Memo to American Jews: Look left and take stock
The relentless drumbeat of lies about “evil Israel” is taking its toll across major sectors of society.
By Henry Kopel
JNS
Jul 22, 2025
Jews overwhelmingly lean liberal and vote Democrat, as I myself did for many years. Back in the 20th century, this made sense, given the antisemitism of conservative regimes from which so many Jews had fled, and the welcome for Jewish immigrants offered by urban Democratic political machines. Hitler’s far-right ideology reinforced American Jews’ aversion to things deemed “conservative,” and U.S. President Harry Truman’s prompt recognition of Israel during its perilous founding hours strengthened that party allegiance.
That history does much to explain the “liberal Democrat” imprint in the cultural DNA of American Jewry. However, the landscape that shaped that history has long since been washed away and paved over. The contemporary Democratic Party and many of its core constituencies have moved to the far left, and provide cover for some of the most illiberal and antisemitic agendas on the political chessboard. However, many Jewish leaders still focus more on threats from the far right, remaining blind to the scope of this tectonic left-side shift. They have yet to fully comprehend the left’s commitment to both the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of Israel supporters from civic life.
Two sets of facts are critical to understanding this political transformation. First is the recognition that outbreaks of leftist antisemitism are not just unconnected “one-offs.” Rather, they now reflect the left’s having captured large parts of America’s opinion-shaping institutions: the universities, K-12 schools, teachers’ unions, legacy media, and now, the Democratic Party. Second is recognizing and exposing the three big lies about Israel that the left disseminates through those institutions.
Taking the second fact set first, the three great falsehoods now super-spread by the left and its allies are, first, that Israel was a colonialist project when Israel is the epitome of decolonialism, being a globally persecuted people finally returned to their indigenous homeland. Second, that Israel’s modern-day founding in 1948 involved genocide of the Palestinian Arabs when, in fact, Israel’s founders agreed to yield much of their indigenous land for an adjacent Palestinian state, while it was the Palestinian Arabs who attempted a genocide of the new Israeli state. Third, that Israel denies Palestinian sovereignty when, in fact, Israel has at least six times since 1937 endorsed specific proposals for a sovereign Palestinian state, all rejected by Palestinian leaders.
The truth is the very opposite of the lies: Israelis have tried for nearly a century to help foster an independent Palestinian state alongside them, while, for their part, the Palestinians have never wavered from their endless public incitement calling for Israel’s destruction.
These are far from the only defamatory lies about Israel that the left and its allies propagate. But the especially wide dissemination of those three core falsehoods, which paint Israel in such an evil light, does much to explain why so many other lies about Israel are now readily accepted as if they were true.
As noted, the other critical fact set is the scope of the left’s institutional captures. Among the first to fall were campus departments of Middle East Studies, as thoroughly documented by historian Martin Kramer. Across America, those academic centers promote as true the three big lies catalogued above. The left subsequently captured other liberal arts fields, such as history, sociology and the various “identity studies” departments. They now all recycle en masse the same defamatory lies about Israel.
Those lies are also now spread in K-12 schools through a set of curricula drafted by far-left professors and activists. One representative example is California’s “Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” used in several school districts to satisfy the state’s ethnic-studies mandate. This curriculum (more accurately called propaganda) “den[ies] that Jews are indigenous to the Middle East,” and falsely teaches that “Israel is a ‘colonialist’ and ‘settler state’ founded through ‘genocide,’ ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘apartheid.’”
Just a week ago, the NEA—the nation’s largest K-12 teachers’ union—voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League and thus expel ADL’s Holocaust education programs from its classrooms. Fortunately, the vote did not pass. A Massachusetts legislative hearing last February revealed a slew of explicitly antisemitic teaching materials promulgated across the state’s classrooms by the NEA’s state affiliate.
Those who merely support Israel’s right to exist in peace, which includes at least 85% of American Jews, are now targeted for expulsion from campus student governments, literary festivals and other civic involvements.
Most alarming, however, is the embrace of the big lies about Israel by leading Democratic politicians and the widespread refusal by party leaders to dissociate from them. When New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist frontrunner to be the next mayor of New York City, defended the Palestinian movement’s use of the phrase “Globalize the intifada” (i.e., inciting mass murder of Jews worldwide, including in the United States), the Democratic Party’s national chairman refused to condemn that incitement to antisemitic slaughter. Other leading Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), have endorsed Mamdani. All this is distressingly consistent with the rising hostility to Israel among the Democrats’ voting base. A Pew poll from April of this year found that 69% of Democrats “express unfavorable opinions of Israel,” as compared with just 37% of Republicans.
The relentless drumbeat of lies about “evil Israel” is taking its toll across major sectors of American life.
It explains the shocking explosion of pro-Hamas protests on American campuses after Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which led to the murder of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of 251 others into Gaza, 50 of whom remain captive. And it also explains the brutal executions and firebombings of peaceful Jews across America, whose assailants robotically utter “Free Palestine” and the same false defamations of Israel that universities, media and left-leaning politicians do so much to promulgate.
Unlike the far right, which has long been ostracized from most opinion-shaping institutions, the antisemitic left now leads those institutions. It is the principal disseminator of the ideology behind the violence that now threatens the lives and safety of Jews across the country.
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