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From Alfred Dreyfus to Josh Shapiro: How the ‘dual loyalty’ charge shadows Jewish public life
(JTA) — When Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro wrote in his new memoir that Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential vetting team asked whether he had ever been a “double agent” for Israel, many Jewish leaders heard something painfully familiar.
“These questions were classic antisemitism,” Deborah Lipstadt, the former U.S. special envoy on antisemitism, wrote on X, a view shared by, among others, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League; Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s former leader, and Josh Gottheimer, the Democratic congressman from New Jersey.
These critics agreed that the question put to Shapiro echoed the “dual loyalty” charge: that Jews — especially those with visible ties to Israel — have divided allegiances, loyal first to their people and only conditionally to the countries they serve.
Other Jewish commentators insisted that the questions put to Shapiro by the Harris team were routine, similar to those asked of anyone being vetted for top security clearance. “So please,” Shaul Magid, visiting professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, wrote on Facebook. “Can we just calm down and stop looking like hysterical conspiracy theorists.”
But as the reactions rolled in, so did a quieter, more complicated debate — one that goes to the heart of American Jewish identity. Does the normative American Jewish attachment to Israel — Israeli flags in synagogues, Zionist education in day and Hebrew schools, pride in the young American Jews who serve in the Israeli military — invite accusations of dual loyalty? And if so, should Jews do a better job of explaining how their often fierce attachment to Israel does not compromise their loyalty to America? Should they even have to?
Shapiro, 52, has been open about his connections to Israel, which represent a not unusual arc for a day-school-educated Jew of his generation: a high-school volunteer program affiliated with the IDF, a six-month stint working at the Israeli Embassy in Washington after college, and outspoken views during the Gaza war that combined criticism of Israeli government policy with condemnation of some pro-Palestinian protests.
Those ties, Jewish leaders argue, are well within the American Jewish mainstream — and far from evidence of disloyalty. “No one ever accused Irish Americans of dual loyalty for caring deeply about Ireland,” Foxman wrote. “This reflects something very troubling about our political culture.”
In his memoir, “Where We Keep the Light,” Shapiro wonders whether he was singled out as “the only Jewish guy in the running,” and says he told Harris’ team the questions were offensive. After the New York Times reported the exchange this week, Harris’ team sought to control the damage, telling CNN that every finalist was asked whether they had ever acted as an agent of a foreign government — a standard question on federal vetting forms. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was ultimately chosen, was pressed about his multiple trips to China, where he lived for a year after college, these sources told CNN.
“The crux of vetting is asking uncomfortable and even farfetched questions,” one person close to the process said. “The point isn’t that you believe it — it’s that it’s on the record.”
Jeffrey Salkin, a rabbi and columnist for Religion News Service, rejects that equivalence. Writing about the episode, he contrasted Walz’s questioning about China with Shapiro’s experience. Walz, Salkin argued, was asked about what he did, writes Salkin. Shapiro was asked about who he is.
“For Jews, dual loyalty is the oldest antisemitic charge in the book,” Salkin wrote. “The crime is all within the imagination of the accuser.”
The charge predates the creation of Israel, going as far back as Exodus when the pharaoh warns that the growing number of Israelites in Egypt “may join our enemies in fighting against us.”
The charge was revived in the modern era, when Jews were gradually granted full citizenship in exchange for renouncing their ties to a Jewish national identity. In 1789, speaking on behalf of Jewish emancipation in the French National Assembly, the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre proclaimed famously that “Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals,” warning: “The existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country.”
The promises of emancipation were nearly revoked in 19th-century France, when Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason amid mass cries of “Death to the Jews.” Later, Hitler rose to power behind the myth that Germany could have won the First World War if it had not been “stabbed in the back” by disloyal Jews and communists.
“You don’t need Israel to have the dual loyalty charge,” Pamela Nadell, the American University historian and author of “Antisemitism, an American Tradition,” said in an interview. “Think about the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and the idea that Jews are more loyal to their people than to any state, that they are a kind of fifth column.”
In that light, Nadell said, asking a Jewish governor who has sworn an oath to the U.S. Constitution and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania whether he had ever been an Israeli “double agent” suggested the vetter is either “utterly clueless” or something worse.
“It suggests the interviewer either didn’t understand the weight of what she was saying — or actually believes the dual loyalty charge,” said Nadell.
