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This is a guest essay written by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The nomination of open Hamas supporters by the Democratic Party has led to another round of American Jewish leftists bemoaning their abandonment by the party and the movement, despite the time they marched with Martin Luther King Jr.
But the Democratic Party didn’t abandon the Jews. It never stood with them in the first place.
When was the Democratic Party ever friendly to Jews? Was it the antisemitism of New Deal litigation that targeted Jews in the Schechter chicken case? Was it when Franklin D. Roosevelt told Joseph Stalin that he might give the Saudi regime “the six million Jews in the United States,” after watching six million Jews die in Europe? Was it when Harry S. Truman slapped an arms embargo on Israel as it fought for independence, and later told his biographer that “there’s never been a Jew inside the house”?
Even the brief honeymoon after the Holocaust, when the Democrats at least pretended to deplore public displays of antisemitism, came quickly to an end with the degeneration of the civil rights movement, championed earnestly by Jewish leftists, into black militant groups.
By the end of the 1960s, antisemitic race riots had torn apart entire communities, and antisemitic statements by Black leaders were becoming a routine part of life that the Democratic Party learned to accept. Some Jewish leftist groups protested, mostly to no avail. They held civil rights gatherings to reboot the mostly mythical black-Jewish alliance, and the Anti-Defamation League issued surveys documenting clear patterns of antisemitism and suggested teaching Black people more about the Holocaust.
Over the next half century, a line of openly antisemitic hatemongers — including Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and Al Sharpton — was added to the pantheon of Black leaders and became power players in the Democratic Party. Most Jewish Democrats learned to live with it and, after issuing occasional statements, to shut up about it.
Despite having called New York City “Hymietown” and supporting Islamic terrorists, Jesse Jackson finished third in the 1984 Democratic presidential primaries and second in 1988. After the Crown Heights Pogrom, Al Sharpton ran for the presidential nomination, got an MSNBC show, and became a kingmaker in the Democratic Party. This had nothing to do with “Israel,” “Zionism,” or anything except straightforward racism.
On the Israel side, White Democrats from Adlai Stevenson to Jimmy Carter became quite comfortable attacking Jews in antisemitic language, with even less response from Jewish Democrats. For the most part, though, Democrats paid lip service to condemning antisemitism, just not when it came from prominent members of their own party. After the brief honeymoon under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, they also paid lip service to supporting Israel while undermining it when in office.
Barack Obama felt empowered to engineer a public break with pro-Israel groups. Yet he was pursuing the same underlying foreign policy as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; he was simply more strategically confrontational about picking fights with Jews and Israel to fracture the party.
The events of October 7th were similarly used to help engineer a break that was already underway, following prior clashes over the antisemitic leadership of the Women’s March and the elevation of Black Lives Matter, along with its antisemitism, to morally unchallenged status in the party’s activist coalition.
Universities had long since ceded student government and entire departments to anti-Israel groups and terrorist supporters. The atrocities of October 7th and the Israeli campaign against Hamas enabled a social media contagion and an activist mobilization that were already underway.
Many Jewish Democrats, at least those who don’t mouth the same apologetics blaming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and AIPAC, feel betrayed and abandoned. But there was never any actual relationship there, just an affair that eventually gave way to a public declaration of adultery.
The longstanding relationship between the Jews and the Democrats was a mostly one-sided affair in which Jews voted for Democrats, donated to them, and readjusted their religion to echo whatever flavor of leftist politics the party was subscribing to at the moment. In exchange, Jews were able to hold political office and staff the party and its leftist allies.
But, much like the FDR and Truman administrations, leftist Jews were convinced that the party was not antisemitic because it included Jews, without ever looking at the bottom line. This approach was good for the careers and social status of some leftist Jews, who could afford to move out of urban neighborhoods to the suburbs and swallow public insults from minority leaders as unimportant to the bigger picture of their values and the cause.
The latest twist requires them to readapt not only to the congressional nominations of the likes of Dariazila Avila Chevalier in New York, who attended a celebration of October 7th after the attacks, and Melat Kiros in Colorado, who denied that a Muslim terrorist who set elderly Jews on fire, including a Holocaust survivor, hated Jews, but also to the Democratic Party welcoming them to its ranks.
It’s shocking, but not really a new trend. Democrats dropped even pro forma condemnations of antisemitism from their own side back in the late 1990s. By the time the picture of Obama posing with Louis Farrakhan came out, everyone just ignored it. What is different this time is that Democratic Party antisemitism isn’t just something leftist Jews can ignore.
