By Seth Mandel
Thursday, July 23, 2026
The dam is breaking—or at least leaking—when it comes to
Democratic Party figures criticizing the party itself for its toleration of
anti-Semitism. The question that follows is: What will be done to solve the
problem that has now been identified?
To answer that, though, we first should take a look at
what Democrats are saying about the party’s current anti-Semitism crisis.
Joel Rubin, a former State Department official and the
Jewish outreach director for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, has
been criticizing his former boss for materially contributing to the country’s
wave of Jew-hatred. Here he is on Fox yesterday talking about the
Vermont senator:
“I worked on his presidential campaign in 2020. And I am
very disappointed, if not dismayed, by his willingness to not just support, but
actually promote and create candidates who are trafficking in anti-Semitic
tropes and trying to push them into the Democratic Party in our primary
process, be it Graham Platner, [Abdul] El-Sayed in Michigan, be it Darializa
[Avila Chevalier], who Zohran Mamdani supported in New York, who doesn’t
recognize the State of Israel’s right to exist. These are people who should be
out, not in. And right now they’re getting pushed into our system, and it’s
very dangerous for the American Jewish community to have to deal with this kind
of hate speech on a daily basis.”
Sanders is an interesting case, because he is in many
ways the Squadfather: the politician who ushered progressive extremists right
into the mainstream of the Democratic Party and paved the way for Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and others. He had no bones about
campaigning with them, promoting them and defending them, thereby creating a
protective barrier around them within Democratic circles.
It is fair to ask why Rubin wasn’t already alarmed in
2020 by Sanders’ promotion of anti-Semites, but this does give us one piece of
information: In the opinion of a mainstream liberal like Rubin, the party’s
anti-Semitism problem is notably worse than it was in 2020.
The tell is that in 2020 Rubin could claim to be working
from the inside of the progressive movement to influence it in a better
direction; in 2026 he has to go public with his concerns because there is no
place for him on the inside.
Next we have Alexander Vindman, an Army veteran and
National Security Council official who became famous for blowing the whistle on
President Trump’s attempts to manipulate U.S.-Ukraine relations. Vindman is now
running for the Senate as a Democrat from Florida.
Jewish Insider has Vindman’s comments to a Florida Democratic Party zoom meeting with its Jewish
Caucus. Vindman, who fled the Soviet Union as a child along with his father and
brothers, referenced the fact that he has been in the crosshairs of
anti-Semites before:
“I’ve become used to the right-wing, nationalist,
nativist, antisemitic tone, but I’m really shocked about what I’m seeing from
the far left — the DSA wing, that is deeply troubling. It is not simply
criticism of Israel but a conflation of Israel and Judaism, and a rise of
antisemitism within what should be a portion of our own big tent.”
Indeed, Vindman was subject to vicious anti-Jewish
taunting from some of the president’s right-wing supporters and even, as John
Podhoretz noted at the time, then-Rep. Sean Duffy (who became Trump’s
transportation secretary).
Vindman became something of a liberal hero for blowing
the whistle on Trump and absorbing the public scrutiny, but he so far isn’t
getting much attention from his fellow Democrats for saying things like this:
“That is not the world that I grew up in. That is not the
world that my daughter should be living in, and that is absolutely something I
will fight tooth and nail to make sure that she feels comfortable living her
Jewish American life.”
The Democratic Party itself, Vindman said, has bred
“impunity” for anti-Semites and thereby only encouraged more of it to come.
We also have new—and interesting—comments from Adam
Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. Twice in the
past two months, Smith has flipped on his earlier support for the U.S.-Israel
strategic relationship and bowed to the hard left. After the more recent
incident, he put out an extraordinary statement acknowledging that he and his
family and his staff have been put through years of harassment, sometimes
violent, by anti-Zionist activists seeking to bully him into compliance with their
rancid politics.
What was so extraordinary about this statement was that
it strongly implied he’d given them what they wanted. Which is to say, a
powerful sitting congressman was threatened into voting a certain way by
anti-Semites.
Now Smith has gone on the Breaking Points podcast, an
extremely low-information anti-Zionist chucklefest hosted by Krystal Ball.
Smith again talked
about the near-impossibility of having a conversation
within progressive circles because of the movement’s aggressive
closed-mindedness.
But he also made an interesting comment alluding to the
ignorance of most of the anti-Israel crowd. He accused Ball and other
progressives of ignoring the consequences of their policy
prescriptions—especially their support for the descendants of Palestinians
displaced in 1948 to colonize Israel and turn Jews into the minority in their
own land:
“Maybe that’s just what has to happen in the minds of
some people, but understand the consequences of it, understand why Israel was
created in the first place, so that the Jews would have some place to go. And
to just blithely say, ‘Well, yeah, it’ll go away and it’ll be fine.’
“Let’s say this plays out how you describe and there is
no ‘Jewish ethnostate.’ The consequence of that is there is no Jewish state.
You have the Palestinians and they would now be governing that area, and that
means Hamas would be governing that area. Do you have any problem with that? Do
you have any problem with Hamas suddenly becoming a much more powerful entity
and having the country ‘from the river, to the sea’?”
The biggest problem is that his fellow progressives don’t
have a problem with a Hamas-run land from the river to the sea, which would
undertake an ethnic cleansing of millions of Jews and try to turn every day
into October 7. Nor do these anti-Zionists have any true concerns about Israeli
democracy, since they’d replace an imperfect democracy with a Nazi-style
fascist dictatorship of blood and soil.
So what are the options for folks like Smith, Vindman and
Rubin?
For Smith, the answer is easy. He should do two things.
First, stop voting as the anti-Semites want him to vote and vote his
conscience. He’ll surely insist that’s what he’s doing now, but that’s
obviously preposterous. Smith has to decide he’s more willing to lose his seat
in Congress than he is to throw American Jews under the intifada bus. Second,
he should be making these statements on every major news network, writing
op-eds for the New York Times and Washington Post about it, and
start making headline-grabbing floor speeches about it. If he’s right about
what’s happening—and he is—then he’s going to have to say it on shows hosted by
serious people instead of Breaking Points.
For Vindman, a lot will depend on whether he wins his
primary and then the general. He’s the favorite to win the primary, so he’ll
likely be in position to demand the party get behind him and amplify his
campaign message. That message, then, should include his Jewishness and his
defense of Israel’s right to exist and defend itself.
Finally, Rubin has likely missed his opportunity to
influence the Democratic Party from the inside. His contribution, then, should
be to allow himself to be seen as a cautionary tale. He should make clear to
liberal Jewish campaign staffers that by 2020, Bernie Sanders had already
crossed lines and that it was a mistake to try to influence him from the
inside.
In Maine, the fact that Graham Platner’s political
director resigned and went public with her concerns about Platner’s Nazi tattoo
and serial dishonesty did far more to improve the situation than staying on
staff would have accomplished. That’s the lesson.
Democrats are not yet powerless to curb their party’s
infatuation with anti-Semitism. But if they keep acting as though there’s
nothing they can do, they will soon see that self-fulfilling prophecy come to
pass.
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