Liberals should be learning from Jews, not resenting us.

Does the Left actually want to see minorities succeed? Or has it grown too attached to eternal victimhood?

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

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For generations, the political Left has stood, proudly and often righteously, as a defender of marginalized communities.

It has championed the rights of the poor, the abused, the racial and ethnic minorities excluded from representation. It has fought for safe employment conditions, equal opportunity, representation, and dignity for all.

And yet, when it comes to the Jews (arguably the most successful minority in modern history), the Left doesn’t celebrate. It doesn’t ask how this tiny, battered people rebuilt ourselves after near-annihilation. It doesn’t seek to understand what lessons might be applied to uplift other communities.

Instead, far too often, it resents us, distrusts us, and villainizes us.

This is a catastrophic moral failure.

By every liberal measure — education, civic engagement, social mobility, cultural contributions — Jewish communities should be a model for what minority empowerment can look like.

Jews rebuilt from genocide without asking for pity. We emphasized education, mutual aid, cultural continuity, entrepreneurship, and civic participation. Across the West, we rose from garment workers and refugees to senators, scientists, and high-ranking judges, often within a generation or two.

And yet, this story of a people who never had privilege but created opportunity is not held up as a triumph. It is now twisted into something sinister. The modern Left doesn’t ask, “What can we learn from the Jewish story?” It asks, “Why are Jews doing so well — and whom must they be hurting to get there?”

This is not justice. It’s jealousy, disguised as ideology.

And it leads to a dark, disturbing question: Does the Left actually want to see minorities succeed? Or has it grown too attached to eternal victimhood?

Sometimes, it feels like success is the real sin — not oppression, but overcoming it. Like the moment a minority rises, they are no longer worthy of compassion. Instead, they must be brought back down, recast as oppressors, so they can fit back into a narrative of victimhood that the Left knows how to manipulate.

Nowhere is this failure more glaring than in conversations about Israel.

There was a time, not that long ago, when the Left embraced Israel. In its early decades, Israel was seen as a symbol of resilience, a scrappy underdog rising from the ashes of genocide and surrounded by hostile regimes bent on its destruction. Kibbutzim, collective farms, and socialist ideals dominated the landscape. Jewish refugees from Europe and the Middle East poured in by the hundreds of thousands, building a democracy from nothing, often while fighting for their survival.

This was the Israel admired by Martin Luther King Jr., supported by labor unions, and celebrated by the Left as a rare success story of post-colonial self-determination.

But something changed.

As Israel grew stronger, more prosperous, and more capable of defending itself, it lost its status as a victim in the eyes of the Left. And in today’s moral economy, strength is a sin, and success is suspect. The moment Israel became undefeatable, it became harder for liberals to sympathize.

Israel didn’t change its core values, but it changed its position in the power hierarchy — and for the modern Left, that’s all that matters.

Instead of asking how a tiny country surrounded by enemies managed to build a thriving liberal democracy with a diverse population and world-changing innovation, the Left now sees only its military strength, its tech sector, its economic power, and concludes, wrongly and lazily, that it must be an oppressor.

But this is a dangerous moral framework, one that punishes survival and sanctifies weakness. It’s the same twisted logic that turns Hamas into a “resistance movement” and Israel into a villain simply because one is weak and the other is strong, regardless of their values or their actions.

Israel did not arise from conquest. It rose from catastrophe. It was built not by colonizers, but by Holocaust survivors, pogrom refugees, and Jews expelled from Arab lands. It is the only country in the Middle East where LGBTQ+ rights are protected, women serve at the highest levels of government, and minorities vote freely.

The hypocrisy runs deeper still. The Left proudly defends the rights of indigenous peoples around the world to preserve their identity and pursue self-determination. Kurds, Palestinians, Armenians, Tibetans — their nationalist aspirations are framed as noble. But Jewish nationalism? That alone is labeled colonialism.

The Jewish People are indigenous to the Land of Israel. Our language, culture, and sacred texts were born there. Our exiles were not migrations; they were expulsions. Our return is not conquest; it is homecoming. If the Left cannot recognize this, it is not being anti-nationalist. It is being selectively anti-Jewish.

This is the intellectual trap of the modern “decolonization” movement. What began as a call to liberate peoples from foreign domination has, in the case of Israel, devolved into a call for Jewish erasure.

