Shapiro Slams JD Vance Over Holocaust Remembrance Social Media Post: ‘Offered Comfort to Antisemites’

A recent social media post by Vice President JD Vance has drawn scrutiny from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who said Vance’s message commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day did not go far enough in acknowledging the damage inflicted by the Nazis, a failure Shapiro said continues to fuel rising antisemitism in the United States.

Concretely, Shapiro said Vance’s comments “offered comfort” to people on the right who support anti-Jewish rhetoric.

In the post in question, Vance marked the day with a message that read:

“Today we remember the millions of lives lost during the Holocaust, the millions of stories of individual bravery and heroism, and one of the enduring lessons of one of the darkest chapters in human history: that while humans create beautiful things and are full of compassion, we’re also capable of unspeakable brutality,” Vance wrote. The post included photos of him standing beneath Hebrew words translating to “Never Forget” during a visit last year to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where he was given a tour by a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor. “And we promise never again to go down the darkest path.”

Having said he had not seen Vance’s post before the interview, Shapiro said he was not surprised that the vice president did not explicitly mention Jews in the message, citing what he described as Vance’s handling of antisemitism within his party.

“Remember that the reason why we memorialize the Holocaust on this day, really, essentially, is to never forget,” Shapiro said. “And the reason you want to never forget is so that we never live through that atrocity again. Part of never forgetting is making sure that the facts of what happened are recited, are remembered. The fact that JD Vance couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge that 6 million Jews were killed by Hitler and by the Nazis speaks volumes,” he added.

Shapiro went on to recall Vance’s past support for the Alternative for Germany political party, which has drawn criticism for rhetoric with Nazi echoes and has gained support in recent years.

Last year, AfD became the first far-right party to win a state election in Germany since the Nazi era, according to NBC News. In a recent interview, Vance emphasized that he has not endorsed AfD or encouraged Germans to support it.

“Given the way he openly embraces neo-Nazis and neo-Nazi political parties, given the way in which he has offered comfort to antisemites on the right who are infecting the Republican Party,” Shapiro continued, “it’s not a shock to me that he would omit that, but it’s a sad day that the vice president of the United States, on Holocaust Awareness Day, couldn’t address that.”

In response, a spokesperson for Vance called Shapiro’s comments “next-level hypocritical deflection” and a “misguided plea for attention,” arguing that Shapiro also did not explicitly mention violence against Jewish people in his own post on X.

Originally published on Latin Times