For American Jews, October 7 changed next to nothing

There is nothing new in a Democratic president promising he’s “got Israel’s back” while stabbing it in the front. There is nothing new in a Democratic presidency orienting America’s Middle East policy around the terrorist regime in Iran.

The libel that Israel trains American police in killing black men was shouted on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The Women’s March, an astroturfed attempt to unseat the newly elected Donald Trump in 2017, collapsed when its leaders were exposed as antisemitic.

The Palestinian flag, the totem of haters across the Western world, was omnipresent at the George Floyd riots of 2020. In Los Angeles that summer, the pursuit of “racial justice” inspired Floydian rioters to smash up Jewish-owned shops.

“They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware… this is a movement,” the Democratic candidate for vice president, Kamala Harris, said as the 2020 protests were ongoing. “They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November. They’re not gonna stop after Election Day… and they should not.”

Harris now finds her “movement” has gone rogue, Golem-style, in an election year. The Democratic Party’s strategic cultivation of what, if it were in any other country, would be called a street militia was obvious to anyone who was half-awake a decade ago. So was the racism of the “social justice” left.

So was the determination of the major Jewish organisations, the ADL and the AJC especially, to deny that the alliance between the Jews and the Democrats had become the political equivalent of an abusive marriage.

The reaction to October 7 has revealed that Israel, and even Jewish civil rights in America, have become partisan fodder for the culture war.

No one was slumbering more deeply and complacently before October 7 than the major Jewish communal organisations and the liberal Jewish congregations. No one is more distressed by the interruption of their historic slumber than their common donor base, affluent suburban liberals. Major organisations such as the ADL and the AJC were supposed to secure the Jews’ hard-won place in American life by managing political relationships with Washington DC.

Instead, they pursued partisanship in an era of declining bipartisanship and sleepwalked American Jews into the biggest crisis in their modern history.

The biggest change since October 7 is that Jewish America’s soft middle can no longer deny that the universities and the Democratic Party, the institutions which carried American Jews to a comfort and influence unparalleled in Jewish history, turned against them years ago, while the institutions that were supposed to protect them, the big communal organisations, sold them out to a party that despises them.

This upsets the average American Jew far more than the Democrats’ turn against Israel.

Until they change how they vote, however, nothing will change.