On Saturday night, on the first night of Passover, an armed intruder hopped a gate at the residence of Pennsylvania’s Gov. Josh Shapiro and set fire to the building. It appears he did so because Shapiro is Jewish.
According to call logs provided by Dauphin County authorities, Cody Balmer told a 911 dispatcher less than two hours after he allegedly set the fire that “Shapiro needs to know that he ‘will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,’ and he needs to stop ‘having my friends killed’ and ‘our people have been put through too much by that monster.’”
Shapiro, of course, has no control over Israel’s war in Gaza, and accusing him of culpability for crimes committed by other Jews, halfway around the world, is the definition of antisemitism.
Few would consider this even a controversial statement. But here’s one that might ruffle a few feathers.
Balmer’s particular pro-Palestinian rhetoric didn’t simply appear out of thin air.
Targeting Shapiro because he’s Jewish is disturbingly similar to certain pro-Palestinian activists calling Shapiro “Genocide Josh” last summer and advocating against him as Kamala Harris’ running mate. It’s little different from anti-Zionist activists targeting Jewish-run businesses in the U.S., Jewish American leaders and Jewish institutions because of their views on Israel.
They are two sides of the same coin — manifestations of modern antisemitism.
It is essential to note that there are caveats to this argument. Anti-Zionist activists didn’t burn Shapiro’s house and try to kill him. Degree matters — as do actions. Moreover, Balmer, according to his mother, suffers from profound mental illness and has a lengthy criminal record.
Still, Balmer’s particular pro-Palestinian rhetoric didn’t simply appear out of thin air. His specific criticisms of Shapiro bear striking similarity to accusations made by anti-Zionist activists that the governor is aiding and abetting genocide in Gaza.
Last summer, critics of Shapiro’s bid to be Harris’ running mate argued that he “stands out among the current field of potential running mates as being egregiously bad on Palestine.” A group of progressive activists calling themselves “No Genocide Josh” urged Democrats to pass over Shapiro for the No. 2 nod. A now-defunct website of the group argued that it was in the Democratic Party’s “best interests” that the VP nominee “support the majority of Democrats and Americans who want social and economic justice for workers and an immediate ceasefire in Palestine.”
But Shapiro’s views are practically interchangeable with those of other prominent Democrats, including his rivals to become Harris’ 2024 running mate.
Like the eventual VP pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, or Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Shapiro supports a two-state solution and the creation of a Palestinian state. He has also been far more personally critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he called “one of the worst leaders of all time” and said of him he “has steered Israel in a wrong direction, and made Israel less safe and made their future less bright because of his leadership.” (For Kelly’s part, he attended and applauded Netanyahu’s speech to Congress last year when many other Democrats in attendance wouldn’t, while Walz barely mentioned the prime minister’s name during his time as the Democrats’ VP candidate.) Yet, no one called Walz “Genocide Tim” or Kelly “War Crimes Mark.”
Shapiro has even offered rhetorical support to those protesting Israel’s policies in Gaza, noting “it’s right for young people to righteously protest and question those issues.” Underlying the criticisms of Shapiro is the unstated idea that Jews cannot be objective when it comes to Israel — a charge once explicitly lobbied against Catholic politicians, including John F. Kennedy — or that American Jews are as loyal to Israel as they are to the United States. The suggestion of dual loyalty has haunted Jews for generations, but such scurrilous accusations from self-proclaimed progressives are all the more concerning. The left has long partnered with Diaspora Jews in fighting racial, ethnic and religious discrimination. At a time when the president of the United States regularly traffics in antisemitic tropes — and his first term in office was marked by a significant rise in antisemitic incidents — the support of the left is more essential than ever. (Even with Trump out of office, the number of antisemitic incidents in America continued to rise, even before the war in Gaza began in late 2023.) Criticism of Israel is fair game, but lumping in American Jews with the actions of their co-religionists in Israel is not. To those rightly rushing to condemn Balmer’s alleged crime, the same unequivocal force needs to be directed at those who traffic in the seemingly more benign but just as dangerous antisemitism — even when it comes from their own political camp. Conservatives like to ascribe blame for antisemitism to the anti-Zionist left. Liberals often place blame squarely at the feet of Trump and other far-right groups. The reality is that antisemitism is prevalent in both camps, even if both right and left-wing leaders are loath to point fingers at their political allies. Antisemitism is arguably the oldest and most enduring form of ethnic and religious discrimination. It is civilization’s first major conspiracy theory. Since antisemitism is so prevalent and often misunderstood, there is an even greater danger in singling out Jewish politicians for their views on Israel or Jewish administrators at public universities, or protesting Jewish restaurants, hospitals with Jewish names, or Jewish places of worship, and calling for bans on Jewish religious organizations, like Hillel. Doing so risks turning Jews at large into targets of those aggrieved by the situation in Gaza. Pro-Palestinian activists will argue that such public demonstrations represent a small fringe, but that’s all the more reason to ostracize and exclude those who would turn their attacks on Israel against Jews in America. Jews need and deserve not nitpicking over what is and isn’t antisemitism, but rather full-throated condemnation, even if the hate is emerging from one’s own political camp. Criticism of Israel is fair game, but lumping in American Jews with the actions of their co-religionists in Israel is not. As we saw this week in Pennsylvania, when such ideas enter the public discourse, the impact can be deadly.
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. 
