The Blogs: From ‘Punch a Nazi’ to nominate one

Less than a decade ago, “Punch a Nazi” was the moral shorthand of progressive politics. This week, the Democratic Party effectively nominated one for the United States Senate.

There is no graceful way to begin a sentence with the words, “My friend has a Totenkopf tattoo,” and Graham Platner is not my friend. He is, as of this week, the presumptive Democratic nominee for United States Senate from the State of Maine. The party that once promised to “punch Nazis” has decided to elect one, and we are supposed to call it progress.

I do not use that word loosely. Graham Platner says he is not a Nazi. He simply chose, around 2007, to put a Totenkopf on his chest, the death’s-head insignia of the SS unit that ran the camps. He has said he did not know what it meant. CNN’s KFile, his own deleted Reddit posts, and a former acquaintance who recalled him calling it “my Totenkopf” tell another story. He has since covered the tattoo with a Celtic knot and a dog. We are expected to be reassured by the dog.

When Governor Janet Mills suspended her primary on April 30, Platner was the apparent winner. Chuck Schumer, who had personally recruited Mills against Platner, endorsed Platner the same day. Chris Van Hollen has appeared on television to defend him. The party has decided that Susan Collins’s seat is worth more than its discomfort with a candidate who praised Hamas’s tactics on Reddit in 2014, calls Israel a “terrorist state,” accuses the Jewish state of genocide, and told an audience that the real number of Israelis murdered on October 7 was not 1,200 but “600 military members.” Rounding down the dead is not a policy disagreement; it is a category of speech we should know on sight.

The ADL, the Jewish Democratic Council of America, and Maine’s only Jewish federation have said publicly that this candidacy worries them. Democrats, even some Jews, endorsed Platner anyway. That contrast is the whole story of progressive Jewish politics in 2026. Some of us still have eyes.

Modern Jewish life in the West has rested on a wager that the great liberal projects would treat Jews as full citizens because they treated everyone as full citizens. The wager has been good. It still is. But it required, on both flanks of the political map, a baseline refusal to flirt with the ideologies as well as the symbols and slogans that have killed us. That baseline is eroding. On the right, it winks at the conspiracy fringe. On the left, in Maine and across the country, in the willingness of senior Democrats to wave through a man whose résumé reads like a content warning.

So what do American Jews do?

Stop pretending. The party of Henry Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Joe Lieberman is being pulled, hard, by a faction that treats Zionism as the world’s original sin. That faction has been organizing patiently for a decade. It is not a fringe. In Maine, it is the nominee. Across America its politicians make life dangerous for Jews and dismiss the consequences.

Organize as Jews, not as partisans. Pro-Israel Democrats must be honest about it on the left, including in the calculations of their Senate leadership. A community that cannot tell the truth about both sides will be useful to neither.

Vote and give accordingly. Susan Collins has earned a serious second look from Jewish Mainers. So has every Democrat in a contested primary willing to say plainly that Platner is not normal.

Zachor, remember, is a commandment, not a mood. The Jewish people are not an interest group. We are a covenant people. Covenants are not negotiated away to keep a coalition together. If the Democratic Party has decided that we are negotiable, our answer should be firm and unmistakable. We are not. We never were. And we will vote, give, organize, and remember accordingly.

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