The Prime Minister, the Senator—and the Clown

New York is the largest Jewish city in the world. A million Jews—12% of the city—live in New York with another half million in the surrounding metro area. So months ago when communist Muslim mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani plainly declared Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state, that this rogue nation was engaging in genocide in Gaza, and should he be elected and the Israeli prime minister dare to set foot in New York, he’d honor a sham arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Benjamin Netanyahu and order him taken into custody, some pundits assumed Mamdani was simply writing off the Jewish vote.

Yet political prognosticators have been stunned time and again as over the decades the Democrat Party has made their disdain for their Jewish constituency painfully clear, repeatedly giving support to some of the US’ greatest anti-Semites—Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Keith Ellison, Linda Sarsour, et al—yet inexplicably all the while losing not a whit of backing from a Jewish-American electorate that votes overwhelmingly, 75%, for that same Democrat Party now bizarrely chanting “from the river to the sea!” Zohran Mamdani took the measure of New York Jews who had put up with their children been hounded, harassed and assaulted on New York city college campuses, who’d taken their lumps when Al Sharpton led “get the Jew!” riots in Crown Heights, who’d lately become the targets of “progressive” urban thuggery’s new urban sport of knocking the shtreimels and yamakas off the heads of passing strangers, and cannily decided he had every reason to bank on their electoral submission.

Mamdani correctly gambled that there’s nothing the Democrats can say or do, no offense so grievous and shocking, no betrayal of their Jewish constituency that would cause Jews to refrain from still voting for them. And his appraisal was borne out; an astonishing one third of Jewish New York voters cast their ballots for the mayoral candidate who declared in plain English that when the Israeli prime minister next visits New York he’d do everything in his power to effect his arrest.

A few days ago, 7-21-2026, in an interview with the New York Times, the mayor doubled down on his patently absurd, yet purposefully insulting to Jews, threat against the Israeli prime minister. And this time—finally—the Marxist Muslim mayor got some push back. It didn’t come from Jews though, and not even from New Yorkers. It was Democrat Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania who clapped back, and just like Mr. Mamdani, the senator didn’t mince words.

Senator John Fetterman is at the forefront of a last ditch effort among the few remaining sane liberal voices dead set against the cultural suicide running amok in the Democrat Party. He’s no proponent of erased borders, defunded police, or men in dresses lurking in women’s bathrooms. He doesn’t cheer when traitorous mobs burn American flags or vandalize national monuments. And he’s a die-hard, shoulder to shoulder, ally of Israel. Senator Fetterman called Mamdani a “clown” and suggested the mayor’s best course was to “sit down”—leaving off the implied “and shut up.”

Senator Fetterman is warning his keffiyeh-wearing, Jew-hating party that he is at a breaking point, a “red line” in his words, with their sickening anti-Semitism; any more of it and he’ll be forced to part ways with the Democrats. But Jews are running out of champions like John Fetterman. The time has long since come when they’re going to have to stand up for themselves. And the first baby-step for Jewish-Americans to recover their dignity, their spines, and their self-respect is to dissolve their ties with a party which trumpets to the world their utter contempt for Jews.

Jewish-Americans’ decades-long loyalty to the Democrats has been repaid by repeated kicks in the teeth. American Jews must now pick themselves up, dust themselves off and offer their allegiance to a party that shares their millennia-old commitment to God, country, family, hard-work, scholarship, and tradition.

That’s not the Democrat party; not anymore, and certainly not as far as Jews are concerned.