NY Times Touts Israel Candidate Josh Shapiro For President
Sid Shniad
NY Times Touts Israel Candidate Josh Shapiro For President
Sorry, we will destroy him in the primaries
MJ Rosenberg
This is from the front page of The New York Times today.
Josh Shapiro Knows What the Democrats Need
Nov. 9, 2025
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It’s the usual blah-blah from the oh-so-moderate New York Times—a sermon on why Democrats must choose a “centrist who can get things done,” not a progressive who might actually do the right things. In other words, no one remotely resembling Bernie, Zohran, or AOC.
No surprise there. That’s what the Times exists to do—speak for the establishment. And Josh Shapiro? He’s as pure a specimen of establishment thinking as you’ll find.
The good news is he can’t win the Democratic nomination. And if, by some miracle, he did, enough Democrats would stay home—as they did in 2024—to protest the coronation of a lifelong AIPAC loyalist. He’s a sure loser.
Maybe Binyamin Appelbaum, the Times writer, hasn’t noticed that Democrats have soured on Israel. The Gallup poll reports that only 21% now call themselves pro-Israel, while 59% side with the Palestinians. I expect that a likely litmus test for Democrats running for president in 2028 will be whether they would continue to supply weapons to Israel and use the US veto in the Security Council to defend Israel from the consequences of its actions. No will be the only acceptable answer.
When Shapiro’s record on Israel comes up—and it will—his campaign is over before it begins. Gaza hurt Kamala Harris in 2024 only because she had to defend Biden’s record; Shapiro owns his, and no amount of rebranding will wash it away. That record will—rightly—keep him far from the Oval Office.
Here is that record, from the New Republic. It was published in 2024 when Shapiro was being considered for the Vice Presidential nomination. All of it is still true today.
Unfortunately, Shapiro stands out among the current field of potential running mates as being egregiously bad on Palestine. It’s not just that he, like many Democrats, is an outspoken supporter of Israel—though he certainly is, having championed Israel’s war against Hamas consistently and without any apparent concern for Palestinian civilians. Shapiro has, moreover, done far more than most Democrats to attack pro-Palestine antiwar demonstrators, in ways that call into question his basic commitment to First Amendment rights.
In his previous role as Pennsylvania attorney general, Shapiro championed the state’s constitutionally dubious anti-BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) law against Ben & Jerry’s after the ice cream maker refused to license its product for sale in Israeli settlements. “BDS is rooted in antisemitism,” Shapiro wrote in a statement in 2021, as he condemned a company named for its two Jewish American founders. “The stated goal of this amorphous movement is the removal of Jewish citizens from the region and I strongly oppose their efforts.”
As governor, Shapiro’s particular animus against pro-Palestine activism has only grown more apparent and troubling. Last December, he played an active role in the GOP-orchestrated sacking of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill. During a visit to Goldie, the popular Philadelphia restaurant co-owned by the Israeli-born celebrity chef Michael Solomonov, Shapiro condemned Magill’s testimony on alleged antisemitism on the Ivy League campus before Representative Elise Stefanik, the MAGA right’s grand inquisitor. “That was an unacceptable statement from the president of Penn,” Shapiro said, referring to Magill’s unwillingness to accept Stefanik’s slippery framing on what constitutes antisemitism. “Frankly, I thought her comments were absolutely shameful. It should not be hard to condemn genocide.” Magill resigned four days after her testimony and three days after Shapiro’s statement, legitimizing the GOP’s wider assault on academic freedom, which would be repeated successfully against Harvard President Claudine Gay weeks later.
In April, Shapiro’s office baselessly claimed that a peaceful pro-Palestine encampment on the Penn campus threatened student safety. “If the universities in accordance with their policies can’t guarantee the safety and security and well-being of the students, then I think it is incumbent upon a local mayor or local governor or local town councilor, whoever is the local leadership there, to step in and enforce the law,” Shapiro told Politico at the time. In May, he urged Penn to shut down the encampment completely. “The University of Pennsylvania has an obligation to their safety,” he said, once again alluding to nonexistent threats to the physical well-being of Jewish students. “It is past time for the university to act, to address this, to disband the encampment, and to restore order and safety on campus.” The university complied; one day and 33 arrests later, Shapiro’s office said Penn “made the right decision.”
