It’s Friday, August 21. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Ro Khanna, race hustler. Niall Ferguson on the sci-fi prophet who predicted our AI future. Gary Saul Morson on the disease of political violence. And more.
But first: the inside story of how anti-Zionism took over the Democratic Party.
What does it mean to be a progressive today? Support for universal healthcare and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement are among the articles of faith. But as we’ve been reporting over recent months, one issue has increasingly become a defining litmus test for the left—particularly among the Democratic Socialists of America: Israel, a country far removed from most Americans’ day-to-day lives.
It wasn’t always this way. Joel Rubin would know. In early 2020, he joined Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign as its Jewish outreach director, tasked with building a home for Jewish Democrats who supported both Israel and Sanders’s progressive agenda. He quickly discovered that would be harder than expected. Many activists surrounding the campaign weren’t looking for a candidate who supported a two-state solution; they opposed Israel’s existence altogether.
Six years on and the picture has gotten even worse. “Anti-Zionism,” Rubin writes today, “is no longer one position among many in the Democratic Party; it has increasingly become the boundary marker separating the politically acceptable Jew from the politically suspect one.” And Sanders is at the center of all of it.
Read Rubin’s piece for the inside story on how this happened—and why he now believes that “my former boss, and the broader left-wing activist infrastructure that surrounds him, are actively fueling antisemitism in this country.”
—The Editors
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