A purge is moving through the movement, its societal and professional enclaves, and the party — shunning, demonizing and actively pushing Jews out. There’s no retreating from Brownsville to Westchester, because “Brownsville” is now everywhere. It’s in suburban neighborhoods, in private schools, on college campuses, and among medical associations and law firms. It determines who gets roommates, book contracts, and the ability to live the upper-middle-class lifestyle that so many leftist Jews had long since come to take for granted.
Some try to adapt. Like their former brethren in the USSR, they measure exactly how much to denounce, condemning Netanyahu, Zionism, and Israel, and even praising the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or Hamas. Others are caught in a “fight or flight” reaction after the October 7th attacks.
But the good news for them is that the Jews aren’t special. Or they’re only so special.
Jews have long been canaries in the coal mine, and an obsession with them tends to mark the arrival of a broader and bloodier extremism. Life may not be as pleasant in the Park Slope Coop or at Columbia University, but the radical movements doing this are not well disposed to the continued existence of the upper middle class, or of America itself.
The Jews may face the threat of being the first up against the wall, whether from the Democratic Socialists of America’s Marxist and Communist entryists now busily hollowing out the Democratic Party, or from the Islamists working both sides of the aisle. But history tells us they will not be the last.
The moment does not call for more paroxysms of neuroticism, or for plays like “Birthright” and “The Zionists,” which completely fail to deal with what is going on. It calls for an honest reckoning with the history of the Democratic Party and the Jews, abandoning the old myths of solidarity, and dealing with the cold realities of self-preservation and the preservation of an open American society.
To paraphrase a Marxist truism, “The issue isn’t the Jews. The issue is the revolution.”
The Jews were a useful stand-in for capitalism for Karl Marx and other prominent socialists. The USSR and its Communist allies were purging Jews long before the old class hatred was internationalized into the third-world liberationism that now calls for the destruction of Israel.
The growing influence of leftism in the Democratic Party was bound to make it more antisemitic. Combine that with the tribal hatreds of minority and third-world activists, and the Democrats look less like the party of JFK and more like the United Nations and its obsessive scapegoating.
Everyone, including many Jewish leftists, could see it coming, but they chose to stand with a movement that was bound to grow in its hatred for them the closer it came to its goals. The signs had been there since the 1960s and 1970s. Now it’s becoming impossible not to see them.
The “right side of history” is the pursuit of an extremist world order with no room for the Jews.
Jewish Democrats can allow the stable of leftist groups like the Jewish Democratic Council of America, the Nexus Project, J Street, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, created to trick them into adopting anti-Israel positions, to guide them into accepting the current horrors as the justifiable new normal. They can align with openly anti-Israel leftist groups like J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, T’ruah, or Bend the Arc in the hope that it will save their social status and their skin. Or they can have some dignity and fight back.
That will require dealing with some ugly realities. Antisemitism in their party isn’t emerging out of thin air. It’s due to the influence of extremist movements originating within a leftist ideology that dates back centuries. Class warfare invariably turns antisemitic, and a hierarchy of identity politics doesn’t offer “solidarity,” as anti-Israel leftists insist; it unites tribal groups around hatred of Jews.
The Democratic Party didn’t abandon the Jews. Leftist Jews abandoned themselves by accepting antisemitism from the party, refusing to hold it accountable, lowering their expectations, and refocusing around general social justice while ignoring their interests and even their survival.
If they want things to change, that is where it starts.
Let’s call a spade a spade. Jews have a long genetic memory of pogroms and other persecution primarily involving Catholics and other Christians. The Jews among the Bolsheviks delusionally thought that Communism would put the Christians in their place and finally make us equal. And somehow the Republicans became cast as the party of the Christians and a vote for them was a vote for Jesus and pogroms. Even though Christians are now Israel’s greatest supporters, all many of us can see is a Polish peasant threatening us with a stick. The mania is so complete that we can’t see the Muslim waving a gun at us on the other side.
Hmm.... for those of us on the center-left, who have always been liberals, this reads as pretty insulting. What, we're all just stupid? We are imagining the blood-and-soil nativism that has entirely taken over the GOP and which is happy to support Israel so long as it fights Muslims, but despises American Jews and sees us as foreigners?
Yes the Democrats are not perfect. But unlike the GOP, they are a fractious bunch and are controlled by no one person and no one ideology. Leftists trying to take over are often vile and rarely successful for long.
What are our choices here? Fight for a place among the Democrats or beg at the table of the latest GOP strongman? You want examples of Jew-hatred among Republican presidents? It's a long list.
So honestly, this analysis was worth less than the time it took to read it, and I read fast.