Jonathan S. Tobin
In Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Party, only those who bend the knee to antisemitic ideology have a place. Is this the end of an era for American Jewish life?
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.). Credit: Lev Radin/Shutterstock.
The end of the political career of Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) is filled with irony. He was a child of immense privilege who may wind up best remembered for being a victim of discrimination. He was also a man whose rapid rise in public life was fueled by rabid partisanship and the weaponization of the law against political opponents.
But his career came to an abrupt end earlier this week, when he was brought down by an even more extreme faction of his party that had decided he wasn’t sufficiently ideologically pure to suit the current political fashion of delegitimizing Jewish identity on the left.
This heir to the Levi Strauss Jeans fortune, who led the first attempt to impeach President Donald Trump on flimsy politicized charges, has led a life that is hardly typical of most American Jews. Yet the arc of his political career may well illustrate the end of an era for American Jewry. He might have thought his good looks, money and impeccably partisan record assured him a bright political future, but in the end, his Jewish identity did him in.
Barista bigotry
Barring a theoretical comeback in a future when the woke and the Jew-haters no longer dominate his party, not only is his career finished. He’s also linked forever with a story in which a fashionable Brooklyn coffee-shop chain publicly refunded his purchase by declaring that he should be refused service along with “racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide-enablers or anyone in between. Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
The exchange of the very liberal Goldman for another very liberal Democrat as the representative of New York’s 10th Congressional district isn’t particularly significant. The same is true of what happened in other districts on primary day, when candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani also won seats. Liberal pundits can downplay the significance of these contests by saying that the divisive ideological battles that now define Gotham’s politics are not like those elsewhere. They’re not entirely wrong when they say New York City is not America.
Yet Dan Goldman’s story, both the primary defeat and the coffee-shop incident, is still important. What happened in his district is actually typical of what has become normalized in Democratic Party politics in recent years. Over the last century, Jews have been among the most dedicated and loyal supporters of the Democrats. But if they want to be accepted today, they must be willing to pay an entrance fee that requires them to disavow Israel and Jewish peoplehood, crucial elements of their identity.
This is the inevitable result of the hijacking of the Democratic Party by ideological “progressives” who have been indoctrinated in the toxic theories of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism. They are primarily seen as the impetus for the divisive “anti-racist” movement that has done so much to exacerbate and widen racial disharmony in the United States and elsewhere.
Post-Oct. 7 surge of Jew-hatred
But as we’ve seen since the atrocities and mass murder committed during the Hamas-led Palestinian-Arab attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, they are the driving force behind the surge of antisemitism that followed. And rather than being restricted to disturbing events on college campuses where Jews were targeted by mobs of activists chanting for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”), the same trend is now dominating Democratic Party politics.
Mamdani’s trio of primary victories, like the rise of the Nazi-tattooed, Israel-bashing Graham Platner in Maine and of the Islamist-supporting Abdel El-Sayyed in Michigan as credible Senate candidates, is not merely a sign of changing times. It may well be the death knell for an era of Jewish acceptance. And with loud voices touting antisemitic Israel-bashing gaining acceptance in high places, though not similar electoral success, on the right, it does raise serious questions about whether American exceptionalism with respect to Jews and much else is now in jeopardy.
Jewish acceptance
Jews have achieved inclusion in virtually every sector of American society, business, the arts and government. The United States also offered them influence and even power. And, as journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon persuasively argues in her new book, The Jews and the Left, that didn’t begin in the 20th century. From the earliest days of the republic that is now about to celebrate its 250th birthday, Jews were not merely tolerated as they have at times been elsewhere, but included as equal partners in the American experiment. And they took advantage of the opportunities offered by a country in which political liberty and economic freedom prevailed.
Dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of them, whether rich or poor, embraced the Democratic Party and political liberalism, rightly or wrongly, as representing the values that had enabled their acceptance and prosperity.
But Goldman’s political fate illustrates the way the sea change in the Democratic Party with respect to the demonization of Israel and Zionism is altering the landscape for Jews.
Goldman—who probably thought that his money and then incumbency, once obtained, would lead to an indefinite, unchallenged hold on the seat he won in 2022—wasn’t merely defeated in the Democratic primary. His loss to former New York City comptroller Brad Lander was an epic trouncing, by the stunning margin of 65.8% to 34%.
The reason for his defeat was no secret. As the man who led the first partisan impeachment of Trump in 2019, Goldman likely believed he had earned a permanent hold on the affection of even the most left-wing members of his party. But he was, as the Jew-haters at Brooklyn’s Poetica coffee shops pointed out, a “genocide” enabler. Which is to say, he was a supporter of the State of Israel, even if he was not a particularly enthusiastic one
Bending the knee to the antisemitic left
Lander, like Goldman, is also Jewish and a veteran political liberal. But unlike the soon-to-be former congressman, he understood how the Democratic Party in New York City and much of the rest of the country now operates. While he has claimed, at times, to be a “liberal Zionist” and an opponent of antisemitism, he has adjusted his position on the war being waged by Iran and its terrorist proxies to destroy Israel to one that puts him in sync with current liberal fashion.
He has frequently repeated the key mantras of Hamas propaganda that falsely accuse the Jewish state of “genocide” in Gaza. And, like the vast majority of Senate Democrats, he is in favor of an arms embargo on Israel that would essentially force it to surrender to foes whose goal is a real genocide of the population of the one Jewish state on the planet. He has also campaigned against the supposed “corrupt” and “foreign” influence of AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobby, which his ally, Mamdani, smeared as “monsters.”
