Amid a massive fraud scandal in Minnesota, Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential pick in 2024, announced earlier this month that he would not seek reelection.
Investigations have uncovered widespread fraud in the state’s housing, nutrition, and childcare assistance programs, totaling, some say, billions of dollars.
Walz, when announcing that he would not seek another term, indicated he didn’t want the scandal to distract him from doing his job for the remainder of his current term. He has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Imagine, however, if Harris had defeated Donald Trump in the 2024 elections, and Walz was now the country’s vice president. Then imagine what kind of distraction this story would have been for him, the president, and the country. Yet, during the vetting process, none of this – if it came out – was enough to derail his candidacy.
Perhaps the vetters overlooked or downplayed this because they were too busy trying to figure out if Josh Shapiro, the Jewish-American governor of Pennsylvania and one of three people shortlisted for the job, was an Israeli agent.
In a memoir to be published at the end of the month, Shapiro wrote that the Harris vetting team focused intently on his views on Israel. Shapiro had been unabashedly pro-Israel, though critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and there was concern in the Harris camp that this could be a liability for the ticket among progressive voters.
Shapiro was hardly an obscure figure. A proudly Jewish governor who attended Jewish day school in suburban Philadelphia, studied in Israel as a teenager, and keeps a kosher kitchen in the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, he had become a nationally recognized political name. And as his candidacy gained traction, it triggered something else as well: an organized pushback from the Left.
Shapiro - a serious contender
Once Shapiro appeared to be a serious contender, critics dredged up a college-era article in which he questioned the viability of the Oslo Accords and described the Palestinians as “too battle-minded” to live in peace with Israel. The message was clear: His unapologetic support for Israel – even paired with criticism of Netanyahu – could be a problem.
That sentiment was not confined to activist circles. In late July, as Shapiro’s name circulated, CNN political correspondent John King matter-of-factly suggested he could pose risks on the ticket because he was Jewish.
The issue, however, was not Shapiro’s Judaism per se. Progressive voices would have welcomed an anti-Israel Jewish figure such as Bernie Sanders. They were implacably hostile, however, to a Jewish candidate who was also openly pro-Israel.
Against that backdrop, Shapiro’s account in his forthcoming memoir, Where We Keep the Light, is particularly relevant.
While Shapiro described the process overall as “professional and businesslike,” he wrote that one line of questioning went too far.
'Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?'
White House counsel Dana Remus, he recounted, asked straight out, “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?”
The question stunned him. “Had I been a double agent for Israel? Was she kidding?” Shapiro wrote, adding that he told her how offensive he found it. When Remus followed up by asking whether he had ever communicated with an undercover Israeli agent, the governor replied, “If they were undercover, how the hell would I know?”
The episode says a great deal about lingering suspicions of Jewish loyalty and about the narrowing space for unapologetic support for Israel in elite Democratic politics. As Los Angeles Rabbi David Wolpe put it on X/Twitter, one wonders whether anyone would have asked Tim Walz whether he was a secret German or Swiss agent because of his ancestry.
Probably not.
What makes Shapiro’s account so jarring is not merely the sentiment behind the question but its bluntness. You support Israel. You hold a high office. Prove you are not an Israeli agent.
The assumption behind this question carries a chilling effect. Jewish politicians who identify as Zionists may now think twice before publicly supporting Israel or confronting the antisemitic rhetoric in progressive and pro-Palestinian circles for fear that such positions will brand them as suspect.
Some may choose to stay quiet. Others may retreat from politics altogether.
Still others may decide it is safer to appease the loudest critics – even at the cost of disavowing positions they once held.
The latter tack is illustrated by an episode involving Scott Wiener, a progressive California state senator running for the congressional seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Wiener, though critical of Israel’s policies in Gaza, refrained – up until this month – from saying these policies amounted to genocide.
At a candidates’ debate, the moderator asked the candidates to answer with a “yes” or “no” whether Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza. Wiener did not answer, while his two opponents said “yes.”
After being pummeled on social media, Wiener, apparently sensing which way the political winds were blowing in super-liberal San Francisco, corrected himself and said – “as a Jew” – that, yes, Israel was committing genocide. Well, at least no one will accuse him of being an Israeli agent.
The 'Israel issue' loomed large
In his book, Shapiro revealed that the Israel issue loomed large throughout the vetting process. This was natural, since it was the summer of 2024 – the war in Gaza raged, and a few months earlier, campuses across the country were full of often violent anti-Israel demonstrations.
Harris, in her own memoir, denied that Shapiro’s Jewishness played any role in her decision to choose Walz as her vice presidential nominee instead.
Yet picking Walz over Shapiro seemed counterintuitive, since Harris and Walz were both on the left wing of the Democratic Party and since Walz hailed from a state the Democrats were already sure to win.
On paper, Walz added little to the ticket. By contrast, Shapiro was the governor of a swing state that any candidate would need to win the presidency, and he was a centrist Democrat, appealing to voters Harris was struggling to reach.
Harris went with Walz and went on to lose the election. Whether the choice was decisive is unknowable, and Harris denies that Israel had anything to do with it.
Still, the vetting process Shapiro described in his book – including being asked whether he had ever been an Israeli agent – makes it hard to argue that the issue was irrelevant. Nevertheless, Harris’s decision to bypass a running mate who was openly supportive of Israel did her no favors.