Rep. Becca Balint helped Sen. Bernie Sanders craft and lead efforts to cut US arms sales to Israel, wrote an op-ed calling Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide” and has stood proudly with fellow progressives for two decades. But Balint was wincing last week as she stood on the steps of the Capitol, recounting the warning she gave her congressional staff.
“I know at some point there will be a day of reckoning, because I still believe that Jews should have a homeland,” the Vermont Democrat told CNN. “There will be people, I think some of my own supporters, who will turn on me, because I still believe in a two-state solution. I still do. I still believe that Israel should be safe and secure. I believe that the Palestinians have been so ill-treated for so long and deserve a safe and secure homeland. I do not believe Israel should be dismantled.”
Balint described being “shaken to my core” watching the video of Scott Wiener, the California state senator running for retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s seat, recently being hounded out of a transgender rights event with angry shouts including, “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of sh*t!”
She described a familiar ache. Like the people who tell her that homophobia doesn’t exist and then ask her what it means that she’s a lesbian. Like the House Democratic colleague she wouldn’t name who she says came to a bipartisan antisemitism taskforce meeting and said, “I didn’t really think there was any antisemitism anymore, because all the Jews are rich.” Like the people who accuse Jewish politicians of having dual loyalty.
For many liberals, longtime policy priorities like universal healthcare or stopping climate change are now intertwined with opposing Israel. An ascendant faction of the left argues there’s no such thing anymore as “progressive except for Palestine” — a phrase that took off in the years following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack and the ensuing war in Gaza — and sees opposition to Israel as a Democratic litmus test.
The same day as the trans rights event in San Francisco, a woman stood behind Sen. Jon Ossoff in Savannah, Georgia, wearing a “Protect Trans Kids” T-shirt and a keffiyeh — the scarf associated with Palestinian identity — decorated with the rainbow colors of LGBTQ solidarity.
Many progressive Jewish leaders, including those who are critical of the Israeli government, like Balint and Wiener, see some expressions of sentiment around Israel as rationalizing antisemitism. They point to references to Jewish or Israeli interests nefariously controlling politics with money or suggesting that Jews aren’t fully loyal to America or to Democratic values.
“When they were saying things like my ‘Israeli masters’ and my ‘Zionist handlers,’ that made really clear where these folks were coming from,” Wiener told CNN. He said his phone was flooded messages of concern and solidarity from Jewish politicians from across the country, with a wide range of views on Israel, as well as some non-Jewish Democrats and other progressives.
What the video of Wiener captured, a wide range of Jewish Democratic leaders tell CNN, is why it’s become a conventional political conversation to wonder aloud whether a Jewish candidate should even try to run for president.
“A lot of progressive Jews have felt like we’ve been pushed out of progressive spaces,” added Wiener, who now refers to Israel as having committed genocide in Gaza after previously refusing to do so. “And that’s not just me: I hear that all the time, very lefty Jews who are put to a litmus test that you have to call for Israel’s destruction, or you are not actually LGBTQ and you’re not welcome here.”
Mark Levine, the New York City comptroller, won his office last year in the same election as Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has said that “the struggle for Palestinian liberation was at the core of my politics and continues to be.” Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has called for “the end of Israel’s colonization and occupation of all Arab lands.”
“There are certainly folks on the left who are exuberant right now and feel very much included in the DSA momentum, but I think it’s fair to say that many, and probably a majority, of Jewish Democrats are feeling pretty isolated right now,” Levine said.
Levine lives in the district where Darializa Avila Chevalier toppled Rep. Adriano Espaillat by centering her campaign on opposing Israel’s control of Gaza and the West Bank and linking it to gentrification in New York. She blamed both situations on “folks who are coming in, claiming the land and buying it up and kicking the people who are living there out.”
Days before the victories of Avila Chevalier and two other candidates Mamdani backed, the mayor gave a speech calling the American Israel Public Affairs Committee “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.”
Espaillat, who had AIPAC’s support, became one of three House Democrats in eight days to lose primaries.
