Haven’t you heard? Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s decision to pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate was based in antisemitism. At least, that’s what the New York Times wants us to believe.
While Democrats of many stripes seemed thrilled with Walz, a Midwestern progressive with military service and a down-home attitude, the Times has kept up the fiction that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who made the short list of vice presidential hopefuls, didn’t get the nod because of left-wing antisemitism. The claim is a thinly veiled insinuation that Democrats who oppose the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza—and Shapiro’s aggressive backing of Israel—are motivated by bigotry against Jews.
‘Veered past anti-Israel fervor’
By failing to choose Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, the New York Times‘ Jonathan Weisman (8/6/24) wrote, she passed up a chance to “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.”
Jonathan Weisman came out in force in a piece (New York Times, 8/6/24) with the headline “Walz Instead of Shapiro Excites Left, but May Alienate Jewish Voters,” and the subhead, “Many Jewish organizations backed Harris’s pick for running mate, but beneath that public sentiment is unease over antisemitism on both the left and the right.”
Weisman wrote:
Was her decision to sidestep Mr. Shapiro, some wonder, overly deferential to progressive activists who many Jews believe have veered past anti-Israel fervor into anti-Jewish bigotry?
The reporter acknowledged that there were “scores of reasons” why Harris might have chosen someone other than Shapiro “that had nothing to do with the campaign that the pro-Palestinian left had been waging against him.” But he added, without citing evidence, that “Jews face a surge of antisemitic sentiment on the left,” and see the Democrats as “harboring strongly anti-Israel sentiment on their left flank.”
After noting that the Republican Party under former President Donald Trump’s influence has been rife with antisemitism, Weisman quoted Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the executive vice president for the Orthodox Union, saying “our greater worry right now is that antisemitism on the left seems to be far more influential on a major party than the antisemitism on the right.”
For anyone who needs a reminder, Weisman was demoted at the Times (8/13/19) when he suggested (“C’mon”) that congressmembers Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar are not really from the Midwest, despite representing Detroit and Minneapolis, respectively, any more than Atlanta’s Rep. John Lewis is from the Deep South, or Austin’s Rep. Lloyd Doggett is from Texas—Weisman’s apparent point being that being Muslim, Black or (in Doggett’s case) just liberal disqualifies you as being from such regions. It was just another example (FAIR.org, 8/14/19) of what the Atlantic (5/4/18) meant when it said of his book (((Semitism))), “His facts are wobbly and his prescriptions are thin.”
‘Plenty of upsides’
Before Harris made her choice, Weisman (New York Times (8/1/24) touted Shapiro as an “opportunity to stand up to her far-left flank in an appeal to the center of the party and to independents.”
This wasn’t Weisman’s only attempt to paint opposition to making Shapiro the Democratic running mate as a sign of Jew hatred. Before Harris’s choice was announced, Weisman wrote a piece (New York Times, 8/1/24) whose subhead said that Shapiro, “an observant Jew, is seen as bringing plenty of upsides to the Democratic ticket,” while “some worry about setting off opposition to the Democratic ticket from pro-Palestinian demonstrators.”
The false implication was that it was his religion that aroused concern from activists, rather than his record on Israel/Palestine. (The insinuation was even clearer in an online blurb the Times used to promote the piece: “Pro-Palestinian groups are seeking to block Gov. Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew, from becoming Kamala Harris’s running mate.”)
Shapiro has been strongly supportive of Israel throughout the Gaza crisis—“We’re praying for the Israelis and we stand firmly with them as they defend themselves as they have every right to do,” he announced early on (Harrisburg Patriot-News, 10/12/23), after Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had declared a “full siege” of Gaza, with “no electricity, no food, no fuel” (Washington Post, 10/9/23).
“We are fighting animals, and we will act accordingly,” Gallant declared. As Israel followed through on that promise, Shapiro was criticized for not speaking out against the soaring Palestinian death toll (New Lines, 8/3/24).
Shapiro assisted in the McCarthyite ousting of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, calling her congressional testimony about student protests a “failure of leadership,” and urging Penn’s trustees to hold her accountable (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/23). The governor later issued an order barring state employees from engaging in “scandalous or disgraceful” behavior—vague terms that were seen as a threat to free speech (Spotlight PA, 5/14/24).
Shapiro distinguished himself in his vituperation of pro-Palestine activists by comparing them to “people dressed up in KKK outfits” (Jacobin, 8/5/24). “I don’t know anybody who used the Ku Klux Klan when they talked about protesters,” Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told FAIR. “That’s going pretty far.”
When Shapiro was Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he “went after Ben and Jerry’s when the ice cream company decided to stop selling to Israeli settlements in the West Bank” (NBC, 7/31/24). He is a strong supporter of divestment, however—when it comes to Muslim countries. “We must use our economic power to isolate our enemies and strengthen our allies,” he said as he introduced a bill mandating that Pennsylvania state pension funds boycott companies that did business with Iran or Sudan (Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, 4/22/09).
Shapiro was also forced to “distance himself from a recently uncovered op-ed he wrote in college, in which he identified as a former volunteer in the IDF” (Times of Israel, 8/3/24). The op-ed argued that “peace between Arabs and Israelis is virtually impossible,” since “battle-minded” Palestinians “will not coexist peacefully” and “do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 8/2/24).
Another pre-VP announcement piece in the New York Times (8/2/24), by Jess Bidgood, acknowledged some of this background, but still put Shapiro’s religion before his policy, describing him as “an observant Jew who speaks of his faith often” before noting that
his outspoken support of Israel’s right to self-defense and his denunciation of college students’ protest of the war in Gaza have also drawn opposition from the left.
