The Lonely Liberal Jew

It began almost immediately after Simchas Torah. Under the headline, “On Israel, Progressive Jews Feel Abandoned by Their Left-Wing Allies,” the New York Times reported on the widespread sense of betrayal among left-wing Jews. “I am in such a state of despair — in my generation, we have been warned how quickly people would turn on us and we just thought, no way,” the Times quoted Nick Melvoin, a local activist in Los Angeles who is running for Congress.

“In Atlanta,” the report continued, “a Jewish mother involved in local politics wrote an open letter lamenting that her child’s progressive private school had not addressed the attacks in Israel with the same kind of empathy it showed after local killings of Asian Americans. ‘Our people are butchered, and no one speaks to it?’ she wrote.”

That sense of Jewish isolation was global. On October 23, Politico ran a piece titled, “Anti-Israel Progressives Are Handing Liberal Jews an Impossible Decision.” In late November, the New Statesman — bible of the British left — wrote of how “the horrendous killing and abduction of Israeli civilians has placed many Jewish activists in unfamiliar territory.”

The sudden awareness of Jewish exposure flooded social media. It found particularly acute expression in the cri de coeur by Shai Davidai, an Israeli-American professor at Columbia University. Witnessing the terror of Jewish students as their professors and fellow students responded to the Hamas atrocities by celebrating the perpetrators, he stood in the middle of his own campus and literally screamed his fear.