New York Rep. Dan Goldman was soundly defeated by Brad Lander, who is also Jewish, after facing criticism about his support of Israel, refusal to refer to the war in Gaza as a genocide and his opposition to Mamdani. And Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, a progressive 15-term incumbent, lost to Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist who called for generational change. Kiros also noted she was fired from a law firm for refusing to take down a letter she wrote after the October 7 attacks opposing the existence of Israel, but argued that this should not be conflated with antisemitism.
Days before his primary, Goldman was banned from a coffee shop whose owners accused him of being a “genocide enabler” who gets his money from AIPAC.
“The experience of being a Jewish Democrat is to feel like … no matter what the topic — it can be affordable housing — it’s just a matter of time before someone links it to Israel,” Levine said. “What is the list of litmus test issues? As far as I know, at this point, it is exclusively a list of questions on Israel. We’re progressives. We’re absolutely willing to criticize the actions of the current government of Israel. And we are. But we’re feeling excluded from many spaces right now, and it’s hard to conclude it’s not because we’re Jewish.”
Michigan state Rep. Noah Arbit invoked the 2024 protest vote effort against then-President and candidate Joe Biden over the war in Gaza. Arbit said the party was on the brink of seeing a “mirror image of the Uncommitted movement — it is exactly the same situation.”
“I don’t see this as a right or left issue,” he said. “I see this as the unmasking of American antisemitism under the guise of criticism of Israel.”
Arbit had his bar mitzvah at and represents the West Bloomfield synagogue that was attacked in March in apparent retaliation for Israeli strikes in Lebanon. He described a deep alienation that goes beyond the statehouse.
“After I leave office, I’m not sure I’ll ever call myself a Democrat again,” Arbit said. “I don’t know how Jews can feel like you can align yourself with any political movement when the grassroots are so hostile to who you are and your community.”
Nowhere is the Democratic fracture more in play than in Michigan, a state with significant Jewish and Arab populations with an upcoming primary for an open Senate seat that’s a must-win for Democrats.
Abdul El-Sayed, a former county health director, is drawing heavily from Bernie Sanders-style politics, including supporting “Medicare for All,” but also centering his campaign on attacking AIPAC and criticizing Israel, which has helped him capture the left.
AIPAC’s allied super PAC has committed at least $20 million so to boosting Rep. Haley Stevens against El-Sayed, according to AdImpact, in what became a head-to-head race this weekend after state Sen. Mallory McMorrow ended her campaign.
El-Sayed, who is Egyptian American and a Muslim, links how people view Israel to how they will deliver on other progressive priorities and called it a “moral Rorschach test.”
“If you can’t speak to the absolute worst thing that people can do to other people, it’s hard to take seriously when you say that you’re going to stand in the cut and be a protector for the people in your own communities,” he told CNN.
That argument gives Amanda Berman, the founder and CEO of Zioness, a group with the tagline “Unabashedly Progressive. Unapologetically Zionist,” what she said is a “physical, visceral reaction: I experience it as antisemitism.”
“The idea that my liberation movement is a threat to your health insurance or food security in America — those ideas are as old as ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’” Berman said, citing the 20th century antisemitic book purporting to reveal a conspiracy of Jews running the world. The book was published first in Russia, eventually used by the Nazis as inspiration and is invoked in antisemitic rhetoric today.
“Would you tell me how bombing tens of thousands of children is a liberation movement? That’s an interesting use of the word ‘liberation,’” El-Sayed said when told of that response.
Not opposing Israel, El-Sayed said, is proof of being captive to corporate dominance and afraid of AIPAC. El-Sayed recently told Semafor that Stevens “is a suit with a large AIPAC bank account, that’s it. I hope maybe they find some way to teach her how to string together two coherent sentences.”
Asked whether he believed that support of Israel could not be about money, El-Sayed told CNN, “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights.” Asked whether one could be a Zionist and a progressive, he said, “Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.”
He declined when pressed by CNN’s Kasie Hunt to answer whether he believed Israel has a right to exist.
