Ep. 118: What the Shapiro attack tells us about America in 2025
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Hello and welcome to Jonathan Tobin Daily. I'm JNS Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin. Thanks for joining me for another discussion on the most pressing issues in the Jewish world. Please like, subscribe, and give us good reviews when you listen to the show. Now let's get started. It seems like a lot longer than just eight months since then-Price President Kamala Harris tapped Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate.

Picking the inept waltz to stand beside her on the Democratic presidential ticket was one of a series of blunders that 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 Governor Josh Shapiro in favor of waltz.

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, however, a brutal reminder of why Shapiro did not get the chance to help prop up Harris's doomed campaign. Shapiro was a far more impressive candidate than Waltz turned out to be. He certainly would have fared better than Waltz in the vice presidential debate against then-Senator J.D. Vance.

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 Walsh on most issues, Harris picked the Minnesota.

The main reason was the widely held perception that Shapira'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 anti-Semites 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 in advance.

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 anti-Semitism, Jew hatred remains a problem for Shapiro's party. 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 terrorism globalized the Intifada, have normalized intimidation and violence against Jews, his ravings about the Palestinian people in 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 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 worshipers at a Shabbat service. Indeed,

Shapiro himself, then the Attorney General of Pennsylvania, was saying much the same thing himself about blaming Trump in the wake of that atrocity. 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 the administration's eight years of criticisms 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 Senator 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 anti-Semitism.

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 anti-Semitism that has arisen since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

The decision was announced when Shapiro attended an iftar dinner at the mosque, where he said that 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 Republican 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 Senator Bernie Sanders. This raises serious questions about more than Shapiro's political future.

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, Pennsylvania. 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 Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is inheriting Sanders' 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 unify the country, as Shapiro does.

In the aftermath of October 7th, the vilification of nominally pro-Israel Jews, even of 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 anti-Semitism isn't, as Democrats have 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 would rather forego $9 billion in federal funds 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.

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