Last night, in Democratic primaries in New York City, Jewish identity was used as a political liability. Candidates were targeted for their associations with Jewish communal organizations. Zionist identity was treated as disqualifying. The “Good Jew / Bad Jew” dichotomy was leveraged for power. And a candidate with no legislative record, whose public profile was built largely on celebrating the heinous October 7 massacre, won.
Let’s be clear about what happened. There is nothing principled or progressive about targeting someone for their Jewishness, extrapolating malintent from their identity, or using someone’s support for Jewish self-determination (Zionism) as the only disqualifying part of their political record. Dressing this strategy in the vocabulary of justice does not change what it is: anti-Jewish bigotry.
Antisemitism has always operated this way. It borrows the moral language of the moment. It finds the fracture lines and widens them. It does not announce itself. It normalizes gradually, meeting silence with momentum, until it becomes infrastructure. That is what we watched happen last night. Not a fringe moment. An organized, anti-Jewish electoral strategy that worked because too many people who knew better chose to look away.
That silence has a cost. The political and party leaders who stayed quiet while Jewish candidates were attacked for being Jewish are making a calculated bet: that partisan victories are worth more than the integrity of the movement. They are wrong. The tolerance of antisemitism does not consolidate power. It corrodes it. History is unambiguous on this point. The movements and institutions that made room for anti-Jewish prejudice in the name of unity did not survive that choice intact. Neither will this one. We will all suffer the consequences.
Progressives who share our commitments to economic justice, reproductive rights, racial equity, food access, housing, childcare, wages and democratic accountability are being pushed out of the left not because of their values but because of who they are. A movement that cannot apply its own principles consistently cannot build the coalitions it needs to defeat authoritarianism and white nationalism. That is not a Jewish problem. It is a progressive movement problem. It has become a Democratic Party problem. And it belongs to everyone who claims to care about this movement.