‘Not captive to the left’
Trump advisor Mark Penn (New York Times, 8/3/24) encouraged Harris to choose Shapiro not despite but because of the fact that he is “unpopular with many progressives over energy policy, school choice and other issues,” and therefore “would send a signal that Ms. Harris is not captive to the left and that she puts experience ahead of ideology.”
Weisman’s pre-announcement piece on Shapiro (8/1/24) contained this nugget:
The campaign to thwart his nomination is, by its own admission, not well organized. People working against Mr. Shapiro come from groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America; Uncommitted, which waged a campaign to convince Democratic primary voters to register protest votes against President Biden; the progressive Jewish group IfNotNow; and a group of anonymous pro-Palestinian aides on Capitol Hill known as Dear White Staffers. It does not include some of the largest Palestinian rights groups, nor have more prominent progressive groups joined, like Justice Democrats.
Which raises the question: If this coalition is so weak, why write about it? The Uncommitted campaign, which attracted nearly 1 million votes in the primaries, greatly worried Democrats who supported Biden (NBC, 3/6/24; Guardian, 7/3/24). Biden is now out of the race, and the influence of this coalition had enough impact to grab the concern of the Times.
In a New York Times op-ed (8/3/24) that pushed for Shapiro as the running mate, pollster Mark Penn—identified by his work with the Clintons from 1995 to 2008, not by his counseling Trump in 2019—said that Shapiro’s presence on the ticket
would also reassure Jewish voters—long a key part of winning Democratic voter coalitions—at a time when many of them see hostility and antisemitism coming from some in the far left of the party.
Penn’s op-ed made a flimsy case that concern for Palestinian life is “antisemitic.” But in hailing Shapiro as a moderate, Penn revealed it was his politics, not his identity, that gave the left pause. Shapiro is “unpopular with many progressives over energy policy, school choice and other issues,” Penn noted. This is a good thing, in Penn’s view; picking Shapiro as a running mate “would send a signal that Ms. Harris is not captive to the left and that she puts experience ahead of ideology.”
‘Won’t assuage concerns’
The New York Times Katie Glueck (8/6/24) depicted scrutiny of Shapiro’s Israel/Palestine positions as ” an ugly final phase of Ms. Harris’s search.”
Following Harris’s announcement of Walz as her running mate Times reporter Katie Glueck (8/6/24) wrote that
after the conclusion of a vice-presidential search process that prompted intense public scrutiny of his views on Israel, Mr. Shapiro’s familiar references to his religious background took on a raw new resonance.
“He seemed to sound a note of defiance” by saying “I am proud of my faith,” Glueck wrote.
Although his Mideast positions were “well within the Democratic mainstream, and were not markedly different from other vice-presidential candidates under consideration,” Glueck wrote, Shapiro “drew outsize attention on the subject, his supporters said, and some saw that focus as driven by antisemitism”—linking to Weisman’s piece about how the Walz choice might “alienate Jewish voters” as evidence.
In a particularly bewildering piece, Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn (8/6/24) chided that Walz “does relatively little to define or redefine Ms. Harris”: “He won’t assuage concerns that she’s too far to the left,” Cohn lamented; “his selection doesn’t signal that Ms. Harris intends to govern as a moderate”—which is, of course, the New York Times‘ constant concern about Democrats. No matter, wrote Cohn—”there will be many more opportunities” for Harris to move to the right, “like a policy platform rollout and the Democratic convention.”
‘Didn’t dare cross the left’
The Wall Street Journal (8/1/24) came out and said what New York Times writers mostly insinuated: Shapiro was “vilified and maligned because he is Jewish.”
The Murdoch press has painted Shapiro as a victim of antisemitism as well, although as outlets that practically equate the DNC with the USSR, it’s hard to see why they would care about the Harris campaign’s internal debates. “The attack on Mr. Shapiro is part of a far-left campaign to portray Jews as perpetrators or enablers of genocide,” Daniel Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in the Wall Street Journal (8/1/24). The New York Post editorial board (8/6/24) said that Shapiro was the “clear best choice” but Harris rejected him “plainly because she didn’t dare cross the left by tapping a Jew.”
At FAIR (6/6/18, 8/26/20, 12/12/23), we’ve grown used to establishment media like the New York Times conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism as a way to keep the struggle for Palestinian rights on the political margins. But with the paper’s laments for the unchosen Shapiro—so parallel to the Murdoch media’s crocodile tears—the reach feels so extreme one wonders if even the authors themselves believe it.
The Democratic Party boasts many Jewish lawmakers in both houses, including Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, a sort of mascot of New York Jewishness rivaling Mel Brooks. Shapiro wouldn’t have even been the first Jew on a Democratic presidential ticket; the late Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, similarly observant but far to Shapiro’s political right, has that distinction. The suggestion that without Shapiro on the presidential ticket, the Democrats remain some kind of goyish social club is comical. (If we accept that spouses are unofficial parts of presidential tickets, Harris if elected will also give the White House its first Jewish resident.)
Clearly, the Times does not believe that voters must simply accept Jewish candidates without looking at their records. It did not suggest that the party’s rejection of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, as a presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020 was rooted in disdain for his unabashed Brooklyn Jewishness. When New York City Comptroller Brad Lander challenges Mayor Eric Adams from the left in the 2025 city primaries, the paper is unlikely to suggest that voters who stick with the incumbent are Jew haters.
It’s becoming clear that for the corporate media, it is OK to not support Jewish candidates if they support lifting wages, fighting climate change or addressing racial injustice. But at a time when concern for Palestinian lives has become so mainstream that being too pro-Israel can become a political liability, the New York Times wants Jewish politicians’ support for Israel to be a taboo topic.