Pennsylvania’s Shapiro: Harris team asked if I’d ever been ‘a double agent for Israel’

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File: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro watches warm ups before an NFL football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Detroit Lions on November 16, 2025, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)

File: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro watches warm ups before an NFL football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Detroit Lions on November 16, 2025, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro says in a new book that during his vetting by Kamala Harris’s team as a potential vice presidential candidate for the 2024 US election, he was asked whether he had at any time “been a double agent for Israel.”

Excerpts from Shapiro’s book “Where We Keep the Light” were reported on by The New York Times and The Atlantic.

The Jewish Shapiro recalls being highly offended by the question (“Was she kidding?”) and intensely uneasy with the general process, which included more questions regarding his positions that have been generally supportive of Israel.

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He says that the fact he was asked this “said a lot about some of the people around [Harris].”

“I wondered whether these questions 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,” he says.

“These sessions were completely professional and businesslike,” Shapiro says. “But I just had a knot in my stomach through all of it.”

Harris eventually picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, and the two went on to lose the general election to Donald Trump.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/pennsylvanias-shapiro-harris-team-asked-if-id-ever-been-a-double-agent-for-israel/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5823769&forum_id=2).#49600260)

I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running —

I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running —

I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running —

I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running —

I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running —

I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running —

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5823769&forum_id=2).#49600262)

https://www.timesofisrael.com/shapiro-seeks-to-downplay-his-time-as-idf-volunteer-after-college-op-ed-resurfaces/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5823769&forum_id=2).#49600385)

classic jewish obfuscation

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5823769&forum_id=2).#49600270)

seems kike a totally fair question to ask

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5823769&forum_id=2).#49600381)

Yes, they really asked Josh Shapiro if he’s an Israeli spy - comment

What they asked Josh Shapiro during VP vetting reveals everything about how Jews are treated in America.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro speaks during the a campaign kickoff rally earlier this month.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro speaks during the a campaign kickoff rally earlier this month.

(photo credit: Hannah Beier/Reuters)

ByZVIKA KLEIN

JANUARY 19, 2026 16:27

Picture the room.

It’s a vetting process for the vice president of the United States. There are lawyers, staffers, and clipboards. Background checks. The standard machinery of American democracy is doing its work.

Then someone asks Josh Shapiro, an American governor, a lifelong public servant, a man who’s spent decades in Pennsylvania politics, whether he has ever been “an agent of the Israeli government.”

Whether he has ever communicated with an undercover Israeli agent.

Read that again.

Josh Shapiro. (credit: SHUTTERSTOCK)

Not: Have you ever lobbied for a foreign government? Not: Do you have undisclosed financial interests? Those are normal vetting questions.

This was different. This was: Are you secretly working for the Jewish state?

Shapiro writes about this moment in his new memoir, and the sentence lands like a tracer round. Because every Jew in America, whether they’ve been near a VP vetting room or not, recognizes the temperature of that moment.

They’ve sat in smaller versions of it.

They’ve heard gentler variants of the question.

They’ve watched the words change while the suspicion stayed exactly the same.

Only Jews need to go through these tests

The loyalty question doesn’t usually announce itself this clearly.

It comes dressed up.

On campus, it sounds like: “Do you condemn Israel’s actions?”

In the workplace, it sounds like: “I just want to understand where you stand.”

At a dinner party, it sounds like: “But you support a ceasefire, right?”

Non-Jews will never be asked these questions. They will never need to go through these tests.

The person asking wants a renunciation. They want to watch you distance yourself from something they’ve decided is suspect: your connection to other Jews, to Jewish history, to the Jewish state.

It’s the same test Shapiro got.

Here’s what the question really says:

You can be Jewish, but only the right kind of Jewish. The private kind. The kind that doesn’t connect to anything outside yourself. You can have a religion. You can have a grandmother who makes brisket. You can even have opinions about Israeli policy.

But the moment your Jewishness links to a people, a history, a homeland, the moment it becomes something more than a personal quirk, we need to know: Are you loyal to us, or to them?

This is what Americans call dual loyalty.

It’s the accusation that Jewish peoplehood creates a conflict with citizenship. That caring about Israel means you can’t fully care about America. That identity is allegiance, and allegiance is singular.

It sounds almost reasonable. Until you realize nobody asks this about anyone else.

Nobody pulls Irish-Americans aside and asks: “Have you ever been an agent of the Irish government?”

Nobody vets Greek-Americans for secret communication with Athens.

Nobody demands Indian-Americans prove they’ve condemned Modi enough to be trusted.