That same week, The New York Times profiled Shapiro as one to watch in his party with the headline “A Rising Democrat Leans Into the Campus Fight Over Antisemitism.” In that piece, Shapiro made clear the low regard in which he holds pro-Palestine campus activists. “If you had a group of white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs every day, that would be met with a different response than antisemites camped out, yelling antisemitic tropes,” he told the Times. (This echoed a statement made in an earlier interview in which he compared campus protesters to the Ku Klux Klan.) Then, in an executive order, Shapiro updated his administration’s code of conduct to forbid state employees from engaging in “scandalous or disgraceful” behavior, a vaguely worded instruction that civil libertarians immediately interpreted as threatening pro-Palestine speech.
Shapiro is an observant Jew with personal ties to Israel; on October 7, he tweeted, “Our family has shared many special moments in Israel and our hearts break for those living this horror now.” If selected as Harris’s running mate and subsequently elected, he would become the first Jewish vice president in American history (a distinction narrowly missed by the late Joe Lieberman when Republicans stole the 2000 election).
CNN’s John King has already flagged that antisemitism might make the selection of a Jewish vice presidential candidate risky; likewise, calls from the left to oppose Shapiro risk being branded as antisemitic. Shapiro is not, however, the only Jew who has been suggested as a possible running mate for Harris. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has also garnered attention, and he has taken a very different approach to this issue. Asked by the Illinois state politics site Capitol Fax whether he agreed with Jewish organizations calling for the resignation of Northwestern University’s president over a pro-Palestine encampment, Pritzker replied, “I support the Jewish organizations. I’m not about calling for people to step down.” He also drew a distinction between antiwar, pro-Palestinian demonstrators and “some bad actors” engaged in antisemitism, and affirmed the need to protect free speech along with student safety….
While Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has said that protesters showing up at University of Michigan regents’ homes “crossed the line,” she has also been more sensitive than many in her party. “I think the only universal truth right now is everyone is hurting,” she said in May. “We have a robust Jewish community in this state. We have a robust Arab American community, Muslim community, Palestinian community … it’s important to see the humanity and the pain that people are feeling.”
Palestine is not Shapiro’s only progressive heresy. Just before October 7, he drew fire from teachers’ unions and public education advocates for supporting a Republican-backed plan to funnel $100 million in public money to private and religious schools. Although he was ultimately forced to back down under pressure, many are deeply and understandably skeptical of his commitment to public education—if Shapiro is ultimately passed over, there is a good possibility that will be a major reason why.
Still, his particular hostility toward pro-Palestine activists threatens to blunt the enthusiasm among young progressive voters that Harris has managed to generate in the past few days. It could also undermine the Democratic ticket in Michigan, where Arab American activists have cheered the news of Biden’s withdrawal and are adopting a wait-and-see posture toward Harris. Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib, the lone Palestinian American in Congress, is currently holding off on endorsing Harris but has expressed interest in engaging with her on ending the war in Gaza.
Beyond Arab and Muslim Americans, Harris will need to mobilize thousands of young people across the country not only to vote for her but to knock doors, phone bank, and do all the other kinds of grassroots volunteering that translates into a successful presidential campaign. Younger Americans disproportionately sympathize with Palestinians, which is one reason Biden’s approval numbers have suffered badly over the past year. As long as U.S.-made bombs keep falling on Gaza, this issue won’t go away—protests will haunt the Democratic convention in Chicago next month and the beginning of the fall term on college campuses in September, and the anniversary of the attacks on October 7 will fall 29 days before Election Day.
Harris has a real opportunity to turn Biden’s dismal numbers around, and has given at least some indication that she understands how. A great deal of the excitement surrounding her candidacy from young voters stems from the hope that she is more sensitive to ongoing suffering in Gaza and more likely to pressure Netanyahu to end the war. Picking Josh Shapiro as her running mate would send a very different message, and would discourage precisely the people she needs to ensure her victory over Trump.