Far-left politicians embracing anti-Zionist or anti-Israel positions have been quick to highlight their commitment to Jewish safety. This misses that dividing Jews into groups of good ones and bad ones on the basis of their identity and commitments is as bad as ignoring their safety.
There are a host of reasons why many American Jews are feeling unprecedented angst, but one of them is the success of far left and progressive candidates—some, though not all, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America—winning Democratic primaries and general elections. It isn’t only that these candidates are showing up and winning in greater numbers, but that their prominence and influence on the discourse are undeniable, whether it be Zohran Mamdani arguably being the highest-profile Democratic elected official in the country or Abdul El-Sayed—and for a brief period, Graham Platner before him—being the face of the fight for Democratic control of the Senate. While none of these candidates are associated with a single issue, emphasizing opposition to Israel has been a unifying feature for all of them, with that opposition running a gamut from the extreme of justifying Hamas’ October 7 atrocities, to garden variety anti-Zionism opposing a Jewish state, to hedging on whether a Jewish state is acceptable while always reframing the conversation around Palestinian rights. What nearly all of these candidates do as well is make a distinction between their views on Israel and their views on the necessity to protect the safety of American Jews. They do this either by taking a stand against antisemitism while arguing that opposition to Israel is a completely unrelated category, or by maintaining that their views on Israel have no relevance to their zero-tolerance policy for violence or threats against the Jewish community at home.
This distinction should not be taken for granted nor blithely dismissed. Throughout history, it is the rare Jewish community that received the benefit of being treated as normal and equal citizens, and it is one of the reasons that comparisons of this moment to 1930s Germany are woefully off-base. But those who argue that the distinction that virulently anti-Israel progressive politicians are making between Israel and American Jews means that the Jewish community has little to worry about are focusing on the wrong thing as well. The basic safety of Jewish communities and the ability for American Jews to live their lives free of hate crimes should be the most important variable for the American Jewish community, but it is not the only metric that is important. What makes so many American Jews uncomfortable goes beyond someone like Mamdani’s position on Israel per se, and extends to the ways in which extreme anti-Israel positions are impinging on American Jewish identity itself. Whether or not anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and whether or not an extreme and always negative focus on Israel is putting Jews at risk, cannot and should not be the only questions to interrogate. What we should also be asking is whether extreme anti-Israel positions and political rhetoric are making it impossible for the overwhelming majority of American Jews to maintain their American Jewish identity as they define it.
Debating heated policy issues, and arbitrating questions of what constitutes acceptable ideological affiliations and emotional connections for American Jews, are not the same thing. When El-Sayed calls for ending all military aid to Israel, that’s a legitimate policy position irrespective of my not agreeing with it and well within the realm of appropriate policy debates. When he says that Israel is “an illegal apartheid regime for a very, very long time,” and that “every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one,” it goes beyond policy debates. Professing love for Jewish people and Judaism, as El-Sayed did on Sunday, is a nice sentiment, but the fact is that for most American Jews, a connection to Israel and to the Jews who live there is a core part of their identity as people and as Jews. It is incongruous to revere Jews and Judaism while condemning one of the core commitments that most of them hold.
Being sincerely concerned with the safety of American Jews is important, but trashing their deeply held commitments as unredeemable and beyond the pale—which is the effect of stating that any manifestation of a Jewish state is de facto illiberal—is going to make those same American Jews feel at risk, dehumanized, and like walking future hate-crime victims. It goes beyond accusing Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza, which no matter how harsh is still a condemnation of Israel’s actions. In contrast, the charges that Israel is illegal and definitionally a violation of liberal principles is not about Israel’s actions or Israeli policy, and does not allow for any space for American Jews to be emotionally attached to Israel and bonded to their family and friends who live there. It creates a distinction imposed by an outsider between a good Jewish identity and a bad Jewish identity, and not only will that inevitably create actual and tangible danger for the American Jews who fall into the “bad” camp—a group that is not incidentally the bulk of the American Jewish population—but it goes well beyond a debate about the U.S.-Israel relationship and American regional policy.
None of this is meant to dismiss the tangible concerns that some have over antisemitism. There are plenty of legitimate questions about the most high-profile politicians in the new crop of progressives, from Mamdani’s judicial advisory committee that was dubbed “a truly representative cross-section” of New York’s legal community but somehow contains not one Jewish lawyer (which sounds like the start of a bad joke but in this case is sadly real life), to Darializa Avila Chevalier’s attendance at the despicable October 8 celebration of dead Israelis and her later justification of it on the grounds of “human dignity,” to El-Sayed’s bromance with and elevation of the violence-fetishist antisemitic-trope-touting Hasan Piker. The rush to dismiss this behavior from some liberal Jews for reasons of political tribalism will not end well; if you are willing to whistle by El-Sayed’s bond with Piker because Democratic control of the Senate is too important, then you waive the right to rail against Trump’s dinner with Nick Fuentes or JD Vance’s close friendship with Tucker Carlson as politically disqualifying on antisemitism grounds. But even if you are satisfied that the whiff of antisemitism around some of these figures is evidence of smoke but not of fire, it does not answer the question of why we are willing to overlook a very open and concerted effort to police which American Jewish ideological and emotional commitments are acceptable and which are not.
For the pro-Israel community—which to stress again, is not tokenism for American Jews but the clear supermajority of American Jews—the test for being comfortable with the extreme anti-Israel candidates who are now ascendant should not just be whether they are not clearly and frontally antisemitic, or whether they will protect the basic physical safety of American Jewish institutions. It should be whether they can rhetorically accept the right of American Jews to define themselves as they choose and to form their identities as they choose. If not, then encomiums to the beauty of Jewish tradition and ironclad pledges to root out and punish violence against Jews are insufficient. One need not support Israel or even like Israel, but one should absolutely and unreservedly understand and accept why others might and respect their choice to do so.