The revelations from Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s new memoir about his questioning by staff of the then-Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris and by Harris herself are chilling. They make it clear that Shapiro, who was under consideration to become Harris’s running mate, faced the insurmountable obstacle of being a Jew.
First, Harris’s staff asked Shapiro if he was an Israeli agent, based on the fact that he volunteered on a kibbutz and at an IDF base as a teenager. This echoed classic antisemitic tropes of dual loyalty and set a standard that Jews with any connection to Israel in their youth are subject to suspicion.
Possibly worse is what Harris herself did when met Shapiro face to face. According to Shapiro’s memoir, Harris wanted him to apologize for his criticism of anti-Israel encampments and protests at the University of Pennsylvania from April 2024.
Let that sink in: The Vice President of the United States called on a Jewish Governor to apologize for defending Jewish students from antisemitism.
What did he even say that was so bad? During those encampments, he told Politico: “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."
Addressing the same events, he told CNN: “I think what’s important is that we can’t allow peaceful protest about a disagreement on policy happening in the Middle East to be an excuse for antisemitism or Islamophobia on these campuses. We can’t allow it to be an excuse that puts certain students at risk, to be able to go to classes safely or to be able to worship safely."
A call to enforce the law and a condemnation of bigotry and actions that put others at risk. He even stuck to the script of lumping in “Islamophobia" with antisemitism. Pretty anodyne stuff. But even that was apparently too much for Harris, who infamously praised the most hateful people in America, people who call for the genocide of the Jewish people, as “showing exactly what the human emotion should be."
The University of Pennsylvania has been a hotbed of antisemitism since the October 7 massacre, and its response has often been woeful. In November 2023, a month after the October 7 massacre, university staff received antisemitic emails threatening violence against the campus Jewish community. In December of that year, then-university President Liz Magill told Congress, when asked if calls for genocide against Jews violated the university’s rules, that “it is a context-dependent decision" as to whether calls for genocide are wrong.
More recently, in December 2025, UPENN received an “F" grade for its handling of antisemitism on campus from the StopAntisemitism organization.
Condemning those who create an atmosphere of hate and violence targeting a minority should be the baseline of morality. But to Kamala Harris and her campaign staff, the problem was never those who intimidated, attacked, and called for the death of Jews for the crime of being Jewish. Rather, the problem for her was those Jews who had the temerity to notice the people who wanted to murder them, Jews like Josh Shapiro.
The message: Shut up, Jew.
With people like the woman who almost became the President egging them on, it is hardly a surprise that one of Harris’s favored class of bigots, someone who demonstrated the exact “human emotion" she went out of her way to praise, attempted to murder Governor Shapiro and his family on the first night of Passover last year. When you praise calls for violence and murder, actual violence and murder follow.
This same tolerance for antisemitism and condemnation of Jews for daring to notice the people who openly hate them is now appearing on the right in America. When Jewish figures like Ben Shapiro rightly criticize the thinly disguised antisemitism of Tucker Carlson and the naked antisemitism of Candace Owens, they find themselves under attack for the temerity of calling a spade a spade, of noticing reality.
The response of people like Megyn Kelley has been to defend Carlson and Owens, to send the message’ Shut up, Jew,’ to anyone who is disturbed by the elevation of actual Nazis and the peddling of centuries-old conspiracy theories that always lead to the murder of innocents. There is no antisemitic line Candace Owens can cross that would earn her a mild rebuke from Kelley.
Worse is that the current Vice President, JD Vance, seems to be following in the antisemite-coddling footsteps of his immediate predecessor. Rather than learn from Harris’s mistake of praising and defending antisemites while demanding that Jews shut up about the people who hate them, he has acted like Harris and coddled Tucker Carlson even as the latter hosted and elevated an antisemite who attacked Vance’s wife.
Carlson can support every single enemy of America and oppose America itself, and it seems he is to be immune from criticism. Vance’s criticism is reserved for those who believe that antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and Hitler-worship should not be mainstream, for those who support America and not its enemies.
Pandering to the antisemitic vote turned out to be a losing strategy for Harris, who lost out on the chance to lock up the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania when she passed over its popular governor because he upset the antisemites, ultimately losing Pennsylvania and all swing states in the 2024 presidential election. Pandering to that same bigoted vote will hurt Vance as well if he does not wise up.
We will not shut up. We will not wait for the words of the people who call every day for our deaths to be turned into action. Hatred is wrong, and anyone who cannot or refuses to recognize that fact is unworthy of elected office.
Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.