'Progressives' plagiarized Judaism and deleted Jews from the story.

Today’s progressives stand on Jewish shoulders and spit in Jewish faces.

photo: Tristan Sosteric/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

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

---

In their righteous crusade for justice, the modern progressive movement borrowed much from Judaism — but left the Jews behind.

It’s an irony so thick you could cut it with a knife: Today’s “progressive” ideals — universal human dignity, moral responsibility, social justice, the relentless demand to improve the world — are deeply, unmistakably Jewish values.

And yet, the very people who preach these principles from university podiums and TikTok videos increasingly target Jews as symbols of oppression, privilege, or colonialism.

What they don’t realize, or perhaps don’t care to, is that they are standing on the shoulders of a tradition they now disdain.

Long before progressive politics was an identity crisis, it was a covenant. Thousands of years ago, a small tribe of nomads declared that every human being is created b’tzelem Elohim — in the image of God.

This was radical.

In a world where most cultures accepted hierarchy, slavery, and might-makes-right as natural law, the Jews introduced a disruptive idea: that morality is not relative, but commanded. That power is not sacred, but accountable. That even kings must answer to a higher law.

The Torah introduced labor rights (“Do not oppress a hired worker”¹), animal welfare (“Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading grain”²), environmental protections (“Give the land its Sabbath rest”³), and the first known system of welfare (“Leave the corners of your field for the poor and the stranger”⁴). This wasn’t just religion; it was a social revolution.

The prophets of Israel — Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah — weren’t preaching fire and brimstone. They were condemning corruption, inequality, exploitation, and injustice. Their words ring out like they were written for today: “Let justice roll down like waters.”⁵ “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly?”⁶

Sound familiar?

The Jewish influence didn’t end with the Tanakh (the Hebrew bible). It ran through Christianity, through the Enlightenment, through the civil rights movement, through the very conception of modern human rights. In fact, most of the moral framework that animates today’s Western progressive thought is inseparable from Jewish intellectual and ethical DNA.

Who championed labor rights? Jewish immigrants. Who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? Jewish rabbis. Who helped found the American Civil Liberties Union? Jews. Who fought for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, refugee rights, and civil liberties? Over and over, Jews.

But today’s progressives have forgotten all of this. Or worse, they’ve rewritten it.

They’ve decided that Judaism is no longer revolutionary, but reactionary. That Jews are no longer a historically oppressed people, but a convenient villain. That Israel, the Jewish People’s ancestral and indigenous homeland, is a foreign colonizer. That Zionism is not liberation, but “white supremacy.”

This inversion isn’t just false; it’s theft.

Progressives borrow Jewish ideals (justice, equality, compassion, responsibility) and strip them of their Jewish origin. They love the values, but resent the people who carried them for millennia.

Judaism wasn’t shaped by privilege; it was shaped by exile, by oppression, by a stubborn refusal to disappear. And yet, even in our darkest hours, we never abandoned the idea that the world could be better — that it must be better. That’s where your “activism” comes from.

Jews were building ethical civilizations before most of the world could read. We’ve outlived empires, outlasted inquisitions, survived crusades, pogroms, ghettos, and gas chambers. We rebuilt ourselves after the unthinkable — not once, but repeatedly. If Jewish continuity offends you, it says more about progressives than it does about us.

Worse, progressives now wield Jewish values as weapons against Jews. It’s as if they learned ethics from the Jewish story, then decided that Jews no longer belong in it.

Israelis defending themselves from genocidal terror are branded “settlers” and “colonizers.” Jews standing up for their people are accused of tribalism, racism, and privilege. The people who carried the moral torch through exile, pogrom, genocide, and rebirth are now slandered as the darkness themselves.

Progressives love to talk about “marginalized voices.” So let’s be clear: Jews are 0.2 percent of the global population. That’s not just a minority; it’s a statistical whisper. And yet, somehow, in progressive circles, we’re cast as the villain, the oppressor, the powerful elite.

It takes mental gymnastics worthy of an Olympic medal to look at a people who faced 2,000 years of persecution, exile, and genocide — and decide they’re too privileged to deserve empathy.

