THE ANTISEMITISM IS CONSIDERED A FEATURE NOT A BUG: Wall Street Journal: Democrats Risk Long-Lasting Rift Over Israel-Hamas War

To liberal Jews devastated by scenes of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, the ensuing weeks have shattered illusions of solidarity, says Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and director of the Anti-Defamation League. College students and faculty, as well as local chapters of Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Socialists of America, have justified or even celebrated Hamas’s actions, while many others have emphasized the Palestinians’ plight and criticism of Israel over sympathy for the victims of the terrorist attacks.

“It has been an incredibly clarifying and terrifying moment at the same time for many progressive Jews,” Greenblatt said. “They’re calling me, tweeting, messaging, expressing shock and sadness that the people they marched with, the causes they marched for, have abandoned them in their hour of need.”

What left-leaning Jews Jews need to understand that the antisemitism they are seeing is partly but not solely ideological. While some Jews have drunk the far-left Kool-Aid, American Jews are an overall moderating influence on the left and the Democratic Party. In 2020, for example, Jewish Democrats supported Bernie Sanders at the lowest rate of just about any demographic, around 10%.

Jews were once much more drawn to the far left, but those days are gone—because Jews (and of course I’m generalizing here) thrive in meritocracy, because Jews are grateful to be Americans and see the US as a force for good in the world, because Jews can’t accept ideologically driven binaries that make Jews, in Israel and otherwise, into the inherent aggressors and because such binaries are secularized products of god/devil theology that is not part of Judaism, because societal instability is almost always bad for Jews, and because Jews are well-represented in the establishment that the far left wants to tear down.

So rather than try to extinguish antisemitism in their ranks, many on the far left want to fan it, to drive Jews out, so they can be replaced by Kendi-ites. The fact that Jews are repelled by antisemitism spewing from the far left is not a bug but a feature. It’s not a coincidence, for a while, that everyone of the “antiracist heroes” in Kendi and Reynolds’ Stamped: A Remix has a history of making antisemitic comments.

It might be possible to change people’s minds about ideology. But given that the far left thinks that the quest for political power runs through tossing all but the most extremist Jews from the movement, Jews need to understand that they are facing an implacable enemy, not the sincere but misguided. Once they recognize that, those who thought these folks were their “allies” should start to consider what else they got wrong…