One by one, the arguments against Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as a potential running mate for Kamala Harris have fallen by the wayside. We have now come to that most eternal of questions: But is it good for the Jews?
Despite the stereotypes, Jews are often reticent to ask this question, because the very fact that it is being asked usually means the answer is no. “But is it good for the Jews?” roughly translates to: What’s the catch?
For pro-Israel Jews, the catch is that Shapiro’s identity as a practicing Jew will be coopted and used as a shield to deflect criticism of Harris’s potential moves against Israel. Another possibility is that Harris will feel obligated to concede something to her anti-Zionist progressive base in return for picking a proud Jew as a running mate.
Those are both very real possibilities, but they mostly revolve around Harris’s actions. Some American Jews are worried about how the American public will respond.
“Is the antisemitism going to increase because now you’d have the person who sleeps next to her and the person who would be her closest political ally are both Jewish?” a Jewish former Democratic elected official told CNN. “Does it make it more dangerous for those of us in the Jewish community?”
This is another time-honored concern of the Jewish world: If we fulfill anti-Semites’ conspiracist fantasies by actually having power, it will provoke a reaction from unstable corners.
To which I would respond with an important principle to living as a Jew in the world: Anti-Semitism is something to plan for, not something to plan around.
Which means that in all cases, we should be ready for Jew-hatred—but only in extreme cases should its anticipation force us to change our life’s path.
Conspiracy theorists are going to believe what they want to believe. Everything we know about such people suggests that information that would debunk their worldview only concretizes it. They consider conflicting data to be part of the conspiracy itself. There is, therefore, almost no way to convince them of reality.
But even if we could convince them they were wrong, we shouldn’t want to. It upsets people when Jews are successful, but that doesn’t mean Jews should eschew success to guard the feelings of the snowflake skinheads.
This principle is important because the stakes can get far higher than a VP slot.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, attempts to solve the increasingly desperate need to take in Jewish refugees were complicated by the same factors that contributed to the crisis in the first place. Conspiracy theories about Jews directing the behavior of global powers fanned the flames of deadly anti-Semitism in their home countries. But Western powers were loath to organize any refugee effort aimed specifically at Jews because they didn’t want to feed those same fever swamps. And so the crisis persisted.
As news of the slaughter of Jews in Europe reached the US, Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Stephen Wise hesitated to pressure FDR publicly, worried in part about the optics of it. When the successful Jewish screenwriter Ben Hecht proposed a newspaper ad in 1942 fiercely shaming the world for its inaction, the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress considered it too provocative a step. And when Jewish leaders tried to get the Allies to declare the establishment of a safe haven for the Jews as a goal in the Second World War, they consistently ran up against Western discomfort with the idea that the war was in any way “for” the Jews.
Before his death in 1940, Vladimir Jabotinsky tried to organize a Jewish army much like the Jewish Legion that he formed and fought in during World War I. He believed the Jews should be able to fight for themselves and prove themselves as allies alongside the other nations fighting the Nazis. But because of the Jews’ prominence as Nazi victims, Western leaders feared contributing to the idea that it was a “Jewish war.” Jabotinsky said they should embrace that framing: “Our Western statesmen would be guilty of culpable blindness were they to disregard the historical truth of this statement,” he wrote. “When the Nazis across the frontiers, or their hirelings in Britain and France, yell or whisper that this is a ‘Jewish war,’ they are perfectly right: the microbe of war would have died had it not been allowed to batten on the Jewish tragedy.”
As I said, the stakes are much lower today, thankfully. Having a Jewish vice presidential nominee isn’t the same as having a Jewish state or even a Jewish army. But the principal assumption—that the Jewish angle to anything should be hidden as much as possible lest it rouse the haters—is apparently unvanquishable.
The reason this is coming up now in ways it didn’t drive the conversation when the late Joe Lieberman was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 is because the Democratic Party did not then have a loud and influential, though small in number, wing of the party devoted to intimidating Jewishness out of the public sphere. The party does now, and that wing wants this particular fight.
So should we. The conspiracy theorists are going to complain of Jewish power and influence either way. Is it good for the Jews? Only if we don’t back down.
