With VP choice, Harris making liberal Hollywood Jews feel uncomfortable – report

The thought is that Jewish Gov. Josh Shapiro was nixed to placate antisemites in the Democratic party, says Hollywood editor.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Some liberal Jewish entertainment figures are now feeling that they are not welcome in the Democratic party, after Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate in the upcoming presidential elections while rejecting a prominent Jewish governor widely considered for the position, a senior editor wrote Tuesday.

“Across Hollywood and beyond, liberal Jewish Americans today feel a sense of unease,” wrote Hollywood Reporter senior awards editor Steven Zeitchik in his paper. “I don’t claim to speak for anyone but myself. But my thoughts seem to be echoed among the solidly liberal Jewish American producers, agents and executives I’ve talked to — namely, that even if the pick was the result of electoral calculations, those calculations come with baked-in antisemitic assumptions about the electorate.”

To back up his thesis, he pointed to the fact that “the choice happened after a conscious progressive social-media campaign” labeled the other front-runner, Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as “Genocide Josh” for supporting Israel’s ongoing war against the genocidal Hamas terrorist organization, “and paint[ed] him as some Netanyahu water-carrier when his positions on Israel were standard Democratic two-stateism (and sharply anti-Netanyahu).”

This was antisemitism, he wrote, citing such personalities as Florida Democrat Rep. Jared Moskowitz, who recently said, “Josh’s position on Israel is almost identical to everybody else, but he’s being held to a different standard. So you have to ask yourself why.”

The editor lamented that “liberal American Jews who support the idea of a viable Jewish state regardless of its policies — it’s where half our brothers and sisters live, after all — find ourselves, once again, in an impossible position” as Republicans tell them their traditional party has “abandoned” them, he wrote, while seeing “spikes coming at us from the other direction, in the form of campaigns to target a proud Jewish official and the exuberance” they revealed in trashing him.

“Such reactions draw many liberal Jews back to the weeks after Oct. 7 and the shattering question we asked then – is the ground being pulled out from under us?” he wrote.

Liberal Jews, he concluded, are now “worried we are not welcome in our own home.”

Zeitchik is not the sole media personality thinking along these lines. CNN’s Van Jones wondered, “How much of what just happened is caving in to some of these darker parts of the party,” whom he called “anti-Jewish bigots.”

Top NBC political analyst Chuck Todd went in a slightly different direction, asking if the decision showed that Harris could be pressured by progressive wing of the Democratic party.

This, even though Walz is considered pro-Israel, having voted for aid to Israel during his six terms in Congress and calling the country “our truest and closest ally in the region” at an AIPAC conference in 2010.

Following the Hamas invasion and massacre of 1,200 people in Gazan envelope communities on October 7, he ordered the flags in the state capital to be flown at half-mast in a show of support.

At a synagogue vigil following the attack he said, “If you did not find moral clarity on Saturday morning, and you find yourself waiting to think about what you needed to say, you need to reevaluate where you’re at.”

He has also spoken out against antisemitism and publicly supported Jewish students who feared for their safety during anti-Israel protests that recently took place on dozens of college campuses throughout the country.

American antisemitismDemocratic partyJosh ShapiroLiberal JewsTim Walz