And yet despite the deep roots of the charge, Zionism and Israel have added new fuel to an old accusation. In the years before Israel’s founding, American Jewish leaders fiercely debated Zionism and whether a Jewish state in Palestine “would imperil our position here,” as the Reform movement’s Pittsburgh Platform put it in 1885.
Thirty years later, Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice and Zionist leader, sought to quash such doubts by asserting, “Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent.… Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.”
That proposition was deeply tested in the 1980s, when Jonathan Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst, received a life sentence for passing classified information to Israel. Richard Cohen, then a columnist for the Washington Post, called the Pollard case a “nightmare-come-true for American Jews. In Pollard, the Israelis created an anti-Semitic stereotype — an American Jew of confused loyalties who sold out his country.”
In his 1996 book “Jewish Power,” J.J. Goldberg cites sources saying that the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged a life sentence for Pollard — the first for an American convicted of espionage — as a warning to the thousands of American Jews working in the federal government.
But despite a vocal “Free Pollard” movement that preceded his release in 2015, most Jews see Pollard as an outlier, and recoil at the idea that ordinary expressions of Jewish peoplehood invite suspicion.
That idea has gained renewed urgency in the post-Oct. 7 climate. A June 2024 ADL study found that 51% of Americans agree with the statement that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their home countries. College students report being accused of caring more about Israel than the United States simply for identifying as Zionists.
In a fact sheet on the dual loyalty charge, the ADL acknowledges that many Jews have an emotional attachment to Israel, citing a 2013 Pew study showing that 87% of American Jews said that caring about Israel is either “essential” or “important” to “what being Jewish means to them.”
“But the observation that Israel is important to many American Jews becomes anti-Semitic when it is used to impugn Jewish loyalty or trustworthiness,” according to the ADL.
Magid has written how Jews sometimes leave themselves vulnerable to the dual loyalty charge, either by claiming that Israel is their true “home” — perhaps a religious assertion that can be heard as a statement of allegiances — or when American Jewish families signal that they’d rather their children serve in the IDF than the U.S. military. “If Jews reflexively claim that the accusation of ‘dual loyalty’ is anti-Semitic, we too easily ignore that it was, and remains, one of the great challenges of Jews in modernity,” writes Magid.
For Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz, the senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California, the answer is not to deny dual loyalty — but to redefine it. In his recent book, “The Case for Dual Loyalty: Healing the Divided Soul of American Jews,” Lebowitz argues for embracing Jewish peoplehood alongside American patriotism, calling it a “double helix” binding Jews in Israel and the diaspora. Once Jews accept the notion that they are part of a global people, he writes, there is no contradiction in being loyal to what both America and Israel represent.
“The State of Israel stands as the strongest symbol of Jewish Peoplehood,” Lebowitz wrote in an email exchange. “While the presence of the flag of Israel in our congregation and schools represents the ideal that we are connected to our Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel, the flag also represents the bond that we share with our brothers and sisters in places such as Australia’s Bondi Beach. All American Jews should maintain a loyalty to our country, the United States, and loyalty to our people across the world.”
The historian Gil Troy, who was raised in Queens and now lives in Israel, also insists that loyalty to America and the Jewish people is not contradictory — and that Jews face suspicions not placed on other groups.
“The accusation says much more about the accuser than the accused,” Troy said in an interview. “Which is the oldest story in the book with antisemitism.”
Troy, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, recalls growing up with the hypothetical question, “If the U.S. and Israel were to go to war, which side would you be on?” His answer, then and now, is “it’s inconceivable.”
“Again and again, although I had to ultimately choose an address, my liberalism, my Americanism, my Zionism, have converged much more than they’ve clashed, and if anything, one has reinforced the other,” said Troy, who moved to Israel in 2010.
Troy’s assertion is similar to that of Ruth Wisse, the Yiddishist and conservative thinker, who in a video last year for the Tikvah think tank said she “never could understand this concept of dual loyalty.”
“It becomes a conflict when the two countries … that you stand for are in conflict,” she said. “But in the case of Israel and America, which share the same basic values, and in fact, stem from very much the same traditions, it’s really a doubled loyalty. The people who feel most loyal to America should be those who feel most protective of Israel, which is the greatest ally that America has, certainly in the Middle East, and possibly … the entire world.”
