The party’s over
Steny Hoyer (D-MD), a congressman for the past 45 years, will retire in January. A stalwart supporter of Israel throughout his tenure in congress, Hoyer epitomizes the type of Democrat that is rapidly disappearing.
Indeed, Hoyer represents another time – a time when most Democrats stood with the Jewish state. A recent Gallup poll revealed that while 70% of Republicans are pro-Israel, only 17% of Democrats are.
Capturing the isolation he now feels as a Democrat who supports Israel, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) said, “It’s become lonely.”
In Congress, the two antisemitic Republicans, Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Thomas Massie, have been thrown into the dustbin of congressional history. However, the number of antisemites on the Democrats’ side continues to grow.
In November 2025, 22 Democrats co-sponsored a house resolution accusing Israel of committing genocide. Indeed, it takes a particular combination of evil and ignorance to accuse Israel of genocide, a word coined to describe the Holocaust, but now used to describe a lie that is easily disprovable.
In April, 40 out of 47 Democratic senators voted to block arm sales to Israel.
In July, 103 Democratic representatives voted to end aid to Israel, but at the same time, no Democrat voted in favor of ending aid to Jordan.
Many Democrats now fail to recognize the importance of supporting the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is an imperfect country worthy of criticism like any other, but unlike any other, it is a tiny country confronting on seven fronts, terrorists seeking its destruction.
One can only imagine the damage Democrats will do if they regain control of Congress.
However, it’s not only Congress where Democrats have abandoned the Jewish people. NYC’s Mayor Mamdani picked 18 people to serve on a judicial panel, but it turns out that 18 (chai) is not always a lucky number for Jews. In a city where an estimated 50% of lawyers are Jewish, not one of his picks was. Although Mamdani denied that he intentionally excluded Jews, there is a 1 in 262,144 chance of this randomly occurring.
Moreover, Mamdani was the first mayor in over 60 years to skip the Israel Day Parade, yet he attended the parade celebrating Pakistan, a country where Christians are killed for practicing their faith and honor killings of women occur.
Mamdani, a socialist who speaks of equity and fairness, is okay with Muslims controlling 99.9% of the land in the Middle East but is against Jews having self-determination in the other 1/10th of 1%.
Also now under fire in the Democratic Party is the lobbying group AIPAC. Although it receives no money from the Israeli government and its members and donors are all American citizens, an increasing number of Democrats now refuse to accept its money. When AIPAC successfully helped oust antisemitic representatives, such as Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman, many complained. On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that Democrats would object if the NAACP helped unseat a racist congressional member.
It’s not just moderates and registered independents like me who are disheartened with the party. Some ardent, hard left Democrats have also started sounding the alarm.
Jonathan Greenblatt, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, said the Democratic Party has an antisemitism problem that can be defined in three letters: DSA – Discrimination, Stereotyping, and Antisemitism.
Ammiel Hirsch, a reform rabbi and president of the NY Board of Rabbis, cautioned that Jews should not be loyal to any party. Instead, they “need to demand that the political parties earn our vote.”
Joel Rubin, who worked for Bernie Sanders, noted that political parties die when they kick out the Jews. He said that some of the most iconic Democrats such as Louis D. Brandeis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg would not be welcome in the party today, and he called on all Jews to speak up.
Saying “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. They left me”, Alan Dershowitz, a lifelong Democrat who cast his first presidential vote for John Kennedy, recently registered as a Republican.
In fact, it was Robert Kennedy who in 1948 said that Jews were the reason that the Arab population in Palestine almost doubled to 1.2 million between 1932 and 1944.
Kennedy referenced a pamphlet published by the Christian Council on Palestine which said, “All authorities, including Palestine Government officials and British investigating commissions not particularly favorable to Zionism, agree that Palestine’s extraordinary progress has been due primarily to Jewish zeal and enterprise, and to the capital and labor brought in by Jewish immigrants. The extraordinary growth of the Arab population is primarily due to the reduction of the death rate, directly traceable to the better economic and health conditions introduced by the Jews.”
Today, however, documented historical facts such as these are ignored as many prefer to espouse a fictitious narrative that paints Israel as a villain that colonized the land.
Just as too many Republicans have adopted the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, too many Democrats are spreading lies about Jews and Israel, and antisemitism has always been fueled by lies.
Championing every other minority while embracing antisemitism, the Democratic Party has forsaken the Jewish people who have long supported it, and in doing so, has lost its moral high ground.
Farewell, Steny Hoyer. So long to truth, reason, and justice. When it comes to the Democratic Party, for the Jewish people, indeed the party’s over.
