It’s Never Too Late to Wake Up: A Plea to the Jewish Boomers I Love |
Let’s skip the pleasantries. Jewish Americans are under siege — not in the abstract, historical, “never forget” sense that lets you nod gravely at a Yom HaShoah ceremony and then go back to brunch. Right now. Today. Synagogues operate behind blast-proof barriers. Jewish students need security escorts to get to class. “Zionist” has become the socially acceptable way to say the thing polite society won’t let people say anymore.
And underneath all of it — underneath the campus mobs and the congressional cowardice and the dinner-party antisemitism dressed up as political commentary — is the thing nobody wants to name plainly: terrorism. October 7th was not ancient history. The people who carried it out and the regimes that funded it are still operational, still motivated, and still celebrating. There are people who do not want to argue with us. They want to kill us. And too many of you are sleepwalking through it because you’re too busy doom-scrolling MSNBC to notice.
So hear me when I tell you: this is not a partisan hit piece. I am not here to sell you on the Republican Party. I am not asking you to love Donald Trump. I am not even asking you to like him.
I’m asking you to stop letting him live rent-free in your head while your house burns down around you.
This Isn’t Your Parents’ Democratic Party. It’s Not Even Yours Anymore.
I get it. You came of age politically in a world where the Democratic Party was the natural home for Jewish Americans. Civil rights. Social justice. Tikkun olam. That party earned your loyalty, and for decades that loyalty made sense.
But here’s the thing: a lot of you are still living life like you’re stuck in the first season of The West Wing, convinced that if you just quote Toby Ziegler hard enough the grown-ups will walk back into the room. They aren’t coming. Aaron Sorkin doesn’t write the Democratic Party anymore. TikTok does.
The Democratic Party of 2026 is a party where “from the river to the sea” is chanted at the convention’s perimeter and met with shrugs from its interior. Where members of Congress with documented histories of antisemitic rhetoric chair committees and collect endorsements from leadership. Where “Zionist” is a slur deployed with impunity in progressive spaces that would never tolerate equivalent language about any other minority........