But Jews? Jews get the question.

Modern blood libel

There’s a reason this keeps happening, and the reason is old.

In 1894, a Jewish officer in the French army named Alfred Dreyfus was accused of treason. The charge was espionage. The real charge was that his Frenchness seemed doubtful because he was a Jew.

France, the nation that gave the world liberté, égalité, fraternité, discovered it carried an instinct it didn’t know how to name. The instinct said, “A Jew can rise high, but he still belongs somewhere else.”

That instinct didn’t die in 1894. It didn’t die in 1945.

It just learned to speak more carefully. Politically correct. If you will.

It learned the language of vetting and accountability. It learned to call itself prudence. It learned to borrow the vocabulary of inclusion while doing the same old work: making Jewishness itself a question mark.

‘America is different’

Now, here’s what makes this moment especially painful.

For decades, many American Jews believed they’d solved this. They thought the deal was clear: keep your Jewish identity private, and you’ll be treated as a full citizen. Religion at home, normalcy in public.

It felt like it was working.

Then came October 7.

Suddenly, Jewish identity wasn’t private anymore. It was public, visible, unavoidable. Jews were grieving in the open.

They were scared in the open. They were connected to Israel in the open.

And the world responded with conditions.

You can grieve, but first, condemn.

You can be afraid, but first, apologize.

You can care about Israel, but only if you maintain the right amount of distance.

What Jews discovered is that the old deal was never actually settled. It was just dormant. And the loyalty question was always there, waiting.

The question reveals something uncomfortable about how democracies handle difference.

Two hundred years ago, Europe told Jews, “You can have equality if you stop being a people.” Just be individuals who happen to pray differently. Blend in. Become French, German, or British, just with a different Sabbath.

Some Jews took the deal. Many tried.

But peoplehood doesn’t work like that. It’s not just religion. It’s not just ethnicity. It’s something thicker: a shared story, a shared memory, a sense of mutual responsibility that stretches across borders and centuries.

For most of history, that was fine, because Jews had no power. A powerless people is easy to tolerate. You can visit them in the ghetto. You can philosemitically admire their books. You can use them as a symbol of suffering or endurance.

But then Jews built a state.

Suddenly, Jewish peoplehood wasn’t just a quaint cultural curiosity. It was geopolitical. It had borders, an army, interests, and conflicts. It turned Jews from weak objects of history into participants, at times even strong and successful ones.

And that’s what the modern world, especially the progressive world, has never quite metabolized.

People can live with Jews as victims. They can live with Jews as symbols. They can live with Jews in a synagogue or at a Holocaust memorial.

But Jews with sovereignty? Jews who act in history, who make difficult choices, who defend themselves, who refuse to apologize for existing as a people?

That breaks the script.

Remember ‘Let my people go?’

Natan Sharansky spent nine years in a Soviet prison. His crime? Wanting to emigrate to Israel. The KGB called him a traitor, a spy, an agent of Zionism.

The interrogators would ask: “How can you claim to be Soviet and also want to go to Israel? Where is your real loyalty?”

Sharansky’s answer was simple: “I’m not choosing between identities. You’re the one demanding I choose.”

The Soviet Union couldn’t accept that a person could be Russian and Jewish, could love Pushkin, and also want to live in Jerusalem. The totalitarian mind demands singular loyalty. It treats complex identity as inherently suspicious.

What Sharansky recognized, and what he’s spent decades warning about, is that this suspicion doesn’t only live in dictatorships.

It can appear in democracies too, just with softer machinery.

In the Soviet Union, the state asked the loyalty question.

In America, it’s the vetting committee, the employer, the university, the social circle.

The words are more polite. The consequences are less brutal. But the mechanism is the same: Your full identity is a problem. Edit it. Moderate it. Prove you’re safe.

This is how free societies learn to stop being free, with the quiet pressure that makes people censor themselves.

Asking the questions

Let’s clarify the events that transpired in the vetting room involving Shapiro.

A campaign has every right to ask hard questions. It should ask about conflicts of interest, about foreign contacts, about financial entanglements, about anything that could compromise judgment or create leverage.

But asking whether a Jewish governor has been a secret Israeli agent is an act of profiling.

It treats Jewishness itself, the identity, the peoplehood, and the connection to Israel as inherently suspicious.

And once that reflex becomes normalized in elite spaces, it migrates everywhere.

It shows up in newsrooms, where Jewish reporters are asked to recuse themselves from Israel coverage while reporters of other backgrounds aren’t asked about their ancestral homelands.

It shows up on campus, where “Zionist” becomes a social scarlet letter, where students learn that their Jewish identity is welcome only if it stays disconnected from history, from memory, from Israel.

It shows up in corporate diversity trainings, where empathy is extended to every identity except the one that connects to a Jewish state under siege.

It shows up in social life, where Jews describe a new rule: grief requires disclaimers. Mourning comes with asterisks. Solidarity has conditions.

The result is a pattern. And the pattern has a name.

Here’s the thing about dual loyalty: it’s designed to be unanswerable.

If you defend your connection to Israel, you’re proving the accusation. If you distance yourself, you’re admitting there was something to distance yourself from. If you ignore it, you’re being evasive.

It’s a trap disguised as a conversation.

And it works because it smuggles in an assumption that sounds reasonable: Loyalty is singular. You can’t love two things. You have to choose.

But that’s not how humans work.

You can love your family and your city. You can honor your ancestors and your neighbors. You can feel responsibility toward your people and your country.

Loyalty isn’t a limited resource where supporting one diminishes another.

Every immigrant family knows this. Every hyphenated American knows this. Irish-Americans love Ireland and America. Greek-Americans care about Cyprus and Philadelphia. Nobody treats that as a security risk.

But when Jews care about Israel, suddenly it’s a conflict.

Why?

Because the world never fully accepted Jewish peoplehood as legitimate.

For two thousand years, Jews were supposed to wander. That was the story. Rootless cosmopolitans. The Wandering Jew. Eternal victims.

The Holocaust seemed to seal the narrative.

But then Jews did something unexpected: they stopped asking permission. They built a state. They became actors in history instead of symbols of suffering.

And that shattered the categories.

The West doesn’t have a script for Jewish normalcy. It has a script for Jewish victimhood and a script for Jewish moral witness. But a Jewish state that defends itself, makes alliances, fights wars, builds tech, and argues internally, a normal nation doing normal nation things?

That was never supposed to happen.

And so the loyalty question returns, because it’s the way a culture expresses discomfort it can’t quite name.

What now?

So what do we do with this?

Firstly, we should demand standards.

Vetting can be rigorous without being prejudiced. Campaigns, universities, corporations, and government agencies should be able to say clearly: We don’t treat any identity as inherently suspect. We ask about actions, not ancestry.

We distinguish between legitimate scrutiny and reflexive bias.

If you can’t state that principle, you’re not vetting. You’re profiling.

Secondly, we need to stop apologizing for Jewish peoplehood.

Jews are a people. It’s a fact.

Jews have a religion. Jews have a history. Jews have a language. Jews have a homeland. These things don’t require a disclaimer.

Jews can argue about Israeli policy, loudly, passionately, with full moral seriousness, the same way Americans argue about American policy. Disagreement isn’t betrayal. Criticism isn’t renunciation.

But you don’t have to earn the right to care.

We also need to name the mechanism.

Antisemitism isn’t always a skinhead with a Nazi t-shirt. Sometimes it’s the voice that says: Jews are fine, but maybe they’re too connected. Too confident. Too visible. Maybe we should ask a few more questions.

Dual loyalty is the respectable version of that instinct.

Finally, we also need to recognize the stakes.

Even though as Jews, we think it’s all about us - this time, it actually isn’t.

A society that normalizes identity-based loyalty tests is building machinery that will be used on others. Every minority learns this eventually. Jews are just the early-warning system.

If they can demand that one group constantly prove their belonging, they can demand it from yours.

Josh Shapiro is now trending on social media. He’s mentioned in every Israeli news broadcast and Hebrew news site.

For those who aren’t Jewish, his story will get spun, dismissed, debated, and forgotten.

But Jews should see it clearly. This is a wake-up call.

The loyalty question is back because the world is struggling, again, with the fact of Jewish difference. October 7 didn’t create the struggle. It just made it impossible to ignore.

The question now is whether democracies will meet Jewish peoplehood with maturity or suspicion. Whether institutions will learn to distinguish between legitimate scrutiny and ancient reflex.

The answer won’t come from one campaign but rather from whether people recognize the pattern when they see it.

American Jews deserve equal citizenship. They deserve to belong without probation. They deserve to participate in public life without being treated as a walking conflict of interest.

The loyalty test has consistently served as a warning indicator.

When it starts flashing, Jews learn to take it seriously.

So should everyone else.

Because a society that makes peoplehood a provocation won’t stop with Jews.

It never does.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5823769&forum_id=2).#49600703)