Kamala Harris’s decision to tap as her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is a telling sign of the religious and quasi-religious tests at work in today’s Democratic Party.  Shapiro arguably might have tipped swing-state Pennsylvania into Kamala’s column but at the cost of maybe alienating pro-Palestinian voters in swing-state Michigan.  Shapiro’s Zionism and support for Israel seemed a bridge too far: “What does it profit a candidate to gain Pennsylvania and lose Wayne County (and, thereby, Michigan)?”

Personally, I’m not upset.  When Americans see just how extremist Tim Walz is, especially in his support of genital mutilation of minors, I think his shelf life will be extremely short.  But I cannot avoid looking at the bigger picture: Jewish Democrats seem to be in a similar predicament to the one Catholic Democrats faced 50-some years ago.

After initially coyly dancing around Roe, Democrats under Jimmy Carter – and since – came more and more to embrace abortion on demand.  They went from “see no evil/do no good/say nothing” (Pete Rodino, when his chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee would have mattered) to “personally opposed” (Mario Cuomo) to “sacred territory” (Nancy Pelosi).

The Carter Administration’s push for abortion was so significant that, by the early 1980s, it was a litmus test to advance in national Democratic politics.  When Walter Mondale, another Minnesota radical (“moderate” by the Left’s standards today), practiced his form of identity politics by insisting in 1984 on a female vice president, there were said to have been two candidates: Louisiana’s Lindy Boggs and New York’s Gerry Ferraro.

Boggs, who came to Congress after the death of her husband Hale (a Catholic who was the Democratic House Majority Leader), was persona non grata to Democratic movers and shakers because she not only voted against abortion but even co-sponsored a Human Life Amendment.  Ferraro, on the other hand, was a New York “Roman Cuomo,” that is, personally opposed but politically committed to promoting abortion.  Happily, in 1984 with peace and prosperity in Ronald Reagan’s America and doctrinal clarity in Cardinal John O’Connor’s New York Archdiocese, Ferraro was on the losing end of the second-biggest Electoral College blowout in American history.

That didn’t give the national Democratic Party pause – making it question whether its “diversity that looks just like America” might include pro-life Democrats.  No, faithful Catholics were increasingly marginalized in the party, while pseudo-philosophers and theologians like Mario Cuomo et al. generated rationalizations for why one should be a good Democrat but a bad Catholic.

The process was complete by 2010, when Bart Stupak traded pro-life votes for paper commitments on Obamacare, and was sealed in 2020 when Democrats primaried one of their own incumbents, Dan Lipinski, out of Congress for being pro-life.

Josh Shapiro now represents something similar.  Even pro-Harris partisans admit it (here).

Shapiro was likely deemed a liability because of his Zionism.  Now, Zionism is hardly a religious or moral teaching like, say, protection of the innocent’s right to life.  That said, the “land” occupies no small part in Judaism’s consciousness.  It is prominent in the Old Testament’s covenant with Israel.  Exodus was not just an escape from Egypt; it was a journey to the Promised Land.

The loss of that Land during the Exile was a profound shock.  And while modern Zionism cannot be directly associated with the Old Testament nor today’s State of Israel with Old Testament Israel, there are affinities.

For many modern Jews, it has been said that Zionism has in some ways acquired a quasi-religious status.  To claim, then, that Palestinians have some “right” to this land, but that Jews do not, despite their much older and historically documentable claims – because they are based on a religious text – is selective revisionism, a “naked public square” in international relations.

Yet this is precisely what Josh Shapiro was told.

Just as the Party once told Catholics in the United States that they needed to decide if they were Catholics or Democrats, it is now telling American Jews to decide: are you Jews or Democrats?  Are you Zionists or “progressives?”

In 2000, the Democratic Party nominated a Jew, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, as its vice-presidential candidate.  Lieberman was a committed Zionist. Lieberman died on March 27, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu eulogized him during his recent Washington visit.

Could Lieberman be nominated in today’s Democratic Party?  Or would he be silently passed over, his “memory [not] to be a blessing?”  Is he a proud historical box once checked that could not happen now?

Once again, the Democratic Party seems to be demanding that religious or quasi-religious aspects of a person’s identity be erased in the name of expected partisan benefits.  Unfortunately, too many Catholic Democrats have decided to trade their birthright for an organic, climate-friendly mess of lentil pottage.

The result is that practicing Catholics who are unwilling to be part of a naked public square have no place in the Democratic Party but also suffer by being taken for granted by Republicans.  (“To whom shall [they] go?” – John 6:68, revised).

The question for Jews now is: Quo vadis?  Will you take the Catholic path and eliminate fellow believers from setting party policy?  Will you stay and fight, insisting no low-grade religious establishment tests guide party policymaking and nominee picking?  Will you stay united around Israel, at least as it now exists?

Or will you fracture into sects: the Orthodox and its variants politically marginalized or, like practicing Catholics, largely Republican; the Reformed giving free rein to their political preferences; and the Conservatives playing a balancing act between being “personally opposed” but maybe politically committed?

In several ways, this is a watershed moment: a presidential nominee who won no primaries tapping a running mate in a process arguably tainted at least to some degree by antisemitism.  We’re very likely to see this tension surface – and not in ways that are “mostly peaceful” – at this week’s Democratic National Convention.  Its cultural and political implications will likely echo far beyond the 2024 election.