For now, anyway. For many Jews, cracks are showing in that vaunted relationship, whether it is liberal Jews who warn that Israel is drifting toward the illiberal, undemocratic right, or conservative Jews warning that the Democratic party is being coopted by an increasingly anti-Israel left. (Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of the conservative Jewish News Syndicate, suggested that Shapiro may have told the vetting story in order to distance himself from Israel’s critics and “to save the soul of a party that has been badly compromised by Jew-hatred since Oct. 7.”)
Both sides have looked on anxiously as President Donald Trump has threatened or shredded alliances with other allies around the world.
Whether the questions put to Shapiro were normal vetting, clumsy phrasing or something darker, the reaction to them reveals how fragile the boundary remains between Jewish peoplehood and American belonging. More than 200 years after emancipation promised Jews full acceptance as individuals, the old suspicion still flickers — ready to be rekindled whenever Jewish identity and power become visible at the same time.
The post From Alfred Dreyfus to Josh Shapiro: How the ‘dual loyalty’ charge shadows Jewish public life appeared first on The Forward.
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How a young woman smuggled weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto
This is a revised version of the original article in Yiddish which you can read here.
On Both Sides of the Wall
Vladka Meed and Steven D. Meed
Citadel Press, 448 pages, $29.00.
“But surely by this morning we will learn something.” It was a sentiment that was going around the Warsaw Ghetto, overheard among the groups of Jews huddled on street corners. On occasion someone would muster up some hopeful words: “Jews, have no fear! You will all see. With God’s help, once more we shall survive the evil decree!” It was July 22, 1942: the first day of the Great Deportation. Any optimism was unfounded: On that day, the Germans led roughly 250,000 Jews to the death camps.
Thus begins the opening scene of On Both Sides of the Wall, Vladka Meed’s memoir of her life in Warsaw during World War II. Her story originally appeared in installments in the Forward shortly after her arrival in America, in 1946, under her real name, Feygele Peytel Miedzyrecki. A book-length edition was published by the educational committee of the Workers Circle in 1948.
In 1977, an English translation came out, with an introduction by Elie Wiesel. Now Meed’s memoir is available in an expanded edition, complete with an introduction from the historian Samuel Kassow and a foreword by the translator, Steven (Shloyme) Meed, Vladka’s son.
Vladka Meed takes the reader into the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto, with its charged atmosphere of hope, terror and despair. She summons the cacophony of those last ten, tragic months of the Ghetto; we hear the voices of Jews, Germans and their Ukrainian accomplices.
Fortunately, Vladka managed to avoid the daily aktsyes (deportation campaigns) when the mundir forces (“Jewish police,” in the ghetto vernacular) would capture Jews for deportation. Vladka soon found herself alone: “My mother, brother, and sister have all been taken from me to some unimaginable fate,” she writes. Vladka was lucky to find a job in one of the workshops that served the Germans.
Following the second selektsye (separation of fit and unfit Jewish laborers) in September 1942, the Jews that remained in the ghetto began preparing for an uprising. Vladka remembers their calls: “If we are to die, anyway, let us die with dignity!” “The enemy must pay a heavy price for our lives!”
As a young girl, Vladka was active in the Jewish Labor Bund, an affiliation that helped keep her alive during the Holocaust. She spoke Polish well without a trace of a Yiddish accent, and had “good Aryan looks.” The leadership of the ghetto’s Bundist underground suggested that she become a courier between the ghetto and the Aryan side. That’s how the young Jewish girl, Feygele Peltel, was transformed into a Polish woman by the name of Wladislawa Kowalska, or simply — Vladka.
Step by step, she integrated into “normal life” among Christian Poles. At first she had high hopes. “I had expected to encounter a strong interest among our Polish neighbors about life within the ghetto,” she writes. But she soon realized that her neighbors preferred very much not to know what was happening on the other side of the ghetto wall.
Vladka and her comrades on the Aryan side were charged with obtaining weapons for the ghetto. But their relations with members of the Polish underground army were poor, and little came of their interactions: “As we travel about the city, trying and failing to get arms…we beg them: ‘Help us to obtain weapons. We are willing to pay well for them!’”
Most of their requests fell on deaf ears. Often they’d hand over payment and receive nothing in return — or worse, their Polish contacts would betray them to the Germans. Even when the Jewish ghetto fighters managed to get their hands on a revolver, another challenge remained: smuggling it into the ghetto.
The book is a gripping read. Vladka Meed is a skillful narrator, and she gives a detailed accounting of her dangerous missions. Any day could have been her last: she never knew if she’d live to see the evening. Vladka had many more failures than successes, and in many cases she was saved by a fateful coincidence.
