Josh Shapiro gives a victory speech to supporters on election night at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, Penn., Nov. 8, 2022. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)

By Benyamin Cohen July 22, 2024

Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is one of the leading names bandied about as a vice presidential pick for Vice President Kamala Harris, who many Democrats believe will top the ticket now that President Joe Biden has bowed out of the race.

Shapiro, a popular politician from a crucial swing state, proudly and publicly embraces his Judaism — keeping a kosher kitchen at the governor’s mansion and wearing a red string around his wrist, a good luck charm his daughter got for him at the Western Wall. He grew up attending Jewish day school and got his political start as a kid raising money for Soviet Jewry.

Shapiro has also spoken out vociferously against antisemitism, most recently at the June groundbreaking for the new Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. He pledged that the state would help with whatever it could in the rebuilding of the congregation, site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in United States history. “This is a debt we owe to the people whose lives were cut short when they davened here,” Shapiro said, using the Yiddish word for “prayed.”

In a poll earlier this month, before Biden dropped out of the race, Shapiro outperformed the president by five points in battleground states.

But will a Jewish vice presidential nominee boost Harris’ chances? I talked to several people who have long watched Jewish politicians. 

How Shapiro’s Judaism could play in the race

A strong religious background often helps a candidate, said Jason Isaacson, the chief policy and political affairs officer of the non-partisan American Jewish Committee. “The fact that he is a man of faith is a positive in American politics,” he said. “His Jewishness should only be a positive factor.”

And that could be more true with certain constituencies. Jacob Neiheisel, a University at Buffalo political science professor who focuses on the role of religion in elections, is currently researching apocalypticism. He said, among a strain of Republican voters, “there’s this laser focus on Israel, and its role in prophecy,” adding, “there’s a chunk of the religious right that could see this as a positive.”

But Neiheisel also sees how people “on both the left and the right” could make Shapiro’s Judaism an issue, and play into antisemitic tropes of powerful Jews controlling world events. This argument could be strengthened by the fact that Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish and has been the public face of the Biden administration’s national plan to combat antisemitism.

“There are people who will not vote for Jews,” Isaacson said. “There are people whose prejudice prevents them from looking at Jews in a fair way, whether they’re running for office or seeking a job or sitting next to them at a restaurant.”

The lessons from Sen. Joe Lieberman

There were some similar concerns when Vice President Al Gore chose Sen. Joe Lieberman to be his running mate in the 2000 election. “The interesting thing is that, historically, that has always been a much greater concern for Jews” and that most voters don’t care, said Brandeis University’s Jonathan Sarna, one of the leading historians of American Jewry. “There is some research that suggests that, if anything, it helped Al Gore. It didn’t hurt him.”

But, Sarna cautioned, that was a political lifetime ago.

“Obviously we’re living in a time of greater antisemitism,” Sarna said. “But just for that reason, a case could be made that instead of playing to antisemites, one should encourage the appointment of people like Shapiro, just to remind everybody that in America, we don’t judge people on their religion nor their race, but rather on their competence.”

Isascson noted the propitious timing of this conversation, happening the same week as a long in-the-works memorial for Lieberman at a Washington, D.C., synagogue. “It’s a time when we’re mindful of the cycles in American politics. What I hope for is the country’s maturity in evaluating political figures of different faiths than the majority faith.”

The moment is historic, he said, pointing out that the Democratic ticket could feature a Black woman of South Asian descent and a Jew. (Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who is Jewish, is also on the vice presidential shortlist.)

“And on the Republican side,” he added, the wife of the vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is of Indian ancestry. “I hope that sends a positive signal about the direction that America is moving even as there are fierce undercurrents of bigotry and antisemitism in our country.”

Other past examples: JFK and Mitt Romney

Neiheisel, the political science professor, noted that questions about a candidate’s religion came up during John F. Kennedy’s presidential run. Kennedy, a Catholic, met with Christian ministers to allay their concerns that he would be loyal to the Vatican over America. “There’s a fairly complicated history in the United States of being a religious minority in presidential politics.”

Pollsters wondered similarly about Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, when he was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

On the one hand, he was viewed as a family man with strong religious values. On the other, Mormonism comes with political baggage on both sides of the aisle. A 2014 study found that “liberals increasingly see Mormon candidates as part of a conservative religious coalition,” while “conservative Christians distrust Mormons and their candidates as not truly Christian.” A study in the journal Politics & Religion later found that “anti-Mormon feelings did play a role in the 2012 presidential election, but they did not determine the final outcome.”

Shapiro and Pritzker are not the only Jewish candidates on the shortlist for Harris’ vice presidential pick. Another is Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. When asked Monday on CNN if he’d accept the offer, he quipped:“Look, if they do the polling, and it turns out that they need a 49-year-old, balding gay Jew from Boulder, Colorado, they got my number.”

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