Liberalism can no longer protect the Jews.

A sociopolitical stream that once promised safety and belonging now struggles to distinguish between Jewish power and Jewish vulnerability.

photo: Salvatore Favata/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Rabbi Steven Abraham, the rabbi at Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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There’s a debate in the Talmud, in Sanhedrin 97a, about whether redemption needs a catalyst, or whether it just arrives on its own when the world has finally exhausted its appetite for a particular kind of suffering.

I’ve been turning this passage over in my mind in recent weeks, when California Governor Gavin Newsom sat down with the hosts of a top podcast in the U.S. and described Israel as “sort of an apartheid state.” He said it breaks his heart. He said the current Israeli leadership is walking us toward a place where reconsidering military aid is no longer optional. And he said he would never take a dollar from AIPAC.

(Several days later, Newsom apologized, but by then, the damage was already done.)

The leading figure of American liberalism cut the cord between the Democratic Party and the State of Israel. Not in a leaked memo. Not off the record. On a podcast stage, promoting his memoir, with the cameras on and the Gallup poll numbers fresh in everyone’s pocket — numbers showing, for the first time in 25 years, that more Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis.

Newsom is a lot of things, but reckless isn’t one of them. He is, as journalist Harold Meyerson put it, the Democratic Party’s “ranking political weather vane” — a man whose convictions tend to arrive just after the polling does. Less than two months before the podcast appearance, Newsom sat across from media personality Ben Shapiro and called himself “crystal clear on my love for Israel.”

In October, he told another interviewer he wouldn’t support cutting military aid. What changed between then and now wasn’t the situation in Gaza. It wasn’t anything Netanyahu did. What changed was the numbers: 65 percent of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians, only 17 percent side with Israel. Even among Democrats over 50 years old — the donors, the synagogue presidents, the people who remember 1967 — 66 percent now hold an unfavorable view of Israel. The ground moved, and Newsom moved with it. That’s not moral leadership; it’s market research.

So the question American Jews have to face is not whether Newsom is right about Netanyahu, or whether the word “apartheid” is the right word. The question is older and harder: Can liberalism still protect the Jews?

For those of us raised in the moral language of liberal democracy — civil rights, pluralism, the protection of minorities — it’s a painful question. But Jewish tradition has never flinched from uncomfortable clarity.

For more than a century, Jews in the West made a profound bet: that liberal societies would be safer for Jewish life than anything that came before. The Enlightenment offered Jews what medieval Europe never did: citizenship, equality under the law, protection as a minority. In America and other parts of the West, this felt almost miraculous. Jews could build institutions, enter professions, participate fully in public life. The historian Deborah Lipstadt once called it a kind of civic covenant: Jews supported liberal institutions because liberal institutions protected Jews.

This is the question that haunted Theodor Herzl during the Dreyfus affair from 1894 until 1906.¹ It is the question that drove Zeev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement, to tell the Jews of Warsaw to get out while they still could. And it is the question that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, marching with Black Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, believed he had answered — that a liberalism big enough to fight for Black freedom would naturally shelter Jewish life too. That the prophetic tradition and the American experiment weren’t just compatible. They needed each other.

Heschel’s bet was beautiful. And for decades, the civic covenant held. American Jews built their entire communal architecture on it. They voted Democratic at rates that baffled political scientists. They championed civil rights, immigration, the separation of church and state — not in spite of their Jewishness but because of it. To be a liberal and a Zionist took no effort. The Democratic Party held both ideas without strain.

That arrangement is coming apart, and Newsom’s remarks aren’t the cause. They’re the capstone. The cause is two and a half years of an existential war for Israel and a global conversation that has steadily erased the line between criticizing Israeli policy and rejecting Jewish self-determination altogether. “Apartheid” used to live on protest signs and in academic journals. Now it lives in the mouth of the man who will very likely ask American Jews for their presidential votes in 2028.

Part of what’s driving this is the way progressive politics now sorts the world into a ladder of power and victimhood. In that framework, Jews land in an impossible spot. For centuries in Europe, Jews were the textbook powerless minority. But on the simplified moral map of contemporary activism, Jews get filed under “privileged” — because of Israel’s military, because of the U.S. alliance, because Jewish communities in the West are visibly successful. That move turns the Jew from a vulnerable minority into a stand-in for power. And once you become a symbol of power, empathy dries up fast.

This isn’t entirely new. It echoes a pattern as old as the diaspora itself; Jews get repositioned in the moral imagination of their society. Outsider, then insider, then scapegoat. The vocabulary updates, the dynamic stays the same.

I want to take Newsom at his word that this breaks his heart. But I’ll be honest: It’s hard. His relationship with the Jewish community in San Francisco is real. His visit to Israel after October 7th was real. Twenty years of relationships with Jewish donors and leaders — that’s real.

But the setting for this heartbreak was a book tour. The audience was the progressive podcast world that will shape the 2028 primary. The word “apartheid” wasn’t forced out of him. He reached for it, pinned it on a Thomas Friedman New York Times column for cover, and let it hang in the air. A man whose heart is genuinely breaking doesn’t choose to break it on the stage where the breaking does him the most political good. What Newsom signaled, with his usual precision, is that the Democratic Party is settling its argument about Israel, and it’s settling it in one direction. The Jewish community is being told, politely but clearly, to lower its expectations.

