Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania has been making the rounds. Bill Maher. Pod Save America. The Higher Learning podcast. And in each room — some friendlier than others, none of them easy — he said many of the right things. He affirmed Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He pushed back against the word “apartheid.” He spoke about his faith with visible pride. And he did all of this with a consistency that deserves acknowledgment, because it is rare among Democratic politicians willing to discuss Israel at all.

I watched all of it. And I came away convinced of two things.

First: Josh Shapiro is proud to be a Jew. This is not in question. It is not an act.

That does not mean he is not calculated. He plainly is. Every interview, every podcast, every carefully worded rebuke of Newsom-without-naming-Newsom is a move on a 2028 chessboard, and pretending otherwise would be naive. But calculation and conviction are not mutually exclusive, and in Shapiro’s case I believe both are operating simultaneously. The question is which one is driving.

Second: he has more to give on this subject than he is giving. And I am writing this essay not to tear him down but to ask him — as a rabbi, as a fellow Jew, as someone who wants him to succeed — to give it. My frustration with Shapiro is not the frustration of a critic. It is the frustration of someone who can see the full measure of what he carries and wonders why he sets only part of it on the table.

Let me start with what Shapiro did well, because intellectual honesty demands it and because dismissing the man would be easy, lazy, and wrong. On Higher Learning, host Van Lathan called Israel one of the worst human rights violators in the world and expressed anxiety that describing Israel as an apartheid state might lead people to think he hates Jews. Shapiro’s response was both firm and generous. He disagreed substantively but declined to call Lathan an antisemite. He pointed to the civic reality inside Israel — Arab citizens who vote, serve in the Knesset, pay taxes, serve in the military — and observed, correctly, that an actual apartheid state would never tolerate such equality. This is the kind of grounded, factual pushback that has been almost entirely absent from mainstream Democratic discourse on Israel for years. That Shapiro offered it voluntarily, on a progressive platform, to a hostile interlocutor, matters.

On Pod Save America, he went further. Without naming Gavin Newsom directly, he rebuked the California governor’s recent characterization of Israel as “sort of an apartheid state” — a remark Newsom delivered on the very same podcast just days earlier. Shapiro insisted that language matters, that words must be rooted in reality, that inflammatory buzzwords do not bring anyone closer to peace. He was right. And in the current environment, where Newsom’s slide from “crystal clear on my love for Israel” to apartheid language took approximately six weeks, Shapiro’s refusal to chase the base is itself a form of integrity.

He is not perfect. But he may be what we have.

The complicated part — the part that keeps me up — is the architecture of the argument, not its sincerity.

Shapiro’s stated red line is that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, and that denying this right amounts to endorsing permanent war. This is an important claim. It is also, in the current Democratic landscape, the floor. Affirming that Israel should not be destroyed is not Zionism in any substantive sense. It is the minimum threshold of moral seriousness — the equivalent of saying that a person has a right to breathe. True, necessary, and utterly insufficient as a description of what it means to be alive.

What Shapiro does not say is where the silence becomes loud. He does not speak of Zionism as what it actually is: one of the great liberation movements of the modern era, the return of an indigenous people to their homeland, the political expression of a covenantal promise that predates every empire that ever tried to sever the Jewish people from the land of Israel. He frames Israel’s legitimacy in the language of diplomatic consensus — “right to exist” — rather than in the language of justice. And there is a difference. The language of rights can be negotiated, conditioned, revoked. The language of justice makes a claim on the conscience.

I do not think this reticence reflects what Shapiro actually believes. This is a man who keeps kosher, attended Jewish day school, proposed to his wife in Jerusalem, and told thousands of Jewish teenagers at BBYO — with Israeli flags waving — that he leans on his faith. His Jewish identity is not performative. Which means the gap between what he appears to hold privately and what he is willing to argue publicly is itself a kind of teaching. It tells us something about the cost of entry to national leadership in the contemporary Democratic Party: you may be a Zionist, but you must speak like a diplomat.

A word about Netanyahu, because this is where too many of us lose the thread.

Shapiro has called the Israeli prime minister a “dangerous and destructive force.” This has drawn fire from some quarters of the Jewish community, and I want to say plainly: there is no shame in criticizing an Israeli leader. There is a long and honorable tradition of it — within Israel, within Zionism, within Torah itself. The prophets did not flatter kings. Criticizing Netanyahu is not tantamount to undermining the Jewish state, and conflating the two is both intellectually dishonest and strategically foolish, because it surrenders the ability to distinguish between legitimate dissent and genuine hostility.

If Shapiro’s criticism of Netanyahu is rooted in substantive disagreement — over judicial reform, over settlement policy, over the prosecution of the war, over the coalitional bargains that kept a prime minister under indictment in power — then it is not only permissible but obligatory. The Zionist project does not require us to admire every Israeli government. It requires us to insist on Jewish sovereignty and to argue, vigorously, about how that sovereignty is exercised. Shapiro appears to understand this distinction. He should not be penalized for it.

The harder question is contextual. When Shapiro criticizes Netanyahu on a progressive podcast in March 2026 — in the midst of a U.S.-Israeli military operation against Iran, with sixty percent of Democrats now sympathizing more with Palestinians than Israelis, with Newsom musing publicly about cutting military aid — the criticism inevitably functions as more than disagreement with a foreign leader. It becomes a permission structure for listeners who want to believe that supporting Israel is compatible with opposing virtually everything Israel does. Whether Shapiro intends this or not, his careful positioning invites the inference that pro-Israel sentiment, properly understood, is really just anti-Netanyahu sentiment with a kipah.

This is the tightrope. And I am not certain it holds.

I cannot write about Josh Shapiro without writing about Passover 2025.

Shapiro’s family was asleep in the governor’s mansion after their seder — the ancient ritual of retelling the story of liberation, of asking why this night is different from all other nights — when a man broke in and set off multiple Molotov cocktails. He then called 911 and explained that he did it because of what Shapiro “wants to do to the Palestinian people.” He later told police he would have beaten the governor with a hammer if he had found him. He pleaded guilty to attempted murder, terrorism, and twenty-two counts of arson.

I linger on this because it tells us something that no podcast interview can. Whatever else Josh Shapiro is — politician, governor, presidential aspirant, careful triangulator of Democratic coalition politics — he is also a Jewish father whose children were sleeping in a house that someone tried to burn down on the night Jews celebrate their deliverance from destruction. This is not an abstraction for him. The language of “apartheid” and “genocide” that floats through progressive discourse as rhetorical currency landed, physically, at his family’s door.

And yet, months later, he sits across from interviewers who deploy precisely that language and responds with patience, factual correction, and a generous refusal to call anyone an antisemite. I do not know another word for that except middat ha-din tempered by middat ha-rachamim — the attribute of justice softened by the attribute of mercy. He extends to his interlocutors a presumption of good faith that they do not always extend to him. This is not weakness. It is, in fact, a deeply Jewish way of being in the world.

So here is where I land, and it is an uneasy landing.

Josh Shapiro grew up at Akiba Hebrew Academy — now Barrack Hebrew Academy — on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. The same school that produced Rabbi David Wolpe, one of the most important voices in American Jewish theology of the last generation. The same school that produced Jake Tapper, who defended it on CNN when a political opponent tried to weaponize its Jewishness as evidence of elitism. The same school where children of Soviet Jewish refugees sat alongside kids from the Philadelphia suburbs, learning Torah and American civics side by side, absorbing the radical premise that Jewish particularity and democratic citizenship are not in tension but in concert.

Those roots matter. They produced a man who keeps kosher, who proposed to his wife in Jerusalem, who sends his own children to Jewish day school, who walked the halls of the same institution that shaped a rabbi and a journalist — two vocations that, at their best, share a single mandate: tell the truth even when it is unwelcome.

But roots do not save you. A Jewish day school education, however excellent, does not inoculate a man against the pressures of a political party that is sick — and let us be honest enough to name the sickness.

There is a virus in the Democratic Party. It treats Jewish power as inherently suspect and Jewish sovereignty as inherently colonial. It asked a sitting governor during vice-presidential vetting whether he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government — a question no one would dream of posing to an Irish-American about Dublin or an Italian-American about Rome. It turned “Zionist” into an epithet on college campuses. It gave us “Genocide Josh” as acceptable progressive shorthand. It enabled Gavin Newsom to travel from “crystal clear on my love for Israel” to “apartheid state” in six weeks and face no meaningful consequence. This virus will come for Josh Shapiro again when he seeks the nomination, and it will not be satisfied by careful language or thoughtful disagreements with Netanyahu. It will demand what it always demands: that the Jew prove he is not too Jewish to be trusted with power.

Shapiro is still in the room. He has not left, as so many others have. That counts. But history does not remember leaders who managed the moment. It remembers leaders who met it.

We do not tell our children about the politicians who read the polls correctly. We tell them about the ones who said what was right when it was costly, who led not because the crowd was behind them but because the truth was in front of them. We remember Churchill not for his parliamentary maneuvering but for the moral clarity he offered when the world wanted to look away. We remember Jabotinsky not because he won the internal Zionist debates of his era but because he told European Jews to leave when the respectable voices called him an alarmist. We remember Golda and Ben-Gurion and Begin not because they were popular in the salons of the West but because they refused to let the Jewish future be authored by people who did not have to live with the consequences.

Josh Shapiro has the education — forged at Akiba, in the same tradition that shaped Wolpe’s theology and Tapper’s insistence on factual precision. He has the knowledge — not borrowed, not performative, but woven into the fabric of a life lived Jewishly. He has the backbone — tested not in abstraction but in fire, literally, on the night his family celebrates liberation. He has every tool required to stand before this country and say, without apology, that the Jewish people’s return to sovereignty in their homeland is not a problem to be managed but a justice to be proclaimed — and that any political movement that cannot affirm this basic truth has lost its moral bearings, not found them.

So let me put this plainly.

The man is a graduate of a Jewish day school. He is an educated Jew in the fullest sense of that phrase — not someone who picked up a few talking points for a campaign ad, but someone who was raised inside the tradition, who can read the texts, who knows what the covenant demands. His house was burned down on Passover night, while his children slept, because he is a Jew who supports the Jewish state. He is a fucking Zionist. He should say so. Loudly. Without the diplomatic padding. Without the coalition arithmetic. Without the careful throat-clearing about Netanyahu that functions, in progressive rooms, as a permission slip to tolerate his Jewishness.

Be proud of it, Governor. Say the word. Say Zionist the way Ben-Gurion said it — not as a concession to be negotiated but as a truth to be declared.

And if the party you want to lead cannot nominate a man who says that word without flinching — if the Democratic Party in the year 2028 cannot bring itself to elevate a Jewish candidate who is unapologetically Zionist — then let that tell its own story. Let it stand as the verdict it would be. Not on Josh Shapiro. On them.

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