“Decolonize Palestine” now typically means: Dismantle Israel, displace its massive Jewish population, and pretend that an indigenous people returning home after 2,000 years are foreign invaders. This is not anti-colonialism; it is antisemitism with a postmodern paint job.

And, let’s be honest: The indiscriminate hunting of Jews across the world is not because of the war in Gaza. The war in Gaza is because of the indiscriminate hunting of Jews. It’s amazing how hard it is for some people to grasp this simple fact.

On October 7th, Hamas launched a genocidal rampage — not for freedom, not for land, but for blood. They broke a ceasefire to rape, torture, and murder civilians in their homes. If the Left truly cared about de-escalation, about peace, about coexistence, it would begin by condemning this atrocity. Loudly. Unequivocally. Without adding “but.”

And yet, it didn’t.

Rather than standing with Jews, a historically marginalized group once again under violent attack, many liberals turned away. Or worse, they blamed us.

Jewish students on college campuses were told to “denounce Zionism” or be shut out of liberal circles. Jewish professors were publicly slandered for supporting the right of Israel to exist. Jewish communities were targeted in cities across the West for the crime of being Jewish while a war raged 5,000 miles away.

What other minority group would be told to justify their right to exist before being allowed to mourn their dead?

And while we’re here, let’s talk about the erasure of Jewish diversity: Jews are not a monolith. We are Ashkenazi and Sephardic, Mizrahi and Ethiopian, religious and secular, Left-wing and Right-wing. Some of us descend from Holocaust survivors, others from Jews expelled from Iraq, Iran, Yemen, or Morocco.

Yet, in today’s liberal spaces, Jews are flattened into a caricature — usually “white,” “privileged,” and “powerful” — to justify excluding us from the “oppressed-oppressor” framework.

The result? Jews of color are invisibilized. Orthodox Jews are vilified. Zionist Jews, which is the overwhelming majority, are cast out completely.

If liberals were operating from a place of curiosity rather than contempt, they might ask:

• How did a stateless people survive centuries of exile, persecution, and genocide — and still hold onto their culture, identity, and language?

• How did Jewish communities build powerful social networks, support systems, and institutions that elevated future generations?

• What can other minority and underserved communities learn from the Jewish focus on education, resilience, and mutual responsibility?

• And, perhaps most importantly, why does Jewish success trigger suspicion rather than admiration?

The answer isn’t found in power dynamics or privilege theory. It’s found in something much simpler: a blind spot, fueled by resentment and reinforced by willful ignorance.

In the liberal imagination, Jews are no longer seen as vulnerable, so it has become permissible, even fashionable, to “punch up” at us. But “punching up” becomes meaningless when it justifies violence, terrorism, or antisemitic harassment, especially from groups that hold actual power in their own spheres. Hence, moral relativism has replaced moral clarity.

The Left doesn’t need to agree with every Israeli policy. Jews, too, debate fiercely about Israel. That’s democracy. That’s Jewishness. But to reduce Jews or the Jewish state to a symbol of oppression is to erase everything that came before: the ghettos, the inquisitions, the gas chambers, the expelled communities, the hunted families, the graves.

To stand for justice, one must stand for all people, including Jews. Especially Jews. Not just when we are victims, but when we are thriving. When our success is not a threat but a roadmap.

Real solidarity doesn’t exclude us. Real equity doesn’t scapegoat the successful.
If the Left wants to live up to its own ideals, it should stop vilifying the Jews — and start listening to us.

Beyond the moral failure, the Left is also making a grave strategic error. For over a century, Jews have been among its most committed activists — union leaders, civil rights lawyers, feminist organizers, social workers, donors.

But many Jews are walking away, not because we’ve changed, but because the movement we helped build now turns its back on us. If the Left continues down this path, it won’t just lose Jewish support. It will lose credibility, coherence and, eventually, power.

Doesn’t the Left realize that every civilization, empire, and movement that turned its back on the Jews eventually collapsed? Egypt, Rome, Spain, the Church, czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union — all tried to erase us. We’re still here. They’re gone. History doesn’t look kindly on those who abandon the Jews.

So, here’s a thought: What if the Left replaced resentment with curiosity? What if it looked at the Jewish experience not as an anomaly to be explained away or a threat to be dismantled, but as a roadmap to be studied? What if it asked: “How did this people survive exile, genocide, statelessness, and relentless hatred — and still build thriving communities?”

That’s a conversation worth having, one rooted not in envy or erasure, but in honesty and hope. The Jews are not your enemy. We might be your best example.

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