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Stephanie Spielman

Why I left the Democrats but still voted for them

What a year it’s been. Out here in the diaspora, the horrors the Jewish people face at the bloody hands of Hamas and IRGC proxies have been compounded by the so-called “pro-Palestine” movement. Every day, their proverbial masks fall more and more, all while the literal keffiyeh masks go up, neatly secured with a bright green Hamas headband. They let slip “Jew” instead of “Zionist” and mourn the “Butcher of Khan Younis,” so named for gruesomely murdering his fellow Palestinians, as a martyr for human rights.

In mischaracterizing the protests as a “ceasefire” or “anti-war” movement, polite society has been admiring the emperor’s new clothes. But many of us see the emperor’s whole rear quite plainly. After a year of staring incredulously at the emperor’s exposed backside and enduring suffocating levels of gaslighting, I left the Democratic Party. I am now officially politically unaffiliated.

I have learned that when it comes to Israel and the Jewish people, the left is allowed to abandon its collective principles. Now in America, it is our turn to watch David Baddiel’s “Jews Don’t Count” play out in real time.

The left told us for years that words matter and can indeed be violence. So now we say: Your words like “intifada” and “by any means necessary” matter, and they are violently antisemitic dog whistles. There are millions of words in the English language. You do not have to use those. The left has further touted the imperative of “checking your bias.” So now we say: Your assumptions of genocide and Israeli bloodlust are firmly rooted in a thousand-year old blood libel conspiracies. Your denial of Jewish indigeneity and right to self-determination is a form of colonialist historical revisionism. When we tell you you’re being antisemitic, it is not out of a nefarious desire to insult you or be mean – it’s because you’re being antisemitic, and you need to check your bias.

And yet we’ve gotten nowhere. Some of the blame lies with the Democratic Party, the political home of the left. While they have been quick to acknowledge the sharp rise in antisemitism, they have largely avoided connecting it to the “pro-Palestine” movement itself. Instead, they give the same old speech: They are committed to fighting antisemitism in all its forms, and they condemn the 2019 Tree of Life shooting and other instances of right-wing antisemitism. They are not wrong of course, but to paraphrase Dara Horn’s tour-de-force “People Love Dead Jews,” it is quite amazing how much antisemitism is not right-wing.

I personally reached my limit for the Democrats’ inaction during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago when Biden said of the protestors outside, “They have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” Indeed, it is bad when a lot of innocent people are killed! The trouble is, this is not the point the protestors were actually making. Instead, their points were centered around antisemitic conspiracy, genocidal slogans against the Jewish people, and praise for international terrorist organizations. To suggest otherwise is just another way to admire the emperor’s new clothes.

To be sure, many people protest because they are horrified by the scale of destruction in the Gaza Strip from a war partly supported by US-supplied defenses and therefore feel it’s a moral obligation to protest. Surely it’s not their fault that other people are waving Hamas flags, and they shouldn’t be held responsible when they just want the killing to stop.

This is a tempting trap, but it is nonetheless a trap designed to soothe your cognitive dissonance. While there are many people who are not consciously antisemitic in the protest movement, they appear quite comfortable marching alongside red triangles, blatant Holocaust inversion, and imagery straight out of Der Sturmer, all while chanting for death to Zionists and global intifadas. Of course, not everyone is carrying those signs or chanting those slogans, but the fact remains that they march under the auspices of hate groups like Within Our Lifetime, Students for Justice in Palestine, Samidoun, and Jewish Voice for Peace. They have every ability to condemn their fellow protestors and start a splinter movement that actually advocates for a sustainable, real peace for two coexisting peoples and takes the Jewish community’s concerns seriously. Yet, they continue to march alongside Hamasniks, lending power and legitimacy to a movement that, at its core, seeks to destabilize western democracy and edge Jews out of polite society – and that movement appears to be succeeding.

Indeed, after Charlottesville, for example, we generally agreed that marching alongside Nazis was, in fact, a pretty bad look. At best, it made you a Nazi too, and at worst, you were giving cover and credibility to the Nazis. It was incumbent on folks to forcefully condemn the tiki torch wielders shouting “Jews will not replace us.” I rhetorically ask, where are the comparable demands of the “pro-Palestine” protestors?

So, what should Biden have said instead? I have a humble suggestion:

October 7th was an historically evil massacre. Period. Let’s be clear: praising, justifying, or denying October 7th is morally bankrupt, categorically wrong, and unAmerican.

While I sympathize with protestors who are distressed at the death and destruction, this is not the way to fight for a better outcome. Calls to bomb Tel Aviv are not principled policy criticisms, but calls for more war. Holocaust inversion and accusations of genocide are rooted in antisemitic conspiracy, not reality. You are doing a grave disservice to your own purported cause.

To protest in good faith for a ceasefire, do not stand with those who revere Hamas, praise Hezbollah, and cheer on the Houthis. You should be calling for the one thing that just might guarantee a ceasefire: for Hamas to surrender and release the hostages. You make a mockery of your cause by joining forces with those who ridicule the hostages and view their kidnapping as a perverse form of justice. Find a new way to use your voice that is not in service of Hamas and more war, but in service of durable, peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Until you can manage to protest without antisemitism, you do not have a point.

And yet, this has never been said – not before the DNC, not at the DNC, and not since the DNC. The Democrats have never encouraged the protestors to fight for coexistence or to use their platform to support Gazans under the oppressive theocratic yoke of Hamas rather than Hamas themselves. I fear this historic missed opportunity will resonate for generations.

