Joel Rubin joined Bernie Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign as its Jewish outreach director. His job was to build a coalition of Jewish Democrats who could support both Israel and a progressive agenda. He discovered quickly that the coalition he was asked to build was not one the campaign's activist base actually wanted.
Many of the organizers surrounding the campaign, Rubin writes, were not looking for a two-state solution. They opposed Israel's existence altogether.
Six years later, Rubin's assessment has grown sharper. 'Anti-Zionism,' he writes, 'is no longer one position among many in the Democratic Party; it has increasingly become the boundary marker separating the politically acceptable Jew from the politically suspect one.' The Democratic Socialists of America, he argues, have made hostility to Israel a defining litmus test for the left — more than healthcare, more than immigration, more than any domestic policy question.
And Sanders, in Rubin's telling, is not a bystander. 'My former boss,' Rubin writes, 'and the broader left-wing activist infrastructure that surrounds him, are actively fueling antisemitism in this country.'
Elsewhere in the week's coverage, Representative Ro Khanna posted a video on X decrying what he called a 'disturbing number of black Americans found hanging from trees,' suggesting the deaths could be evidence of a resurgence of anti-black lynching. According to The Free Press's editors, Khanna 'failed to mention any of the evidence that casts doubt on whether the deaths he invokes were caused by racism.'
The two stories are not unrelated. They describe the same political motion: a faction of the American left that has learned to treat inflammatory framing as a substitute for evidence, and that measures ideological seriousness by the intensity of the grievance performed rather than the rigor of the argument made.
Rubin's account deserves to be read on its own terms. He is not a conservative critic firing from outside. He is a Jewish Democrat who believed, in early 2020, that the Sanders coalition had room for people like him. The record of what he found — and what has happened since — is the kind of primary-source testimony that cuts through the usual noise.
What the record shows is a party in which a specific kind of Jew is welcome: one who treats Israel as an embarrassment, or worse. That is not pluralism. It is a new orthodoxy, and it carries a cost that goes well beyond electoral politics.
The principle at stake is simple. A political movement that makes ethnic or religious identity a loyalty test — that decides which members of a minority group are 'politically acceptable' based on their views of a foreign country — has abandoned the liberal tradition it claims to defend. The free-market, free-society case for ordered pluralism rests on the idea that individuals are not reducible to their group, and that no institution gets to decide which version of your identity is the correct one. When a major American political party begins sorting Jews into acceptable and suspect categories, that principle is not being bent. It is being broken.
