When Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was reportedly under consideration as Kamala Harris’s running mate, he was tarred by organized and emboldened antisemitic elements within the Democratic Party as “Genocide Josh” because of his support for Israel. Indeed, an organization of unknown leftist backers calling itself “No Genocide Josh” emerged to warn that Shapiro’s support for Israel was a bad look for the party’s so-called “progressive” activists.
“Selecting a Vice Presidential nominee with anti-Palestinian and pro-war views will depress turnout among Muslim, Arab-American, and young voters, and greatly reduce the excitement that comes with a new nominee,” the group said in a statement.
The publication Jewish Insider later reported that it had obtained planning documents from the team behind “No Genocide Josh” revealing “a highly coordinated” effort by a small group of organizers — including at least one leader of the Uncommitted movement — to pressure Democrats to avoid choosing Shapiro.
A messaging document showed that the group’s organizers included “Dear White Staffers,” an Instagram account originally created to document workplace abuse on Capitol Hill but which, after October 7, became one of the most influential anti-Israel platforms in Washington. Jewish Insider reported that the account was run by a staffer for Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania.
Lee is among Israel’s most vocal critics in Congress and was one of just nine Democratic members to vote against a resolution affirming that the House “stands with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists.” Lee’s district includes Squirrel Hill, where in 2018 eleven Jews were murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history.
According to notes obtained by Jewish Insider, the “No Genocide Josh” campaign believed that “picking a candidate who TikTok turns on over his stance on Gaza would put young people right at the low-engagement spot they were for Biden.” Campaign organizers decided not to push an alternative candidate because, as one document put it, “a candidate being associated with ‘us’ and ‘leftists’ probably isn’t good for their chances.”
After Harris opted for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, critics of the decision began questioning whether Shapiro had been sidelined because he was Jewish.
“Did Harris reject Shapiro just because progressives don’t like that he was Jewish?” tweeted Alan Dershowitz, the constitutional and criminal legal scholar.
Maury Litwack, an Orthodox Union executive focused on education policy, wrote: “Democrats: You can be excited about the Walz pick but also be sad that an outright antisemitic campaign was waged against Shapiro. Some soul-searching is needed.”
The Harris campaign feigned umbrage at the suggestion.
“Assertions that Vice President Harris did not select Gov. Shapiro based on his religion or views on Israel are absolutely ridiculous and offensive,” an unidentified aide told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Vice President Harris has an unwavering commitment to Israel’s security … she will always combat antisemitism whenever and wherever she sees it.”
The Starkman Approved principle — that there is often an inverse relationship between loudly professed moral superiority and actual ethical conduct — applies here.
In his memoir Where We Keep the Light, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Shapiro discloses what the paper described as “a contentious vetting process” in which Harris’s team focused intensely on his views on Israel — so intensely that, at one point, he writes, he was asked whether he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government.
“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” Shapiro recalls, describing his incredulous response to a last-minute question from the vetting team. He writes that he found the question offensive and was told, “Well, we have to ask.”
The questioner, Dana Remus, reportedly continued to press: “Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?” to which Shapiro replied, “If they were undercover, how the hell would I know?”
Remus is not a fringe activist, not a junior staffer, not a TikTok-radicalized progressive. She is a critical component of the Democratic Party’s legal infrastructure. That someone of her prominence felt compelled — or felt authorized — to ask a Jewish governor whether he was a foreign agent underscores how deeply normalized antisemitism has become inside elite Democratic political culture.
Among those who have trafficked openly in Jewish dual-loyalty tropes are Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who were named the 2019 and 2023 “Antisemite of the Year,” respectively, by an organization dedicated to opposing hatred toward Jews.
The Atlantic, which is funded by Laurene Powell Jobs — a close friend of Harris, as previously reported by The New York Times — also obtained a copy of Shapiro’s memoir but framed the episode as him settling some scores — a characterization that sidesteps the substance of his allegation: that a Jewish candidate was asked to account for possible foreign loyalty.
Remus is a partner with Covington & Burling, a Washington law firm. According to her firm bio, Remus served as general counsel to the Biden-Harris campaign and as a senior adviser to the Harris-Walz campaign. She also served as Assistant to the President and White House Counsel for President Biden, leading the administration’s effort to confirm a historic number of judicial nominees, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Other Remus positions: Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel for ethics in the Obama White House; General Counsel of the Obama Foundation, and General Counsel to the personal office of President and Mrs. Obama.
As for Remus’ law firm, in September 2024, a coalition of 37 Jewish and legal organizations publicly urged Covington to withdraw its sponsorship of the American Branch of the International Law Association’s International Law Weekend because the program honored Navi Pillay, a U.N. official widely condemned by mainstream Jewish groups for anti-Israel bias. Covington did not withdraw its sponsorship, despite three major firms having pulled their own support in earlier years under similar circumstances. This episode illustrates how some mainstream institutions treat views widely seen as discriminatory toward Israel as professionally respectable.
Questioning the loyalty of Jews is not new. It is one of antisemitism’s oldest smears — a golden oldie repackaged for the age of social media, progressive branding, and political cowardice.
And Kamala Harris owns it. Not because she personally asked the question — but because her campaign asked it, her advisers normalized it, her aides defended it, and her response was not accountability but vehement denial.
As the Anti-Defamation League has documented, questioning Jewish loyalty was one of the most enduring antisemitic tropes throughout the centuries — the belief that Jews are inherently suspect citizens whose true allegiance lies elsewhere. It is the accusation that Jews are never fully “of” the societies they inhabit, but serve a hidden, collective agenda.
As noted by the ADL, early Christian and Islamic texts portrayed Jews as betrayers and wrongdoers, embedding distrust into religious tradition and later political culture. In Europe, Jews were routinely blamed for plagues, wars, and social decay. During the Enlightenment, even as civil rights were debated, Jews were depicted as incapable of genuine patriotism.
The Dreyfus Affair made the trope modern and unmistakable: a Jewish officer falsely accused of treason, not because of evidence, but because his Jewishness made betrayal plausible.
In the 20th century, the accusation metastasized. Jews were blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I, cast as communist subversives, and later persecuted across the Arab world as presumed Zionist agents regardless of their actual views. In Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere, Jews were arrested, fired, surveilled, stripped of citizenship, and even executed on charges of foreign loyalty. Support for Israel, where it emerged, often followed persecution — not ideology.
Crucially, the ADL notes that this suspicion did not stop at authoritarian regimes. It entered Western institutions quietly and respectably. In the United States, Jewish officials were long viewed as conflicted or unreliable on Middle East policy.
As a former State Department official later wrote in The New York Times, during the Jimmy Carter administration there was an “unspoken but unmistakable assumption” inside the Pentagon: if you were Jewish, you could not work on Middle East policy. Jews, it was assumed, could not be objective. Their loyalty was already in doubt.
As someone who has long supported Israel and written extensively about rising antisemitism, I suppose Harris or others might one day suspect I, too, am an Israel double agent. Their intelligence file might note that I have traveled to Israel twice — once in 1970 and again in 2024 — and that I attended an AIPAC conference in either 2017 or 2018. I once volunteered to provide free public-relations counsel to AIPAC, believing the organization does a poor job explaining its mission. They declined my offer.
I’ve also previously disclosed that I’m a fan of Israeli television, including the series Tehran, which centers around a Mossad agent.
Despite what Harris or others might regard as bad optics, I am not — nor have I ever been — a double agent for Israel.