James Kirchick is the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s revelation that a member of Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign vetting team asked him if he had “ever been an agent of the Israeli government” marks yet another sad chapter in the Democratic Party’s ongoing betrayal of American Jews.
The most charitable explanation for this implication of dual loyalty, one of the oldest of antisemitic defamations, is incompetence. Since Shapiro’s emergence as a national political figure, many progressives have alleged that he “served” in the Israel Defense Forces. This butchers the truth, which is that Shapiro participated in a high school service program that included working on a kibbutz and volunteering at an Israeli military base. Perhaps Dana Remus, a former official for the Obama and Biden administrations who challenged Shapiro’s American bona fides, and her boss, former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., just had bad information.
Assuming that Remus and Holder are both familiar with Google, however, it’s fair to suspect that the real reason the Harris campaign was concerned about Shapiro was that he’s a vocally pro-Israel Jew. What a long way we have come from the 2000 presidential election, when vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman was widely regarded as a strong asset to the Democratic ticket led by Al Gore.
Even if Shapiro had served in the IDF, the left’s fixation on him represents a glaring double standard. For the entirety of their country’s existence, Americans have joined foreign armies not as mercenaries but as idealists. Many of them are remembered for making the ultimate sacrifice in furtherance of a just cause. What sets off progressives isn’t the principle of serving in a foreign army, but serving in the army of the Jewish state.
During the Spanish Civil War, some 3,200 Americans, most of them communists, joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. A component of the International Brigades organized by the Communist International, the Lincoln Brigade fought in defense of the democratically elected, left-wing government of Spain against the fascist forces of dictator Francisco Franco. Upon their return to the United States after Franco’s victory, Lincoln Brigade veterans were harassed by the FBI and subjected to McCarthyite smears. In 1953, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. added the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to a list of subversive organizations, a designation that remained until 1971. (As it happened, nearly 50 percent of the Brigade’s members were Jewish).
No less a conservative icon than President Ronald Reagan praised the Lincoln Brigade in 1984, favorably comparing them to American volunteers fighting the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. There was “a long, honorable tradition” of Americans joining fights for freedom overseas, he said. (Reagan somewhat undermined his point when he added that most Americans believed the Lincoln Brigade veterans had fought “on the wrong side.”) In a 2016 New York Times op-ed titled, “Salute to a Communist,” Sen. John McCain wrote movingly about the death of Delmer Berg, the Brigade’s last known living survivor. “He sustained wounds,” McCain wrote. “He watched friends die. He knew he had ransomed his life to a lost cause, for a people who were strangers to him, but to whom he felt an obligation, and he did not quit on them.”
Many if not most of those on the left assailing Shapiro for his tenuous link to the IDF presumably have a different opinion of those Americans who joined the Lincoln Brigade, as well as the brave young Americans who violated the 1930s Neutrality Acts by serving in the Royal Air Force before America joined World War II. Their sympathy also probably extends to Americans serving in the Ukrainian army now.
If progressives were more self-aware, they would hesitate before suggesting that Jewish Americans with connections to Israel, a key democratic U.S. ally, are somehow disloyal. After all, there is also a long, dishonorable tradition of progressives explicitly rooting for America’s enemies abroad. Large segments of the 1960s peace movement didn’t just oppose American intervention in Vietnam but wanted the Vietcong to win. As the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders schlepped 14 hours to Managua, Nicaragua, to deliver a speech in support of the Sandinistas. Last summer, Georgetown University suspended Jonathan A.C. Brown as its Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization after he posted a message on Twitter encouraging Iranian airstrikes against U.S. military personnel. Last week, Brown reposted an online post claiming Shapiro “lied [about] serving in the IDF … Josh Shapiro may be offended by the questions but they aren’t going away.”
The appropriateness of Americans joining foreign military forces, then, boils down to one’s worldview. For those who consider Israel an ally, Americans who serve in its army are on the same admirable continuum as those who followed their consciences and fought in defense of the Spanish Republic and against Nazism. For those such as Holder and Remus — who work at a law firm that recently as 2023 represented the Qatari government, which has long harbored Hamas leadership —a connection to Israel that many Americans share constitutes a potential counterintelligence threat. By casting aspersions on one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal and generous constituencies, progressives have shown what side they’re on.
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