But here’s the cruelest part: Jews are being attacked in the name of the very justice they helped birth. The people who gave the world its conscience are now told they have none.

This is not just ignorant; it’s a betrayal. It’s the intellectual equivalent of burning down your parents’ house after cashing their checks.

Some Jews, desperate to remain welcome in progressive spaces, have taken to distancing themselves from Israel, or from the Jewish collective itself. They virtue-signal their discomfort with Zionism. They post disclaimers about “not supporting Netanyahu.” They echo slogans designed to keep them in the good graces of movements that don’t actually care about them.

But it’s never enough, because the problem isn’t what kind of Jew you are; the problem is that you’re a Jew at all.

We’ve tried explaining. We’ve tried educating. We’ve tried fitting in. But the more we bend, the more we break. In fact, studies show that antisemitism today is rising fastest on the political Left, especially in academia, activism, and elite cultural spaces. It may wear different clothes — “anti-Zionism,” “decolonization,” “punching up” — but the script is ancient: Blame the Jew, exclude the Jew, punish the Jew for existing.

The Far-Right might chant about blood and soil, but the Far-Left talks about “anti-normalization” and refuses to share platforms with Jews who are too Jewish. Different language, same hatred.

That is why it’s time to stop apologizing for being who we are. It’s time to stop diluting our identity to earn conditional love from movements that will drop us the moment we say something too Jewish, too Zionist, too proud.

Judaism is not a buffet to be picked through for slogans and discarded for politics. You can’t cherry-pick Jewish values while rejecting Jewish peoplehood and Jewish nationhood. You can’t honor the prophets while vilifying their descendants. And you can’t pretend to stand for justice while silencing Jewish pain.

Modern progressives embrace identity, until it’s Jewish identity. They champion self-determination, cultural heritage, and indigenous rights — unless the group in question is the Jewish People. Then the rules change.

Progressives love universalism, as long as Jews are the ones expected to be universal. Suddenly, pride in one’s people becomes “ethnonationalism.” Defending your community becomes “tribalism.” And having a homeland becomes “colonialism.”

It’s a wicked double standard: Every other group is encouraged to celebrate its story, but Jews are told our story makes others uncomfortable — especially if it includes survival, sovereignty, or strength.

Progressives love to say they’re standing up to power, but somehow, they always seem to be punching down at the world’s only Jewish state. Israel, a country one hour east to west and five hours north to south, surrounded by enemies who openly call for its destruction, is treated as the world’s greatest oppressor. Where’s the outrage over Iran’s theocracy? Over Syria’s genocide? Over Hamas’ charter calling for the murder of Jews?

It doesn’t exist, because outrage isn’t the point; Israel is.

No other indigenous people are told their return home is illegitimate. No other liberal democracy is demonized for defending itself from terror. No other people are expected to endure slaughter without fighting back, lest they be accused of cruelty for surviving.

Judaism doesn’t need validation from progressivism; it never did.

We were the original radicals; the first people to say that morality comes from principle, not power; the first to insist that the vulnerable deserve protection; the first to say that justice is holy, and that every human life matters — not because of race, status, or political usefulness, but because of inherent dignity.

We gifted the world its morality, and we’re not giving it up.

If progressives truly want to be moral, they’d start by being honest about where their values come from; about who carried those values when the rest of the world sank into savagery; about the role Jews have played as moral disruptors, as conscience-bearers, as the original revolutionaries.

If you want to fight for justice, welcome. But don’t try to do it while erasing the Jews. Because, without Judaism, your justice has no roots, no memory, no soul, no right to call itself progressive.

And, if you’re Jewish, and you feel the ground shifting beneath you — you’re not imagining it. Stand firm, be proud. The world has always needed our moral clarity, even when it didn’t want it. And we’re not done yet.

---

1. Deuteronomy 24:14

2. Deuteronomy 25:4

3. Leviticus 25:1-7

4. Leviticus 23:22

5. Amos 5:24

6. Micah 6:8