Kassow’s introduction describes the greater historical context of that period, while Steven Meed provides personal details about his mother’s life before the Holocaust, based on her interviews in the American press.
In his translation, Meed includes bracketed phrases that provide brief, helpful contextual notes. He has also chosen to preserve Yiddish words from the so-called “ghetto language”, like aktsye (action), mundirn (police forces), and blokade (blockade). The choice to keep such vocabulary gives the text an authentic feel, even as Meed’s strategy occasionally raises questions. Why, for example, did he ‘translate’ the word kristin (Christian woman) in the Yiddish as “shikse” (an often pejorative term for a gentile girl) in the English? In general, his translations in the book occasionally veer far from the original.
In the United States, Vladka Meed dedicated her life to Holocaust education. This newest edition of her book carries this mission forward, and constitutes a significant addition to the ever-growing library of documents and research on the Warsaw Ghetto.
Unfortunately, the history of Jewish resistance to German occupation still hasn’t been properly integrated into American Holocaust education, even in Jewish day schools. At the University of Michigan, when I discuss the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with students in my course on the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe, I often get this response: “Why didn’t anyone tell us about this in our Holocaust education classes? It’s so important!”
To this day we often view the history of the Holocaust with a focus on mass murder. Vladka Meed’s book, writes Kassow, “demonstrates [that] this battle to stay alive, against all odds, refuted the oft-made claim that Jews went passively to their deaths.”
The post How a young woman smuggled weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto appeared first on The Forward.
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US Senate Vote to Block Arms Sales to Israel Fails — but Raises Questions About Future Democratic Support
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the media following a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, US, July 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
A failed Senate vote to block US arms sales to Israel has further exposed a deepening divide within the Democratic Party, one increasingly defined by younger voters and liberals whose views on Israel are shifting rapidly.
The Senate on Wednesday rejected two resolutions led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have halted roughly $450 million in weapons transfers to Israel, including bombs and bulldozers. The measures failed, ensuring the sales will move forward. But the margin, and who supported the effort, marked a significant political inflection point.
Of the 47 Senate Democrats, 40 voted in favor of blocking sales of bulldozers and 36 voted in favor of blocking transfers of so-called “dumb” bombs. The failed vote represents the largest show of opposition to military aid for Israel within the party in recent memory. While previous efforts spearheaded by Sanders drew support from a smaller bloc, this vote saw roughly 80 percent of Senate Democrats vote against transferring aid to the Jewish state, signaling a seismic shift in the dynamic between the Democratic Party and Israel.
Further, many traditionally stalwart supporters of Israel, such as Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Cory Booker (NJ), voted in favor of Sanders’s resolution, signaling that anti-Israel sentiment has migrated from the far-left fringes of the party into the mainstream.
That change is closely tied to evolving public opinion, especially among younger Americans.
Recent polling, including newly released data from the Yale Youth Poll, shows that younger voters are far more critical of Israel than older generations. Large shares of voters under 30 now support restricting or even ending US military aid, a position that departs sharply from the long-standing bipartisan consensus in Washington. Polls show that a supermajority of Democrats believe that Israel has committed a so-called “genocide” in Gaza, an assertion which lacks little evidence and has been boosted by foreign entities tied to Iran.
Data also suggests that increased social media consumption aligns with more skeptical attitudes toward foreign policy regarding Israel. Those who receive their news from social media, especially youth-centric platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, are far more likely to exhibit anti-Israel animus than those who consume traditional broadcast news media.
The Senate vote reflects the increasing pressure of Democratic lawmakers to stake an aggressive stance against Israel. Several lawmakers who backed the resolutions argued that continued arms transfers should be reconsidered amid the expanding regional conflict involving Iran and mounting humanitarian concerns. They argued that the Trump White House has not sought out appropriate congressional approval for the ongoing war in Iran. Many also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct, suggesting that he has escalated hostilities in the region rather than acted in self-defense from existential threats. These same voices expressed dismay at civilian casualties in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza.
The lawmakers largely framed their votes not as opposition to Israel’s existence, but as a challenge to current policies and the use of US-supplied weapons.
Opponents, including most Republicans, maintained that US military support remains essential to Israel’s security, particularly as tensions with Iran escalate. They warned that blocking arms sales could weaken a key ally in a volatile region.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), an organization dedicated to increasing support for the GOP among Jews, framed the vote as reflective of a broader anti-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party.
