Sometimes the country wants a man of faith. This happened when Jimmy Carter, a former Sunday School teacher, was elected following Watergate, and when the born-again George W. Bush’s slim victory looked like a repudiation of Bill Clinton’s sex-scandal-marred presidency. To speak in the register of faith—not a particular sect or even God, but a grounding belief in a higher order—is to reach beyond partisanship, to try to return to basic moral precepts. In calmer times, a leader expounding from such heights risks sounding preachy and self-righteous. But when the country is exhausted, this might be just what people want.
Right now, the country is exhausted. And Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a top contender for president in 2028, has a new memoir in which the word faith appears nearly 100 times.
In Where We Keep the Light, Shapiro is doing what presumptive candidates for the highest office usually do when they write such a book: He is laminating his narrative. Here is the regular guy who loves shooting hoops, who is hopeless with a hammer, who loves a self-deprecating story about walking into a glass wall or almost falling off a ladder, and whose wife, Lori, is always, always right. He is, in short, pretty boring by almost any measure, and his book can lapse into the gobbledygook of clichés that fill such memoirs—Shapiro is able, for example, “to make a choice and then execute it” when “all eyes were watching.” What stands out, however, is the centrality of his religion—or rather, his faith—which is Judaism.
At the moment, Shapiro would seem to have every reason to downplay his Jewishness. When he was one of two top contenders to be Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, this part of his identity was frequently touted as a liability. “He’s Jewish,” CNN’s John King pointed out, so “there could be some risk in putting him on the ticket.” Others put it less nicely. Certain camps on the far left of the Democratic Party branded him as “Genocide Josh” for his support of Israel after October 7—though his views were not much different from those of most of the Democratic establishment. Add to this the rise of an ambient anti-Semitism on both the right and left, along with the unavoidable reality that Jews are a minuscule minority in this country; any candidate who keeps kosher must overcome a certain strangeness factor if he wants to pass that all-important test of being someone to have a beer with.
But rather than downplay his Jewishness in his memoir, Shapiro puts it at the center of the political identity he is prepping for the national stage. He does this, however, in a quirky—and perhaps savvy—way: Shapiro uses the flexibility of Jewish identity to speak about faith without really delving into the particularity of Judaism.
He can do this because Jewishness is not one thing. It can be a cultural identity—like the Seinfeld-and-bagels version. It can be an ethnic or even a national identity (otherwise known as Zionism). And it can be a religious identity, a set of rituals and practices either strictly adhered to or modified over time. For any individual Jew, the mix will vary wildly. The crux of Shapiro’s Jewishness, by his account, is the religion, but he writes that it is “less about the story and the text than about the lesson and the deed.” He does abide by many of those rituals and practices—such as keeping kosher and not missing Shabbat dinner with his family—but these aren’t the elements he emphasizes. The book is heavily weighted instead toward the thing he calls “faith,” with himself as its “steward.” To my ear at least, this sounds more like the way an evangelical Christian might speak of their religion, but for Shapiro, this word becomes a bridge between who he is and the people he is trying to reach.
Faith here means a kind of centeredness, an inner voice, a prayerfulness. He admits that this all might “sound a little vague”—it does—and he struggles to define exactly what faith means to him beyond the fact that it is the most important aspect of his identity and that it allows him to judge right from wrong, to separate the trivial from what actually matters. Defining his beliefs is “kind of like when you get asked to explain how you fall asleep or blink,” he writes. “You just know to do it.” But faith, for all its squishiness, is the force he deploys, again and again, as a way to connect with other Americans. It is, in other words, not just a central part of himself, but also what turns his Judaism from a potential liability into a potential asset.
After the governor’s mansion was firebombed last year, hours after the Shapiro family had held their Passover Seder, an elderly fire-department chaplain named John Wardle handed Shapiro a handwritten prayer. Shapiro choked up immediately: These words of blessing and protection (from Numbers 6:24–26) were the same that he utters in Hebrew over his children every night. “Despite our differences, at our cores, our values are the same,” he concludes. “Our humanity is shared.” When he calls the family of the man who was killed in the assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, he worries at first that fierce Trump supporters, even in grief, won’t want to speak with him. But then: “I told them about my faith and how much strength it has brought to me in my life,” Shapiro writes, “and that while we didn’t share the same faith, I knew theirs would bring them calm.”