Jewish Democrats like myself have noticed this silence, and we’re handling it in different ways. I, for one, decided to leave the Democratic Party. At least for now, I can’t stomach being a member of a party that has engaged in such systematic gaslighting against my people. Others are becoming Republicans, and even voting for Trump. Republicans are eager for Jews to make this switch; they too have noticed the Democrats’ silence, and they have capitalized on it as a new political knife to twist in the left’s belly. Distressingly, the Democrats have allowed the Republicans to turn antisemitism into a partisan issue. They could have joined with the Republicans to condemn calls for genocide on college campuses, among other initiatives. Alas, here we are, watching Democrats continue to drop the ball while Trump fills the gap by visiting the Ohel, in a cynical, disingenuous redux of when he marched from the White House to St. John’s Church for a photo-op with a Bible in 2020.

Many Jews have flocked to Trump because they see him as a respite from the left’s moral cowardice and as Israel’s protector. While I obviously sympathize with cutting ties with the Democrats, I submit that lining up for Trump instead is the wrong answer and ultimately more dangerous for the Jews and for Israel. This is why I am casting my vote for Vice President Harris.

America is not looking good for the Jews right now, and the best hope we have is fighting to get the America we know and love back – not surrendering it to a wannabe dictator. Relying on a man who knows no other loyalty than to his own ego is neither American nor Jewish. Trump fancies himself a modern-day God-king, but we Americans are not led by kings, and we Jews do not worship idols.

American democracy has largely been a boon for American Jews and for Israel, and it forms the logical basis of our special relationship with Israel as the only Middle East democracy. I am not eager to destroy this foundation by electing a demagogic aspiring dictator with unprecedented contempt for democratic norms. He still refuses to concede the 2020 election and is terrifyingly allergic to facts that don’t stroke his ego. Worse still, Trump increasingly shows both physical and cognitive deficits as he approaches 80. Should he become fully incapacitated, JD Vance – a true isolationist who voted along with Bernie Sanders against Israel aid – will replace him. Personally, I do not trust for a second someone with a demonstrated record of playing politics with Israel’s ability to defend herself.

For years, we have watched Trump discard just about everyone who has ever been loyal to him when it suits him. He has no loyalty outside of quid pro quo arrangements where he gets the biggest slice of the pie. Neither Israel nor the Jews will be an exception. Of course, there does seem to be one notable exception in Putin, who is closely allied with North Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Imagine: If Putin communicated to Trump that he preferred no action be taken against the IRGC, would Trump really give Israel the green light when it mattered most? Would Trump show the same support that Israel just received from the Biden administration during its recent precision strikes on IRGC military sites? Remember, Trump famously politicized America’s military support for Ukraine and was impeached for it. He will do the same with Israel if he decides it enriches or benefits him. He feels no loyalty to the Jewish people – instead, he expects us to pledge our undying loyalty to him. Again I repeat: We Jews are not idolaters, no matter how much Trump wants us to be.

On the campaign trail, he made two points to this end quite cogently (indeed a rarity for him, so we must take them seriously): 1) If he loses, it’s in part because Jews didn’t vote for him. 2) If he loses, Israel will cease to exist within two years. The first comment is a threat and dog whistle to his base: If I lose, he says, you should blame the Jews. After all, they were insufficiently loyal, and therefore traitors. This is not something that someone who truly stands with the Jewish people says. The second comment smacks of the ramblings of an egomaniac with a messiah complex. Israel is in fact not a subsidiary of the Trump Organization and defended itself and thrived without Trump for decades. Am Yisrael does not Chai due to the beneficence of Donald J. Trump. When he turns on us for his own personal gain, Israel will still be there the next day.

Yes, he withdrew from the Iran deal, but he replaced it with nothing at all besides the same old sanctions. The “better deal” he promised evaporated into thin air as soon as reality hit because it was no longer politically convenient. Yes, he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, but symbolic moves are far cries from tangible moves that bolster Israel’s security. Yes, he signed the Abraham Accords, and while this was indeed good policy, it was largely a formalization of backdoor relations between countries that long predated Trump – in other words, Trump was hardly the sole reason for this deal. Less widely discussed among the Jewish community is how he withdrew American troops from Northern Syria and abandoned the Kurds, our close allies against ISIS and Islamism. This move weakened the geographic buffer and allowed for the IRGC to move more aggressively onto Israel’s Syrian Golan border – a move that has already harmed Israel’s security.

In spite of the many, many problems with the Democratic Party these days, it is with Vice President Harris that we have the best chance to preserve American democracy. In spite of the Democrats’ failures to stand up firmly for American Jewry, let us remember that aid to Israel continues to flow essentially unabated. Although I cannot say this confidently about 10-20 years down the line, the current generation of Democratic leadership still sees Israel as an ally who must be supported – perhaps not always in the way that Israel might prefer to be supported, but supported nonetheless. With Trump on the other hand, we have the best chance to lose our democracy, and Israel’s closest ally along with it. You can be sure that a man who loves himself more than the country he led for four years surely also loves himself far more than countries he doesn’t lead.

I truly hope the Democratic Party can revive itself back to a place where I feel comfortable re-joining it, but I’m not holding my breath. Instead, I’m taking Hebrew classes, since the way America is going, I suspect I might really need those skills soon.

About the Author
Stephanie Spielman, PhD is a fully recovered academic who now works as a data scientist and educator based in Philadelphia. She has spent her time since October 7th exploring ways to deepen her connection to the Jewish people, engage with Jewish community, and live outwardly as an unapologetically proud Jew. She enjoys walking and hammock-ing with her dog, consuming news and discussing current events at a hopefully healthy frequency, cooking, and knitting. As her family's resident historian and ancestry researcher, she also enjoys doing deep dives into her family's legacy in the American Yiddish theater.
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