“There is only ONE pro-Israel party, and it is the Republican Party,” RJC wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the group J Street, endorsed the vote as an “encouraging” sign of progress.
“It’s encouraging to see a growing number of senators recognize that unconditional US military support for Israel is no longer tenable in light of the Netanyahu government’s policies. The work now is to translate that shift into action: alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, stopping violence on the West Bank and pursuing paths to end the ongoing fighting across the region,” Ben-Ami wrote.
A self-proclaimed “pro-peace, pro-Israel” lobbying organization, J Street has come under fire for allegedly not doing enough to combat antisemitism or anti-Israel narratives within liberal political circles.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), one of the most strident defenders of Israel in Congress, criticized his party’s turn against Israel, saying in a new CNN interview that they have “boxed themselves in” by supporting Sanders’s resolution. He dismissed the notion that Democrats would become more likely to support Israel with a change in Israeli leadership.
“When Netanyahu goes, and you’re now on record with this, you’re going to revert back and say that now that he’s gone, I can now start sending offensive weapons?” Moskowitz pondered.
Despite the failure of the resolutions, the size of the Democratic vote in favor underscores how quickly the political landscape is changing ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
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Duke University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Over Antisemitic Political Cartoon
Aerial view of Duke University on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Duke University has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter and impounded its money for posting an antisemitic political cartoon on social media, The Duke Chronicle reported on Tuesday.
According to the student paper, the illustration depicts a pig labeled “Zionism” hoisting a Star of David as its arm interlocks with another pig, labeled “US Imperialism,” hoisting the Torch of Liberty. The image was created in 1970 by political cartoonist Emory Douglas, a Black Panther party official who harbored hostility toward the US and Israel.
The Chronicle said the image elicited no fewer than 10 formal complaints from Jewish students for showing a blatant antisemitic trope. Historically, depicting Jews as pigs has been done to reduce them to the status of animals and mock the fact that dietary restrictions forbid Jews to eat pork. The Nazis notoriously did so, but the practice reaches back further into history, when medieval Germans proliferated the Judensau drawings which portrayed Jews drinking pig’s milk and excrement.
In a statement to the Chronicle, SJP denied that it intended to endorse the cartoon’s antisemitic messaging, saying it “was never intended to be antisemitic” and that anti-Zionist activism is “not the same as targeting Jewish people.”
This was not the first time that the anti-Zionist group posted antisemitic imagery. In 2024, the Harvard chapter of its faculty spinoff, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJSP), posted a political cartoon of a Jew lynching an African American and an Arab. In the illustration, a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David and containing a dollar sign at its center dangles a Black man and an Arab man from a noose. In its posterior, an arm belonging to an unknown person of color wields a machete that says, “Liberation Movement.”
Such activity is an integral part of the playbook of anti-Zionist and antisemitic messaging on social media, scholars have found.
From 2013 to 2024, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University studied over 76,000 posts created by Students for Justice in Palestine and its affiliates, finding that over half, 54.9 percent, included only a single, evocative image.
“In contrast, Reels (5.3%) and Videos (4.9%) are used far less frequently,” the institute said in a report based on its research. “Based on these descriptions, we see a strong preference among campus-based anti-Israel groups for static visual formats, suggesting that this type of bimodal content represents the highest form of shareability within activists networks.”
To boost their audience and reach, pro-Hamas groups also post together in what ISCA described as “co-authored posts,” of which there were over 20,000 between 2013 and 2024. Their content set off strong emotions in the individual users exposed to them, inciting incidents of antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and violence. Such outrages, it added, increased in proportion to the concentration of anti-Israel groups on a single campus, evidence of “particularly strong” correlation.
ISCAP’s conclusions can be found in the real world, as SJP and its network of student groups have helped fuel a historic wave of antisemitic incidents on college campuses over the past two and a half years — from spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew” to gang assaulting Jews at Columbia University’s Butler Library.
SJP has also expressed its hope of inciting insurrection in the US and amassing a jihadist army.
In 2024, the national SJP organization proclaimed on X that the anti-Zionist student movement is a weapon for destroying the US, saying that “divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal” but enacted with the later goal of initiating “the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself.” On the same day the group issued the statement, Columbia University’s most strident SJP spinoff, created after SJP was suspended, was reported to have distributed literature which called for “popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to a previous event. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.