Josh Shapiro, the veepstakes, and the role of faith in presidential politics

The polarizing discussion surrounding Gov. Josh Shapiro’s faith and his recent bid to join Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket struck a very different tone than the Jewish presidential question of 1959. Back then, the journalist Bernard Postal polled a who’s who of American politics — Earl Warren, Hubert Humphrey, Dwight Eisenhower, to name-drop a handful of the 30 respondents — on a very pithy question: “Can a Jew be elected president?”

Postal was prompted by the wide speculation that John F. Kennedy, the Catholic senator from Massachusetts, would run for president in the next election. “I believe that a candidate’s religion should have no bearing upon his qualifications for the Office of President,” wrote Kennedy to Postal. “Accordingly, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews should all base their appeal to the voters upon their record of accomplishments and their program or action.”

Postal reported that most agreed with Kennedy, hopeful “that before too long the voters will do away with the tacit but nonetheless effective religious test that has traditionally barred all but white Protestants from the Presidency and the Vice Presidency.”

As the president of North America’s oldest independent Jewish college and a constituent of Shapiro in Pennsylvania, I was proud that he was reportedly on the shortest possible list to run for vice president of the United States. Surely, his reputation as a hardworking, bridge-building politician in a contested swing state had much to do with the consideration paid to him by Harris and her advisers.

I remain optimistic after Harris opted for Tim Walz as her running mate in the upcoming November election. After all, Pennsylvania stands to gain from Shapiro’s continued leadership. And, I suspect, this isn’t his last chance to earn a nomination on a U.S. presidential ticket.

Yet, there was disappointment derived from the political actors that surrounded the brief episode. His detractors — and there seemed to be a disproportionate number of them compared with the other vice presidential hopefuls — attacked Shapiro’s pro-Israel position with mischaracterizations of the governor’s balanced stance.

Some described his censure of then-president Liz Magill’s handling of antisemitism on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus as a national “power play.” Others plainly wondered aloud whether America was “ready” for a Jewish vice president, questioning whether, on an electability meter, Shapiro improved Harris’ chances of defeating Donald Trump or, instead, impaired her odds.

True, the naysayers were not the only pundits on record. There were hopeful voices that marveled about the possibility of an African American-Jewish ticket. Yet, these voices, echoes of the bright-eyed optimism of the late-1950s, were drowned out by a chorus of criticism of the even-keeled Pennsylvania governor.

Perhaps just as worrisome is the relief among a small but not insignificant number of American Jews who feared that Shapiro’s bid for the nomination would have elicited unwanted attention and, what’s worse, added antisemitism to American public discourse.

A sad and similar trope was expressed in the year after Joe Lieberman’s run for vice president alongside Al Gore in 2000. The unfortunate logic was that America’s Jews, by virtue of Lieberman’s high station, would have been somehow to blame for al-Qaeda’s deadly attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001.

Why, then, do I remain upbeat after Shapiro’s bid to share the Democratic presidential ticket? It’s a reminder, to me anyway, of what historian Adam Jortner has suggested in a recent book, A Promised Land, on American Jewry’s most important contribution to the “birth of religious freedom.”

Running for public office was the ultimate test of religious openness; Jews were the very first case study in American tolerance.

In the 1780s, Philadelphia was home to a large number of Jews exiled from their homes in New York and other major cities occupied by British troops. The swelled Jewish community in Philadelphia assembled a committee to draft a notice to local political leaders that Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution had “deprive[d] the Jews of the most eminent rights of freemen, by disabling them to be elected by their fellow citizens to represent them in the General Assembly.” These Jewish patriots anticipated a Joe Lieberman or Josh Shapiro campaigning for the highest offices in government.

Running for public office was the ultimate test of religious openness; Jews were the very first case study in American tolerance. The same feeling of unfairness resurfaced and animated Philadelphia’s Jews in 1787 to appeal to the Constitutional Convention for religious freedoms. Three years later, the Jews of Rhode Island beseeched George Washington to confirm to them that the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” At the core of their concern was the Jewish community’s unease about religious toleration in Newport and Providence.

Of course, other groups — surely, African Americans and women — have faced far more severe political discrimination at the ballot box and elsewhere. Yet, it was the Jewish question that did much to urge Americans in the Early Republic to think deeply about the limits of pluralism. It ought to embolden us to focus, as Kennedy insisted, on a candidate’s “record of accomplishments and their program or action.” This is a critical history lesson that should compel us to stand up for fairness and brave the consequences.

Zev Eleff is president and professor of American Jewish History at Gratz College in Melrose Park.