It never had their backs in the first place;
-- Daniel Greenfield/Sultan Knish
The nomination of open Hamas supporters by the Democratic Party has led to another round of American Jewish liberals bemoaning their abandonment by the party and the movement despite that time they marched with MLK.
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 Shechter chicken case or when FDR told 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 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 period 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 liberals, into black militant groups.
By the end of the 1960s, antisemitic race riots tore apart entire communities and antisemitic statements by black leaders were becoming a routine factor of life that the Democratic Party leaned to accept. Some Jewish liberal groups protested them, mostly to no avail, held civil rights gatherings to reboot the mostly mythical black-Jewish alliance and the ADL 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, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton, were 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 calling New York City, “hymietown” and supporting Islamic terrorists, Jackson came in third in the 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 Dems.
But for the most part, Democrats paid lip service to condemning antisemitism, just not when it came from prominent members of their own party, and, after the brief honeymoon under JFK and LBJ, paid lip service to supporting Israel while undermining it when in office.
Obama, felt empowered to engineer a public break with pro-Israel groups, but he was pursuing the same underlying foreign policy as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, he was just more strategically confrontational about picking fights with Jews and Israel to fracture the party.
The events of Oct 7 were similarly used to help engineer a break that had already been underway with prior clashes over the antisemitic leadership of the Women’s March and the elevation of BLM, 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 Oct 7 and the Israeli campaign against Hamas enabled a social media contagion and activist mobilization already underway.
Many Jewish Democrats, at least those who don’t mouth the same apologetics blaming 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 liberal or leftist politics that the party was subscribing to at the moment. In exchange, Jews were able to hold political office and staff up the party and its liberal allies.
But, much like the FDR and Truman administrations, liberal 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 the social status of some liberal Jews, who could afford to move out of urban neighborhoods to the suburbs and swallow public insults from minority leaders as being unimportant to the bigger picture of their values and the cause.
The latest twist of the party requires readapting to not only the congressional nominations of the likes of Dariazila Avila Chevalier in New York, who attended a celebration of Oct 7 after the attacks, or Melat Kiros in Colorado, who denied that a Muslim terrorist who set elderly Jews on fire, including a Holocaust survivor, hated Jews, but to the Democratic Party welcoming them to its ranks.
It’s shocking, but not really a new trend. Democrats had dropped even pro forma condemnations of antisemitism from their own side back in the late 90s. 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 that liberal Jews can ignore.
There is a purge moving through the movement, its societal and professional enclaves, and the party that is shunning, demonizing and actively pushing Jews out. There’s no retreating from Brownsville to Westchester, because ‘Brownsville’ is now everywhere, including in suburban neighborhoods, it’s in private schools, on college campuses, 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 liberal Jews had long since come to take for granted.
Some try to adapt, condemn Israel, and like their former brethren in the USSR, measure exactly how much to denounce, condemn Netanyahu, Zionism, and the existence of Israel, praise the PFLP or Hamas, while others are caught in a ‘fight or flight’ reaction after the Oct 7 attacks.
But the good news for them is that the Jews aren’t special. Or they’re only so special.
Jews have long since 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 ongoing existence of the upper middle class or of the continued existence of America.
The Jews may face the threat of being the first up against the wall from the DSA’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 that the Jews will not be the last.
The moment does not call for more paroxysms of neuroticism, for plays like ‘Birthright’ and ‘The Zionists’ which completely fail to deal with what is going on, but to reckon honestly with the history of the Democratic Party and the Jews, to abandon the old myths of solidarity, and to deal 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 liberals, 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 60s and 70s. 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 liberal-leftist groups like the JDCA, the Nexus Project, J Street, and the JCPA, 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-liberal groups, J Street, JVP, T’ruah or Bend the Arc, in the hopes 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 the leftist ideology that date 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, the Jews abandoned themselves by accepting antisemitism from the party, refusing to hold it accountable, lowering their expectations, refocusing around general social justice while ignoring their interests and even their survival.
If they want things to change, that is where it starts.
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