli policies, Harris said, “There is a difference between criticism of policy, or political leaders, and antisemitism,” rather than decry her — as so many others did. It too was Harris who joined fellow Democrats in refusing to support an anti-BDS bill, saying, correctly, that it would impede free speech in America.
Harris’ entry to the race affords Democrats a massive reset. She has the opportunity to win over voters who were betrayed by Democratic leaders over their support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. It’s an opportunity she is dangerously close to wasting if she selects Shapiro as her running mate.
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