“The question of Israel’s existence is not a question,” he told Hunt. “I’m not going to play this gotcha game about whether or not it has a right to exist. The question, ultimately, is about whether or not we want a politics that dignifies equal rights.”
Stevens’ campaign pointed to a Monday appearance on MS NOW in which she criticized President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not bringing the region closer to “long-term peace.”
“There is a difference between me and Abdul,” she said. “I believe in a two-state solution. I want to see the people of Palestine and in Gaza live peacefully, side by side, with the people of Israel. He cannot qualify Israel’s right to exist.”
Asked by CNN whether he believes one can be a progressive and believe in a Jewish state as a Jewish homeland, Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, gave a straightforward “yes.”
“If we want to promote safety for all people and fight antisemitism here at home, it actually does no favors to any of that to then say questioning the continued military funding is antisemitic or is trying to take down the nation,” he added. “Progressives have to, and have been, speaking out strongly against antisemitism. And we have a responsibility to speak out against human rights violations and war crimes no matter who commits them.”
Casar noted that in May’s runoff elections in Texas, he endorsed the more moderate Johnny Garcia in a House primary over another candidate, Maureen Galindo, because Galindo said she wanted to turn an immigration detention center into “a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.”
Kiros, who defeated incumbent DeGette in last month’s Colorado primaries, declined to call antisemitic the firebombing of protesters in Boulder who were calling on Hamas to release Israeli hostages. That led Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who won the gubernatorial nomination that same evening, to say in a local TV interview, “If someone isn’t going to acknowledge that, I am concerned about that.”
“You hear it a lot in the context of Black Lives Matter. Now we’re talking Jewish lives matter,” said Weiser, who is Jewish and whose mother was born in a Nazi concentration camp.
Balint, the Vermont Democratic congresswoman, acknowledged her attempts to force a bigger discussion about antisemitism have failed, despite her faith in Casar to guide fellow progressives.
“People are very afraid to create a space within Congress to have a safe conversation about these things, because our colleagues leak and our colleagues go on Twitter, and so I think there has been a real fear that convening people to really talk through these issues is going make it worse,” Balint told CNN. “But I know that these things don’t go away.”
Republicans including former Vice President Mike Pence and Ted Cruz have warned of the rise of antisemitism on the right, with the Texas senator saying at the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in June it is “spreading like a cancer” and is “an existential threat.”
Trump hasn’t just hosted White nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago; he’s for years blurred the lines on American Jews and support for Israeli actions, from calling Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in Washington, “a Palestinian,” to just last week in a CNBC interview saying, “How a Jewish person can vote for a Democrat is beyond me — I’ve been the best president in the history of Israel.”
That just adds to the feeling of political homelessness for pro-Israel Democrats, just two years after CNN exit polls showed Kamala Harris winning 78% of Jewish voters over Trump even as she lost the election. CNN polling this March found 72% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they saw the question of “how supportive of Israel the US should be” as a divide that’s causing problems in the Democratic Party.
Harris did forcefully move against more pro-Palestinian politics in 2024 — with her team excluding the Uncommitted movement from speaking at the party convention in Chicago. Part of why, her old aides now say, was trying to find a balance between losing support in Arab American centers like Dearborn, Michigan, and losing support among Jewish voters in that state and other battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Harris may run again in 2028. Party insiders and outsiders speculate that as many as four Jewish candidates could also enter the White House field: former Chicago Mayor and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Ossoff (who has brushed off talk of a possible bid), Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Emanuel, whose middle name is literally Israel, is following up an April call to end US military aid to Israel with a speech in Tel Aviv on Wednesday calling for a larger rethinking of the US-Israel relationship. He likes to say that “the Democratic Party doesn’t have an antisemitism problem — America has an antisemitism problem.”
But as he flirts with a 2028 run, Emanuel said he’s not the one who needs to look in the mirror when the conversation comes up about whether a Jewish person could run.
“My faith is not your issue. It’s a fact that Americans have lost faith in America. That’s the issue and that’s what we should work on,” he told CNN, “and if my faith is an issue to you, that’s something you have to work on, not me.”
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