Downgrade to a Palindrome

J, 24 bytes

(0{::(-:|.)\.#&,<\)~i.@#

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Explanation

(0{::(-:|.)\.#&,<\)~i.@#  Input: array of chars S
                       #  Length of S
                    i.@   Range, [0, 1, ..., len(S)-1]
(                 )~      Dyadic verb on range and S
           \.               For each outfix of S of size x in range
        |.                    Reverse
      -:                      Matches input (is palindrome)
                <\          Box each infix of S of size x in range
             #&,            Flatten each and copy the ones that match
 0{::                       Fetch the result and index 0 and return

Jelly, 16 bytes

Ḣ;Ṫµ=Ṛ
0,0jŒṖÇÞṪ

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How it works

0,0jŒṖÇÞṪ  Main link. Argument: s (string)

0,0j       Join [0, 0], separating by s. This prepends and appends a 0 to s.
    ŒṖ     Build all partitions of the resulting array.
      ÇÞ   Sort the partitions by the helper link.
           As a side effect, this will remove the first and last element of each
           partition. The 0's make sure that not removing any characters from s
           will still remove [0] from both sides.
        Ṫ  Tail; extract the last one.


Ḣ;Ṫµ=Ṛ     Helper link. Argument: A (array/partition)

Ḣ          Head; yield and remove the first chunk of A.
  Ṫ        Tail; yield and remove the last chunk of A.
 ;         Concatenate head and tail.
   µ=Ṛ     Compare the result, character by character, with its reverse.
           A palindrome of length l will yield an array of l 1's, while a
           non-palindrome of length l will yield an array with at least one 0 among
           the first l/2 Booleans. The lexicographically largest result is the one
           with the longest prefix of 1's, which corresponds to the longest
           palindrome among the outfixes.

Wolfram Language (Mathematica), 53 51 bytes

Byte count assumes CP-1252 encoding.

±{a___,Shortest@b___,c___}/;PalindromeQ[a<>c]:={b}

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Defines a unary operator ± (or a function PlusMinus). Input and output are lists of characters. The test suite does the conversion from and to actual strings for convenience.