Former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman made history when he agreed to be Vice President Al Gore’s running mate in the 2000 election. This made him the first observant Jew to ever appear on a national ticket. As a Jewish American who had experienced antisemitism, I was inspired by Lieberman’s nomination and hoped one day a Jew might even rise up to be President of the United States. At the time that I write this article, another Democratic vice president is seeking the presidency, and two of Kamala Harris’ six finalists are Jewish: Governors Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and J. B. Pritzker of Illinois
Yet unlike the early ’00s, the early ’20s are a more complex time when it comes to understanding Jewish identity. So even though I hope young Jews today can feel a sense of pride and inspiration at the possible candidacies of Shapiro and Pritzker, much as I was moved by Lieberman’s 2000 campaign, the tragic truth is that matters are much more complicated now.
When Hamas led a massive Palestinian attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, they killed 1,175 Israelis, wounded 3,400 others and took more than 250 as hostages. The attack was the greatest mass loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, with many victims suffering atrocities that will take years to be fully uncovered to the public. In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retaliated with an ongoing military onslaught against Gaza, one the Gazan Health Ministry says has claimed at least 39,000 lives and caused more than 91,000 other casualties. The sheer ferocity of the attack, which many human rights activists have labeled a genocide, can be explained in part by the collective PTSD experienced by Israelis after the horrors inflicted on Oct. 7, in part by a status quo that President Jimmy Carter once described as “apartheid” and in part by Netanyahu’s own political need to appease his far-right base to simultaneously stay in power, skirt corruption charges and divert attention from his own security failures.
This is in stark contrast to Lieberman’s heyday. While Israeli injustices against Arabs were still present in 2000, the liberal prime ministership of Ehud Barak had given rise to realistic hopes of a lasting peace — and perhaps even a two-state solution — between Israel and the Palestinians. By the time of his 2004 campaign, of course, America’s traumatic response to its own massive terrorist event — the Sept. 11 attacks —had caused a great deal of reflexive support for Israel. Similarly, the Arab American and Muslim American communities have greater political clout in the ’20s than they did in the ’00s, helped by their growing population and empowered by social media platforms like TikTok.
All of this creates a paradox for many American Jews, a community that has been overwhelmingly both liberal and Democratic in their politics since the days of President Franklin Roosevelt. They are simultaneously heartbroken by the immensity of the Jewish suffering and the moral discomfort of seeing such a massively disproportionate response inflicted against civilians.
This dichotomy is reflected in the responses of Shapiro and Pritzker themselves. Although Shapiro has criticized Netanyahu, he often sounds like the embattled pol, supporting legislation punishing colleges that boycott or divest from Israel and comparing pro-Palestinian protesters to members of the KKK. While many of the protesters have made antisemitic comments, that does not mean the majority or even a substantial minority of motivated by hate of Jews, as eyewitness accounts often verify. Even worse, Shapiro wrote as a college student at the University of Rochester in 1993 that Palestinians “are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own” and “will grow tired of fighting amongst themselves and will turn outside against Israel.” While Shapiro has apologized for those comments and says he advocates a two-state solution, his vilification of Palestinians in 1993 is uneasily similar to his vilification of pro-Palestinian protesters three decades later.
Pritzker, by contrast, strikes a balance between condemning antisemitism and recognizing both the importance of validating both civil protests and the right to criticize Israeli human rights violations. Unfortunately, as often seems typical in American politics, the more appealing option is also regarded as a long shot, but this does not make Pritzker’s words on the protests any less worthy of quoting.
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“As a Jewish person who lost family in the Holocaust, never again means never again for anyone.”
“I support the Jewish organizations. I’m not about calling for people to step down,” Pritzker told reporters when asked whether the president of Northwestern University should step down for striking a deal with pro-Palestinian protesters. “What I support is the fact that we need to protect not just Jewish students but all students on campuses where there are protests.” Pritzker backed Freedom of Speech and safety for students on all sides, even as he acknowledged that there had been incidents of antisemitism.
“I don’t think that’s the reason that you’re seeing the protests,” Pritzker said. “I think you’ve seen people protest for a variety of reasons. So let me be clear, there are anti-war protesters out there. There are people who are anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, which is different than just being anti-war. And there are some bad actors too. There are people who are you know yelling antisemitic epithets and are, you know, and have forever been bigoted, and we want to make sure that we’re keeping everybody safe.”
