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With his Iran war, or, if you prefer, excursion, President Trump is upending political debate in America on the right. The resignation in March of Joe Kent, his director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center, has inflamed disputes about the origins and course of the war. In his resignation letter, Kent suggested that Trump had been inveigled into starting the war and that it was Israel, and Israel alone, that had done the inveigling. “I cannot in good conscience,” Kent wrote, “support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
The perception of Israel as a malignant force in American politics is not confined to the right. It has also been growing among Democrats who were critical of President Biden’s approach toward Israel and its war in the Gaza Strip. The revolt against that approach may have helped to impede, if not shatter, former vice-president Kamala Harris’ run for the presidency in 2024, when she campaigned against Trump. It has been widely speculated that Israel will form a key issue in the upcoming primaries for the 2028 Democratic nomination for the presidency. California Governor Gavin Newsom, for example, has recently referred to Israel as an “apartheid state” and stated that he will accept no contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
One Democrat who has remained unwavering in his support for Israel is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Shapiro, whom Harris considered appointing as her running mate in 2024, seems likely to run for the presidency, Shapiro has managed to transcend partisan decisions, for the most part, in Pennsylvania—his ability to do so forms the keystone of his potential appeal as a presidential candidate who can unite America after a prolonged period of division. Nor is it lost upon Democrats that they must win Pennsylvania in order to obtain the presidency.
In March, Shapiro appeared on HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher’s show. Maher said, “Sounds like you’re well on your way to the nomination.” Shapiro responded, “I refuse to take any of your bait here.”
Does he in fact view himself as presidential timber? One sign of Shapiro’s ambitions is that, like Newsom and Harris, he has released a new autobiography called Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service. Shapiro is 52-years-old. Henry Stimson, the former Secretary of State and Secretary of War, was 71-years-old when he released his memoir, On Active Service, in 1948, two years before his death. Shapiro’s title may be somewhat grandiose, but there can be no denying that he has had to grapple directly with several grave events as Governor–one in Pittsburgh (where the Tree of Life Synagogue came under murderous assault), and another (an arson attack) that directly targeted him and his family in the Governor’s mansion. If anyone has an insight into the anti-Semitic threat that is coursing through America, it is Shapiro.
Shapiro, who was born in Kansas City in 1973, has a self-deprecating streak, noting at the outset of his memoir that he was a middling student in elementary school. Pivotal to reorienting his somewhat lackadaisical attitude towards his studies was discovering the plight of Soviet Jews. He began wiring a refusenik named Avi. Together with his mother, the 13-year-old Shapiro started a national group called “Children for Avi.” “The group,” Shapiro reports, “grew to dozens of people writing to him and on his behalf. My mom organized a trip to Washington, DC, where we got to sit down with Senator Arlen Specter and then-Senator Joe Biden among others to lobby for Avi and the other kids.” By 1986, Shapiro stood at Ben Sholom synagogue on a Saturday morning. “For me,” Shapiro writes, “I would later realize that these were the moments that helped lead me into a life of faith and public service.”
Another early experience that left a deep impression upon Shapiro was living in Israel for four months as a high school junior in the fall of 1989. “Iy was the first time I could feel faith,” Shaprio writes. “I could see it and touch it and it wasn’t abstract.” Upon returning to America in January 1990, he ran and lost a race for student body president, the only race that he has failed to win.
Things began to take a more auspicious turn when he entered the University of Rochester, where he successfully ran for the student Senate. He switched his major to political science from medicine and became an intern in his junior year on Capitol Hill for Michigan Senator Carl Levin. Shapiro seeks to underscore his pragmatism, recalling that working for Levin “showed me…that you need to be prepared for every possible question, every possible scenario, and you should always think through things from all angles, even when you believe you know where you will land on something. It is the fundamental underpinning of being a great leader. If you don’t ask the right questions and listen to the answers, you can’t make the right decisions.”
Shaprio went on to earn a law degree at Georgetown University. He became an associate at Ballard Spahr, a large law firm in Philadelphia, but chafed at the routine. Soon enough, he launched a run in September 2003 for the state House of Representatives. His political odyssey had begun. The key to his steady rise was spending as much time as possible with his constituents rather than hobnobbing with legislators in the state capitol, Harrisburg. “In the seven years I served as state representative,” Shapiro writes, “I held more than a hundred town hall meetings for people in my district.”
Shaprio’s steady ascent meant that the Harris campaign interviewed him at length. Shapiro makes plain his discomfort with Harris and her associates. He recalls that their questions were not about substance. Instead, “they were questioning my ideology, my approach my world view.” He adds, “it was their right to do so, but the manner in which they did suggested to me that they really didn’t understand where the people who would decide this presidential election really were.” In particular, he bridled at their queries about Israel and his criticisms of protesters at the University of Pennsylvania who had vandalized the campus and assaulted Jewish students. “I wondered whether these questions,” Shapiro writes, “were being posed to just me—the only Jewish guy in the running—or if everyone who had not held a federal office was being grilled about Israel in the same way.”
Since then, Shaprio has been in the forefront of urging Democrats not to abandon Israel. He has been road-testing the message that the Democratic Party must acknowledge that the Jewish state has a fundamental right to exist. Whether that message will prove politically salient is bound to be a central question in the 2028 presidential race.
