Josh Shapiro really was accused of being an Israeli spy

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.