Episodes like these coalesce into the central motif of his memoir: faith as an eraser of difference. Whom does he count as his closest adviser on keeping this faith? Well, Lori, of course. But after her, the person he turns to when he has a problem is a Black Baptist pastor named Marshall Mitchell. In an ecumenical text chain, they go “back and forth about a line from the Book of John or a passage from the Book of Joshua.”
The laws of Judaism are traditionally meant to create distance, to distinguish Jews from other people. This is what kashrut or Sabbath observance are about—avoiding certain food or workdays as a way of setting themselves apart. When Joe Lieberman was Al Gore’s vice-presidential candidate, he made a point of emphasizing this difference—everyone near him knew that he was strict about not doing business on Saturday and would bring his tuna sandwiches on the road to make it easier to keep kosher. This was part of the appeal of his candidacy, a return to traditionalism after the Clintonian chaos (Bush’s born-again Christianity promised the same). But Shapiro de-emphasizes the rules of Judaism. He has to because it’s the only way faith can function for him in this story. “For me it is spirituality more than religiousness,” Shapiro writes.
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As he elides the rules of Judaism to focus on the “soul work,” he also makes only passing references to October 7, and he manages to completely avoid mentioning Gaza—as in, not even once. Shapiro has been outspoken in his criticism of the Israeli government (Benjamin Netanyahu, he has said, is “one of the worst leaders of all time”). He has also called out some of the pro-Palestinian protests on campuses, believing they tipped over into being anti-Semitic. Shapiro is a liberal Zionist, which means he has a nuanced position on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians at a moment when, on this topic, few people who care about the issue really want to hear nuance. But when Israel does appear in the book, he doesn’t lay any of this out. Instead, the Jewish homeland is just the place where he first connected with—yes—his faith. “In Israel, it was just everywhere,” he writes. “It was the first time I could feel faith. I could see it and touch it and it wasn’t abstract.”
There is something unique, perhaps even brave, about discussing Israel in this way, as a place perceived not just through a political lens but one that could have so much meaning to a Jewish teenager from suburban Philadelphia (he even proposed to Lori in Jerusalem). And yet the faction in the Democratic Party that called him “Genocide Josh” has not gone away, and neither has the unfair suspicion that he had to confront when he was vetted by Harris’s people and was asked, he writes in the book, whether he had ever been “an agent of the Israeli government.” These voices have only gotten louder, with large parts of the Democratic Party openly opposing the United States’ continued support of Israel. A Jewish candidate such as Shapiro might want to focus on faith, but he has to face up to the reality, fair or not, that he will be asked to explain Israel’s actions more than a Mormon or Catholic candidate would. By avoiding it completely in his campaign memoir, he only confirms just how much he does not want the subject to overtake his candidacy—and concedes, in a way, that it very well could.
What comes across loud and clear, though, is Shapiro’s bet that Americans want someone like him, who can talk earnestly about concepts such as good and evil or what it means to have moral clarity. “Now, more than ever, we yearn for and need a world defined by faith,” he writes in the book’s closing lines. “It’s universal, this belief in others to help us through what feels unsettled, uncivil, un-American. It’s a guidepost, a path through the woods.”
At a time when citizens are on the streets in Minneapolis risking their lives in order to protect their neighbors, this sentiment feels like a resonant one. The motivation for confronting masked, armed agents with whistles and phones is not as much political as it is moral. These people are angry that something has gone awry in the way we treat one another, that we have lost a sense of the common good—an understanding of what is normal and what isn’t. This is the place where Shapiro is firmly planting himself, and whether you find his fulsome profession of faith to be authentic—I do—it might also be a pretty good strategy for winning.