If Shapiro’s attitude represents the center-left position on Israel, and Pritzker’s embodies one more compassionate toward the Palestinian point-of-view, then on the other end ideologically are Jewish political leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Technically an independent, Sanders caucuses with the Democrats and in 2016 became the first Jew to ever win a presidential primary. Consistent with his tradition of democratic socialism, Sanders is an outspoken critic of both Netanyahu specifically and Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians more broadly. Salon spoke with RootsAction.org national director Norman Solomon, who was elected as a Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions and urges people in swing states to vote for Harris “as the only way to defeat Trump.”
“I don’t see value in a twist of theology that functions as an ideology elevating the value of some people’s lives over ‘others,” Solomon said. “There are many Jews, especially among the young, who completely reject the apartheid and mass killing that are integral to what the Israeli government is and does. But the mainline Jewish organizations, in step with the U.S. ‘national security’ state and the political establishment, are marching along in tandem with Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza.”
Another American Jewish liberal, comedian and commentator Katie Halper, told Salon that her support for Palestinian rights “comes from a sense of justice and empathy. I don’t know how anyone can see what Israel is doing in Gaza and not speak out against it.” Yet even though Halper would oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza regardless of who the perpetrators are, she is also informed by her understanding of her Jewish identity. “As a Jewish person who lost family in the Holocaust, never again means never again for anyone. I’m also shaped by a Jewish tradition of solidarity and internationalism. I speak out mostly because it’s the right thing to do but it’s also important to debunk the false and antisemitic claim that Israel speaks for all Jews.”
By claiming to speak for all Jews, Halper noted, Israel silences liberal Jewish voices who support the rights of Gazans. “Israel is streaming its war crimes and claiming to act in the name of Jews. When Jews say not in our name we’re not only supporting Palestinian rights but making the world safer for Jews. Israel, not its critics, contributes to antisemitism,” Halper said.
Solomon also saw a conservative strain of thinking in the notion that Jews must support Israel (former President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused Jews who vote Democrat of being “disloyalty”). Yet Solomon connected the movement for Shapiro to a broader right-wing agenda; the erstwhile Sanders delegate speculated that “the push to put Shapiro on the ticket was not just an effort to gain Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. It was also entangled with his political positions such as support for taxpayer funding of private schools, reductions of corporate tax rates, promotion of fracking, and unequivocal U.S. backing for Israel no matter how horrific its crimes against Palestinian civilians.”
When Solomon describes Shapiro’s litany of conservative positions, it reminds me of how Lieberman was similarly criticized for his more right-leaning views on issues like school vouchers and health care reform. I was privileged to befriend Senator Lieberman during the last seven years of his life, and shortly before he died shared the story of how I had auditioned to play him at Bard College — and how, because Lieberman dropped out on the same evening as the try-outs, I switched at the last minute to (and was ultimately cast as) a more liberal senator who I’d later learned was regarded as a lightweight by Lieberman, John Edwards of North Carolina. While at the time I was disappointed by Lieberman’s withdrawal, at the time I did not see it as a permanent setback for the Jewish community. In retrospect I learned that Lieberman did not view it this way either, repeatedly telling me that he was delighted at the total absence of religious bigotry from his vice presidential and presidential campaigns. Yet in his last year, he and I often commiserated about the rise of antisemitism in America, both due to the far right politics of former President Donald Trump and the far left politics stirred up by many of Israel’s critics. Because, like many other Jews, I was traumatized by the events of Oct. 7th, I took great comfort in Lieberman’s willingness to listen to me privately express my own concerns about the rise of Jew-hatred, as well as share his own views (which he best articulated in an editorial decrying antisemitism as being at a “fevered pitch”). When I told him that ideological extremism seems to foreshadow antisemitism, he replied “Yes. Sadly yes.”
Lieberman knew that I was more critical of Israel than himself and support a two-state solution, but I confess that — when he unexpectedly passed away from a fall five months ago — it never occurred to me that I might never have a chance to go in-depth on the subject at a later point. I would have loved to ask for his views on the subject of this article on how American Jewish identity must grapple with reconciling both our ethnic solidarity and our liberal humanitarian belief system. I am likewise curious what he would have said about Shapiro and Pritzker as human beings.
Of this, though, I have no doubt: Right now there are millions of young American Jews who, just like me twenty years ago, are watching this moment in history very closely. What happens next will shape their futures as American Jews, just as Lieberman’s candidacies shaped mine.