Batya Ungar-Sargon is the author of “The Jews and the Left” (Broadside Books), out June 2.
On May 14, 2026, a flag bearing a star of David and two swastikas flew over a dorm at NYU — one of the most left-wing universities in one of the most left-wing towns in America.
On March 12, 2026, a Muslim man drove a truck full of explosives into a synagogue in Michigan with the intent of blowing up 140 Jewish-American preschoolers in the name of the Palestinian cause, according to prosecutors. His homicidal anti-Jewish racism was explained away by leftists at The New York Times and NPR.
On May 21, 2025, a man named Elias Rodriguez allegedly murdered two innocents because he thought they were Jews. “Free, free Palestine!” he chanted while the police arrested him, in the exact tune and cadence bellowed on college campuses every day. “I did it for Gaza.”
These are just three recent examples of a uniquely left-wing form of anti-Jewish hate and violence that has all but replaced right-wing antisemitism in America — up to appropriating the swastika itself. It’s an entire culture that suffuses the left, justifying and carrying out acts of political violence against Jews, and it stems from the top.
The Democrats are now set to elect a man with what resembles a Nazi tattoo, hastily covered up after 20 years of proudly showing it off, as their senator from Maine. They campaign eagerly with sociopaths who declare they would vote for Hamas over Israel and call Jews inbred. The word Zionist, which describes the vast majority of Jews worldwide, is now a slur on the left.
And it’s a complete reversal of where anti-Jewish sentiment has traditionally sprung from.
For most of American history, where antisemitism cropped up in the US, it was much more pronounced on the right. It’s certainly not completely gone on that side of the political aisle; over the past decade and especially the past few years, there’s been an alarming rise of antisemitism on the right, with big name influencers and commentators engaging in and platforming outright Holocaust denial and admiration for Hitler, as well as blaming Israel for all of the world’s ills and malefactors.
And yet, by and large, it has remained a contained phenomenon on the right, thanks to huge efforts by Republicans senators, congresspeople, influencers and the president himself. Meanwhile on the left, an open skepticism toward Jewish interests and hostility to Jewish perspectives has very quickly become mainstream.
Apologists on the left will claim it’s not antisemitism, it’s merely anti-Zionism. They don’t hate Jews — just the State of Israel. And yet, the vast majority of American Jews are Zionists. Israel is a central component to their identity as Jews. And it’s now verboten on the left.
This would be bad enough. But it’s especially jarring because for 100 years, American Jews have overwhelmingly been Democrats. They built the Labor Movement out of the sweatshops of the Lower East Side. Then they saved some money and bought their own shops and sent their kids to college, so they wrote FDR’s New Deal, which combined a respect for the dignity of labor with a healthy appreciation of capitalism. In the 60s, they marched at the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. They taught in public schools. They read The New York Times and studied at the universities where the left defined the culture.
So central to the left were Jews that for many, being a Democrat and being pro-Israel were the two central components of what it meant to be an American Jew. Yet now, in the 21st century, there is an inherent conflict in those two pieces of their identity. In the party that Jews made their home for 100 years, they now feel welcome only if they check their Zionism at the door. They are welcome only if they denounce their own people (sadly, many Jews take the left up on this humiliating offer).
To understand what a betrayal this was, imagine a counterfactual scenario: One can easily picture the left recognizing how central Jews have been historically to their movement and thus rejecting an ideology that would make Jews feel no longer welcome. Instead, the left, and by now the Democratic Party writ large, embraced that ideology, turning on the Jews who had for so long been a mainstay of their coalition.
But the betrayal goes both ways.
For it was not a foregone conclusion that the history of America and its Jews would lead to 100 years of voting for Democrats. America has always had a unique relationship with Jews. In 1790, President George Washington wrote a famous letter to the “children of the stock of Abraham” of Newport, RI, promising that here, bigotry would be given no sanction, persecution no assistance.
In the letter, he explained that Jews, as all other Americans, would be treated as equals, though not due to the tolerance of their neighbors, tolerant though they were; instead, their equal rights would be due to the religious freedoms imbued in us by our Creator. In his explanation, the president was laying out the template for the extraordinary freedom Jewish Americans would be granted here, pretty much from Day 1. The distinction between religious tolerance and religious freedom would come to define how America would treat its Jews — but also how it would define what it means to be an American.
It means zealously protecting our rights as a gift of God rather than the result of the sufferance of our neighbors or government.
American Jews would play a crucial role in proving that the promises of a liberal democracy could be fulfilled, if liberalism meant equality before the law, respect for religious freedom and freedom of conscience, free enterprise and democracy.
Europe’s Christian nations had persecuted Jews for millennia. But it turned out that the ticket to freedom wasn’t a secular state; the Jews needed a religious country to thrive. And in a divine irony, that country needed Jews.
It is a tragedy that so many Jews, in a misreading of this history, allowed and continue to allow themselves to feel like guests in a social, legal, political, and spiritual reality — in a nation — that had been formed and informed by us to such a deep degree.
