In a cringeworthy exercise in revisionist history, neocon journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon tells us in the Sunday New York Post that “American Jews have been betrayed by the Democratic Party they helped create.” This venting of recriminations goes on at length, ending with attacks on Democratic expressions of anti-Zionism and the willingness of Democratic politicians to surrender “to an entire culture that suffuses the left, justifying and carrying out acts of political violence against Jews.” Moreover, this outrage, she says, “stems from the top.” Apparently, the entire history of American Jewish involvement in the Democratic Party was a journey toward progressive enlightenment, which suddenly turned into an orgy of anti-Israeli and finally, anti-Semitic violence.

Jewish Democrats, in Ungar-Sargon’s account, were in no way responsible for this outcome. Like American blacks who vote for race-baiting black Democratic politicians, but who are never held responsible for their disastrous political decisions on Fox News, Jewish Democrats are here painted as the victims of a party that took advantage of their innocence. On the right, one hears a similar complaint from what remains of Southern conservatives. In their variation of this myth of their innocent victimhood status, Southerners (meaning white Southerners) were supposedly taken in by Southern Republicans masquerading as conservatives. Unless I’m mistaken, lots of Southerners have been happy as clams voting for the likes of Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott, and Tom Tillis. In fact, many white Southerners voted for North Carolina’s left-leaning Democratic governor, Josh Stein, and may vote for equally left-leaning Roy Cooper in the November Senate race.

There are so many holes in Batya-Sargon’s account of the relationship between Jews and the Democratic Party that I’m delighted to see at least one observation in her concluding paragraph ringing somewhat true: “Today American Jews are in a state of flux, trying to figure out what it means to be an American Jew in a world in which the left, which for so long defined their existence, has rejected them.” But even here I must enter my usual reservation. Almost all American Jews situated on the left and in the Democratic Party are descended from the Eastern European migration that arrived in the U.S. between 1890 and 1920. Earlier Jewish communities, and even now Sephardic Jews and the descendants of the German Jews who came in the 19^th century, were never on the left or notably devoted to the Democratic Party. Persian Jews, who are mostly settled in California, remain enthusiastic Trump supporters, even if this causes embarrassment to the minority among them that aren’t. Moreover, my friend David Azerrad is right when he tells me that the Moroccan Jewish community from which he comes has yet to be visited by wokeness.

Jews in the Democratic Party have usually represented the leftist vanguard, as Batya-Sargon concedes, and it may be questionable if most Jewish Democratic politicians and operatives were ever a moderating influence on their party, outside of some neoconservatives, like Doug Schoen and the late Ben Wattenberg, who tried unavailingly to halt their party’s march toward the social left. The two most radicalized and radicalizing ethnic groups in the U.S. Congress are Jews and blacks, who until recently worked harmoniously, pushing the Democrats further left. And these groups still do in J. B. Pritzker’s Illinois, Representative Stephen Cohen’s congressional district in Memphis, or Jerry Nadler’s district in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.  

In the late 1960s, as Benjamin Ginsberg explains in The Fateful Embrace: Jews and the State, Jewish and black Democrats cooperated to transform their party into the vehicle for progressive projects. Under their influence, the Democrats turned away from being a largely white working-class party, appealing heavily to Northern ethnic Catholics and Southern Protestants, to becoming a champion of social causes and finally of Third World immigrants. Moreover, this demographic and strategic transformation has been enormously successful in producing electoral victories, but has come with a cost that no longer pleases Batya-Sargon. Obviously, this Democratic progressivism depends on controlling public education and the media, which the left has done brilliantly. But it also requires filling the country with Third World “settlers” to keep the Democrats in power, while they go on losing the votes of their traditional constituencies.

And therein lies the rub for the progressive Jewish Democrats. Those they’re ushering in are increasingly hostile to their enlightened benefactors, and the party that Jews both served and radicalized has turned on them with a vengeance. This is unfortunate, but it’s blatantly dishonest to pretend that the victims in this case have had nothing to do with the trouble they’ve helped unleash on the country. The first rule in becoming an adult is accepting responsibility for one’s mistakes and not shifting the blame onto others.

I’ve spent the last 60 years listening to Jewish leftists explaining how white Christians in the U.S. intend to persecute them the way other Christians did somewhere else. The only way to protect themselves, they say, is to ally with “progressive” forces against this imaginary enemy. The “betrayal” that Ungar-Sargon describes is what happens if you live in a world of imaginary enemies while abetting real ones.

Although there is much to hate about the Democratic Party, it is not responsible for betraying its Jewish voters, any more than that party has betrayed black voters in inner cities who vote for racist demagogues. All citizens (and unfortunately, even some noncitizens) get to vote, and some of these voters use that right and their influence over a national party to their own detriment. For neoconservatives to cry betrayal after Jewish Democrats pushed their party too far in a bad direction may be setting new standards for dishonesty.