In his new memoir, “Where We Keep the Light,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro offers many of the hallmarks of the modern political memoir - especially one written by a 50-something politician clearly setting the stage for whatever comes next.
There is a flattering, if occasionally self-deprecating, account of his upbringing; a recap of his political successes told with a careful balance of humility and braggadocio; and, perhaps most of all, a sustained effort to define his brand for voters.
But again and again, Shapiro returns to another theme: that Judaism is not a sidebar to his public life, but one of its central organizing principles.
The book opens on the Passover night in 2025, when an arsonist firebombed the governor’s residence in Harrisburg as the family was preparing for bed upstairs after a long seder. Shapiro traces his Jewish biography to his childhood involvement in the Soviet Jewry movement, his education at Akiba Hebrew Academy (now the Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy) in suburban Philadelphia, and a formative semester in Jerusalem during high school.
Still, “Where We Keep the Light” is not a spiritual memoir but a political argument: that Jewish particularism is not in tension with American civic life, but deeply aligned with it. Shapiro presents his Jewishness not as a private belief system or a cultural inheritance to be managed carefully in public, but as a source for the way he governs, how he understands difference, and how he responds to threats against democracy itself.
Throughout the book, Shapiro refers to this source as his “faith” - a way of talking about religion more common to Christians than Jews, who tend to frame their identities around some combination of religion, culture, peoplehood, heritage, practice, and, occasionally, spirituality. When Shapiro writes, “I sometimes sound a little vague when I get asked about my religion in interviews or when I try to put it into words,” he appears to be acknowledging that “faith” alone doesn’t fully capture what being Jewish means to him.
What he does describe is a family life that will feel familiar, and validating, to what sociologists often describe as “highly engaged” Jews. Shapiro writes:
I went to Jewish day school through twelfth grade. I went to synagogue every weekend until at least then. We had multiple rabbis officiate our wedding because there are so many Jewish leaders close to our families, all of whom played a strong role in shaping our lives. We celebrate Shabbat every Friday night as a family. We keep Kosher. Our kids go to Jewish day schools.
Shapiro's relationship with Israel
Those same markers of engagement shape his relationship with Israel, which he says was sealed on that junior-year trip. He describes the celebratory scene on Jerusalem’s teeming Ben Yehuda Street after Shabbat, and the experience of standing at the Western Wall and feeling “the millions of hands that had been placed there before you.” While he often returns to the language of “faith,” these moments read as expressions more of peoplehood than belief. “We were halfway across the world,” he writes, “and there we were, bound by this tie, by this place, brought together by our Judaism, by our past and our present and our presence.”
Those bonds complicate what has become the memoir’s most widely reported revelation: that Diane Remus, a member of Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential vetting team, asked whether he had ever been “an agent of the Israeli government.” Due diligence, or a deep misunderstanding of how American Jews relate to Israel? Either way, Shapiro writes that he found the question “offensive,” echoing the reaction of many Jews who see ties to Israel as foundational to Jewish identity, not evidence of dual loyalty.
Describing the period when he was under consideration for the Democratic ticket, Shapiro doesn’t refer explicitly to the attacks from the left, where he was called “Genocide Josh,” or to the pro-Israel activists who insisted he’d been dropped for consideration because of his presumed Israel ties. (According to the book, he declined before Harris had made her decision.) He writes only that Harris “expressed how bad she felt that I had been getting hammered with the antisemitic attacks that she had witnessed throughout the process.”
Harris’ advisers also pressed Shapiro on Israel policy and his “hard line” response to pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, including at the University of Pennsylvania. His answer reflects a consistent theme of the book: that whatever his personal beliefs, he understands his role as protecting all his constituents. “I told them that the safety of students on campus has been threatened,” he writes, “and I would take that position to protect them, or any other student group whose safety was at risk, any day.”
That universalism also shapes his reflections on the Tree of Life massacre, which occurred while he was attorney general. Shapiro describes being deeply shaken and unsure how to explain the attack to his children, but before discussing antisemitism he emphasizes the positive community response: interfaith vigils, Muslim neighbors standing alongside grieving Jews, and the resilience of the Tree of Life community itself.
Visibility in the face of antisemitism
When he does discuss antisemitism, he writes that it has become “more tenuous than ever to be Jewish in America,” with anti-Jewish hatred now “much scarier, much more real, both in the number of incidents and how present it feels around us.”
His response is not retreat, but visibility. He describes “doubling down on my commitment to living my faith publicly,” a choice he says inspired others, including “a significant number of Christians and Muslims," to express their own religious identities more openly.
Shapiro is the rare “pre-campaign” memoir that doesn’t do much score-settling, he’s more comfortable praising his mentors and the citizens who have inspired him. His remarks this week about JD Vance’s failure to include Jewish victims or Nazi perpetrators in his International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement are more pointed than any critique of Trump or his circle offered in the book.
“It is not a surprise to me, however, given the way in which he has openly supported the AfD party, given the way he openly embraces neo-Nazis and neo-Nazi political parties, given the way in which he has offered comfort, really, to the antisemites on the right who are infecting the Republican Party,” Shapiro told NBC News. “So it’s not a shock to me that he would omit that, but it’s a sad day that the vice president of the United States on Holocaust Awareness Day couldn’t address that.”
(The vice president responded by calling Shapiro a “political lightweight.”)
The book also includes no life lessons from a major setback - perhaps because Shapiro has had so few. (His only losing election, which he writes about, is for Akiba senior class president, when he was beaten by Ami Eden, the CEO of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent company.)
A former state representative and two-term attorney general, he rose to national prominence for his aggressive prosecution of clergy sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, his handling of the Tree of Life massacre, and his high-profile legal challenges to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania. Elected governor in 2022, he has governed as a pragmatic Democrat in a closely divided swing state, a résumé that has placed him regularly on shortlists of future national contenders.
At a book talk at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on Tuesday, Gayle King asked him whether he believes the country is ready for a Jewish president. Shapiro dismissed the premise.
“I don’t buy any of that,” he said. “I think the American people are good and they’re decent, and they just want someone to get stuff done and solve their problems.”
That is part of his brand statement. “No one asks if you are a Republican or Democrat or who you voted for before they work solving problems and lending hands,” he writes.
And there’s another part. Politicians call it “America’s civil religion.” Philosophers call it the “common good.” And Jews might even call it “derech eretz,” the way of the land.
In the end, literally, Shapiro calls it “faith.”
“Now more than ever, we yearn for and need a world defined by faith,” he writes in the book’s conclusion. “It’s universal, this belief in others to help us through what feels unsettled, uncivil, un-American.”
“Where We Keep the Light” is ultimately a testament from a Jewish public figure confident that his Jewishness is not an obstacle to political ambition, and religion not a force for intolerance or division, but a wellspring for a better America. His memoir suggests that being Jewish publicly, confidently, and without apology makes him a better politician for all.