Since the war on the Jews has, incredibly, become even more important to the base of the Democratic Party than the economic issues that once motivated most of its members, the fact that Goldman’s wife, Corrine Levy Goldman, is an enthusiastic supporter of Israel who criticized woke Jew-haters on social media meant that he was toast.
Lander is not as radical as Darializa Chevalier, who defeated another incumbent, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, in the primary in New York’s 13th district. Chevalier actually took part in a demonstration on Oct. 8, 2023, where she helped celebrate Hamas and defend the massacre of Jews. But with his willingness to repeat the blood libels about Jews committing “genocide” —when, in fact, they are the intended victims of an actual genocide planned by Palestinian Arabs and their supporters—made him acceptable to the new dominant faction within his party. Like the management of Poetica, left-wing Democrats will make an exception for Jews willing to support the slaughter of half of the world’s Jewish population that resides in the world’s only Jewish state.
Anti-Zionism is antisemitic by definition, since it seeks to deny rights to Jews that no one would think to take away from any other people and to normalize their delegitimization and victimization by bloodthirsty terrorists. The real “genocide enablers” are not those Jews who won’t endorse patently false accusations of Israeli criminality. That label is better applied to those who cheer for Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, or who regularly regurgitate antisemitic propaganda about Israelis.
Antisemitic Jews
Some liberals point to Lander’s Jewish background and the ubiquitous presence of anti-Zionist Jews in Mamdani’s coterie, as well as sprinkled throughout the intersectional left’s efforts to purge Israel-supporters, whether or not they are Jews. But that effort to refute accusations of antisemitism rings hollow.
These Jews are the 21st-century version of past instances in which Jews joined their oppressors, either out of a misguided belief that this would earn their acceptance or a genuine conviction that Jewish identity and beliefs were evil, as was the case with Communist theorist Karl Marx. That was also true of the Jewish Bolsheviks who made up the Yevsektsiya, the bureau devoted to eradicating Jewish life in the first decades of the Soviet Union. Mamdani’s Jews and members of anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, who have joined the shock troops of the far left’s attempt to revive Communism, are their heirs.
The question facing Americans is whether the victories earned by these forces of intolerance for Jews are just a passing phase that will soon fade or a turning point for American society.
When considering this question, it’s possible to consider the coffee-shop incident as just another instance in which an era of hyper-partisanship has legitimized the sort of uncivil behavior that has been directed at conservative Republicans. For example, in 2018, then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (now governor of Arkansas) was asked to leave a Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, because its owner was opposed to the Trump administration.
But the manager of Poetica, who took to social media to denounce Goldman (who had only purchased a cup of coffee as a thank you for its staff allowing his 7-year-old daughter to use the restroom) and actually posted a screenshot of him at their cash register, wasn’t acting as a partisan. The point of his action was the conviction that discriminating against the overwhelming majority of Jews who won’t join attacks on the besieged Jewish state is what righteous liberals are obligated to do.
This nasty behavior is significant because it was the reason that Goldman was defeated in a district where people who share this hateful belief predominate. And as Democratic primaries around the country show, such results are no longer outliers.
The mainstream liberal media has normalized antisemitism since Oct. 7. With blood libels like The New York Times’ absurd claim that Israelis trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners accepted as truth rather than fiction, we can’t be surprised that rank-and-file liberal Democrats, who make up more than 90% of its readership, should draw conclusions from such screeds. Anyone who won’t parrot these lies is someone whom they think deserves to be targeted for discrimination. And once you go there, it isn’t much of a leap to decide that such persons don’t merely deserve to be voted out of office, but to be targeted for humiliation and, ultimately, violence.
Will decency prevail?
All of Goldman’s wealth, his attempt to use the law to target Trump and his perfect liberal voting record didn’t save him from this kind of treatment. And the same will be true of every other liberal Jew who won’t bend the knee to the left on Israel as did Lander.
It is possible to argue that such extremism is a prescription of political doom for the left. Antisemitism has always been a political loser in American politics. Most Americans never voted for the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that is inextricably linked to Jew-hatred. Trump’s 2024 victory was largely the result of a sense that Democrats had tipped too far to the left on a host of social and cultural issues that most citizens regarded as bizarre and wrongheaded.
But in 2026, Democrats appear to be doubling down on the very same laundry list of woke beliefs with hatred for Israel at the very top. And, though antisemites have been repeatedly defeated in Republican primaries this year, the willingness of Vice President JD Vance to continue to legitimize the far-right’s Jew-hating podcasters like Tucker Carlson and their enablers like Megyn Kelly illustrates that similar ideas are also having an impact on the GOP and the political right.
Turning these trends around will require genuine leadership by America’s political, cultural and religious thought leaders in the coming months and years, as well as punishment at the polls for Mamdani and his fellow extremists outside of deep urban enclaves. Trusting in the common sense and decency of the American people has been a formula for Jewish acceptance and success for the last 250 years.
Contrary to the prevailing narrative that Jewish liberals have long accepted about this country, Jews are not victims in America, but fellow stakeholders in a republic where Jewish life was cherished. But the demise of Dan Goldman forces even the most sanguine observers to ponder whether that faith in the exceptional nature of the American experiment in constitutional democracy will continue to be justified.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
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