The Jewish response has been predictable, and in its own way, not enough. Rabbi Reuven Taff warned in the Jewish Journal that calling Israel an apartheid state “is not neutral commentary — it’s a weapon that isolates Israel and encourages attacks on Jews.” Senator John Fetterman, not Jewish but incredibly pro-Israel, called it fringe. Newsom’s staff rushed to set up a private Zoom with Jewish community leaders.

But reassurance is what you offer after a decision has already been made. That Zoom wasn’t a walk-back; it was pastoral care for the losing side. And what was completely absent from Newsom’s remarks — the original comments, the cleanup, all of it — was any acknowledgment that apartheid language carries real consequences for Jewish communities beyond the policy debate about aid.

He didn’t mention rising antisemitism on campuses. He didn’t address how easily “apartheid state” becomes license to boycott Jewish organizations or harass Jewish students. And when he said that Netanyahu’s influence over American strikes on Iran was “pretty damn self-evident,” he wandered (whether he meant to or not) into the neighborhood of one of the oldest and most dangerous ideas about Jewish power. A serious leader grappling with a genuinely painful shift would have flagged those risks. Newsom didn’t. He moved on to the next question.

Here’s where I sit with this, as a rabbi, as someone shaped by the prophetic tradition. I can’t pretend that every single thing Israel has done in Gaza and the West Bank lines up with the ethical demands of Jewish teaching. The prophets didn’t hand out exemptions for strategic necessity. Amos didn’t footnote his indictments with intelligence briefings. When Heschel said “in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible,” he wasn’t only talking about Selma, Alabama. He was naming a principle that cuts in every direction, including toward Jerusalem.

But Heschel never thought Jewish ethics meant Jews had to be vulnerable. The prophets demanded justice for the widow, the orphan, the stranger — but they spoke as members of a covenantal people whose survival mattered. They were universalists. They were not naïve. They understood that moral vision without political realism becomes dangerous. The whole modern Jewish embrace of liberalism was an attempt to hold those two things together: prophetic ethics and political security.

And yet I can’t pretend the emerging liberal consensus, the one Newsom has now stamped with his approval, is safe for Jews. A movement that treats Jewish self-determination as negotiable, that uses “apartheid” as shorthand, that compresses a century of Jewish history into a colonial story — that movement will not reliably tell the difference between a corrupt prime minister and the Jewish People. The slide from anti-Zionism into antisemitism isn’t theoretical. It’s happening right now, on campuses, in union halls, in progressive spaces where Jewish members increasingly feel that their presence is tolerated but their identity is not.

Journalist Emily Tamkin put it well in the Forward: American Jews who have long stacked their liberalism on top of their patriotism on top of their Zionism are about to find out those things don’t stack so neatly anymore. Something has to give. And the 2028 primary will force the question.

I don’t have a partisan answer; I have a theological one. The prophetic tradition holds two demands at once: Power must be accountable, and the vulnerable must be protected. These aren’t sequential; they’re simultaneous. A Judaism that can’t think critically about Israel’s political dynamics is a form of idolatry. A liberalism that can’t see Jewish vulnerability is a form of blindness. Right now, both failures are on full display.

Jews bear some responsibility here too. For decades, many Jewish institutions assumed that showing up for progressive causes would automatically earn solidarity in return. But alliances built only on shared language fall apart when priorities shift. The covenant at the heart of Jewish identity has never depended entirely on the goodwill of the surrounding society. Jewish history is partly the story of learning to participate in broader civilizations without giving up what keeps Jewish life alive. The modern State of Israel is one expression of that — the recognition, earned over centuries of exile, that moral ideals have to be backed by political agency.

What I want from liberal politicians, and from the parties they’re shaping, isn’t uncritical support for Israel. What I want is some evidence that the people rethinking military aid and reaching for the language of apartheid have also thought about their obligations to the Jewish community, which has been one of liberalism’s most faithful constituencies. I want to know the recalibration includes a plan for protecting Jews — not just Israeli Jews, but all Jews — in a political climate that grows more hostile by the month.

Because here’s what the Gallup numbers don’t capture: They don’t capture the Jewish day school parent in Los Angeles wondering if the progressive coalition her family helped build still has room for her. They don’t capture the college student in Melbourne or London who wants a ceasefire and is also afraid to walk to Hillel on a Friday night. They don’t capture the rabbi who is quietly terrified that the community he’s been trying to improve is rearranging itself into something that no longer needs, or even wants, Jewish participation.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel believed the prophetic tradition could hold the tension between universal justice and particular belonging. I still believe that. But beliefs need institutions, and institutions need political allies who take your safety seriously even when they disagree with your government. If liberalism can’t manage that — if the Newsom Moment means Jewish security is now a second-tier concern, subordinate to the realignment of liberal foreign policy — then Heschel’s bet has been lost.

And if it’s been lost, we’ll need to find another way. The Jewish People have done this before. We’ve outlasted every political arrangement that once promised us safety.

The prophets taught us to pursue justice. History taught us to pursue security. The work of this moment is to hold those together again — without illusion, and without despair.

Because the bigger question may not only be whether liberalism can still protect the Jews. It may be whether liberalism can even protect itself.

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1. The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. The scandal began in December 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a 35-year-old Alsatian French artillery officer of Jewish descent, was wrongfully convicted of treason for communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris.