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The Moulton Moment and the Mamdani Effect: How the Democratic Party Is Abandoning Its Jewish Center
US Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol. Photo: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
When Representative Seth Moulton (D) of Massachusetts recently announced that he was returning donations from AIPAC and refusing future support, the story barely made national headlines. Yet this small act — a single line on an FEC filing — reveals something much larger. It marks the moment when an ambitious, mainstream Democrat concluded that distancing himself from the organized Jewish community is a political asset, not a liability, and when moral cowardice began to masquerade as conscience.
Moulton is no progressive firebrand. A Harvard-educated Marine veteran, he built his brand on national security and bipartisanship. His decision is not about ideology; it is about survival. Over the past two years, the Democratic Party has entered a new phase of moral performance politics, one in which proximity to Jewish or pro-Israel institutions carries reputational risk among the activists who increasingly shape primaries and online discourse.
Not long ago, Moulton faced an online firestorm for something utterly ordinary: defending his young daughters. During a 2024 interview, he said he did not want them “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” The remark — hardly radical — provoked furious denunciations from progressive activists, staff resignations, and a public shaming campaign that painted him as transphobic. He had stumbled across a sacred boundary of the new moral order and learned its central rule: dissent is dangerous.
That experience left its mark. Now, as the next purity test forms around Israel, Moulton has taken no chances. By refunding AIPAC donations, he signals compliance with a rising moral code that defines virtue not by conviction, but by disavowal. In today’s Democratic ecosystem, the act of rejecting traditional Jewish institutions has become a badge of progressive credibility.
This transformation can be understood through what might be called the Mamdani Effect: the process by which Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) ideology, once confined to New York City, has begun reshaping the Democratic Party’s moral and political vocabulary. Named for New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani, one of the most visible DSA figures in state politics, this effect blends anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism, and performative solidarity into a single moralized aesthetic. It is a politics of accusation and purity: one advances not by building coalitions but by identifying oppressors and cutting ties.
New York City has served as the laboratory. Once the bastion of pragmatic liberalism — of Ed Koch’s centrist governance and the Jewish-Catholic labor coalition — the city’s politics now turn on moral spectacle. Candidates compete to condemn Israel, police “colonial complicity,” and signal distance from Jewish civic life. The new left does not want to coexist with traditional Democratic institutions; it wants to replace them with a moral movement that prizes purity over pluralism.
The pattern is spreading. Across the country, the activist wing of the Democratic Party has increasingly absorbed the language of the DSA: colonizer, decolonization, abolition. The Democratic Socialists of America formally calls for “the full decolonization of all the occupied lands of the United States” and has established working groups for “police and prison abolition,” and “BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions).” This rhetoric has migrated from campus protests into the language of progressive representatives — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) spoke at the 2020 DNC of repairing “the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia.” What began as fringe rhetoric now increasingly defines the emotional grammar of the party’s activist base.
Polling confirms the shift. Gallup found that in 2016, 53 percent of Democrats sympathized more with Israel than with the Palestinians; by 2025, that number had collapsed to just 21 percent, while sympathy for Palestinians soared to 59 percent — a nearly three-to-one reversal.
The shift represents a complete reversal from a 30-point advantage for Israel to a 38-point advantage for Palestinians among Democrats over nine years. Among younger Americans (Millennials), sympathies are now essentially tied, with 42 percent sympathizing with Palestinians and 40 percent with Israelis. What was once a bipartisan consensus on the legitimacy of the Jewish State has become a generational and partisan fault line.
For centrist politicians like Moulton, the implications are clear. The activists who dominate social media and small-donor networks increasingly treat Israel as shorthand for Western capitalism and “settler power.” In that moral framework, defending the Jewish State, or even maintaining ties to mainstream Jewish institutions, is suspect. So politicians adapt. Moulton’s decision to reject AIPAC funding is not an act of conviction but of fear: fear of the social media mob, fear of being labeled an oppressor’s ally, fear of losing favor with a base that now equates moral virtue with repudiation. What looks like moral clarity is in fact moral conformity.
That fear is corrosive. It does not only alienate Jews; it hollows out the liberal tradition itself. The Democratic Party that once celebrated pluralism now traffics in exclusion. The heirs of Bella Abzug and Daniel Patrick Moynihan are being replaced by the apostles of Zohran Mamdani: a politics that thrives not on solidarity but on sanctimony.
For American Jews, the cost of this transformation is profound. For nearly a century, Jews were among the architects of the Democratic coalition; builders of unions, schools, and civic institutions. They embodied the idea that liberal democracy worked: that minorities could flourish through education, engagement, and shared civic purpose. The synagogues that hosted voter drives, the Jewish Community Centers that welcomed refugees, the federations that funded civil-rights lawyers. These were not instruments of power but of civic faith. Yet as the party moralizes, belonging itself has become conditional. The new progressive creed demands repentance for association with power, success, or Israel.
Jewish institutions — synagogues, federations, philanthropic networks — are recast not as engines of community but as symbols of privilege.
The Moulton moment and the Mamdani Effect together capture the collapse of liberal pluralism into moral puritanism. What began as a movement for equality has hardened into a system of ideological compliance. Its adherents are sincere, but their sincerity is illiberal. They mistake outrage for justice and purification for progress. When mainstream Democrats start treating Jewish civic life as a reputational hazard, they do not merely abandon a community. They abandon the civic model that sustained American liberalism itself. The party that once trusted persuasion now rewards excommunication.
Yet there is still time to recover a better tradition. Courage is contagious. Moulton could have chosen differently; others still can. It is possible to defend women’s sports without fear. It is possible to support Israel’s right to exist without apology. It is possible, even now, to build a Democratic politics rooted not in shame but in shared responsibility.
This is the new political fault line: not left versus right, but Marxism versus capitalism, moral theater versus civic realism, conformity versus courage.
Moulton may think he is protecting his political future, but what he is really revealing is the fragility of a party that now punishes independence and rewards retreat. If Democrats wish to remain a serious moral force, they must rediscover what liberalism once knew: that pluralism is not complicity, and that solidarity requires standing with allies even when it is unfashionable.
As Alexis de Tocqueville warned nearly two centuries ago, “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.” The Democratic Party’s crisis is not tactical but moral. Liberty cannot endure without the faith that binds citizens together and that faith begins with courage.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Father and Son Behind Bondi Mass Shooting, Australia Police Say
A man lights a candle as police officers stand guard following the attack on a Jewish holiday celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, December 15, 2025. REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
Two gunmen who attacked a Jewish celebration in Sydney’s Bondi Beach that killed 15 people were a father and son, police said on Monday, as Australia mourned victims of its worst gun violence in almost 30 years.
The father, a 50-year-old, was killed at the scene while his 24-year-old son was in critical condition in the hospital, police said at a press conference on Monday. Officials have described the shooting on Sunday as a targeted antisemitic attack.
Witnesses said the attack at the famed beach, which was packed on a hot evening, lasted about 10 minutes, sending hundreds of people scattering along the sand and into nearby streets and parks. Police said around 1,000 people had attended the Hanukkah event.
Forty people remain in hospital following the attack, including two police officers who are in a serious but stable condition, police said. The victims were aged between 10 and 87.
Authorities said they were confident only two attackers were involved in the incident after previously saying they were checking whether a third offender was involved.
Police investigations are ongoing and police numbers have been increased in Jewish communities.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who visited the scene on Monday, called the attack a “dark moment for our nation,” and said police and security agencies were thoroughly checking the motive behind the attack.
“What we saw yesterday was an act of pure evil, an act of antisemitism, an act of terrorism on our shores in an iconic Australian location,” Albanese told reporters.
“The Jewish community are hurting today. Today, all Australians wrap our arms around them and say, we stand with you. We will do whatever is necessary to stamp out antisemitism. It is a scourge, and we will eradicate it together.”
Albanese said several world leaders including US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron had reached out and he thanked them for their solidarity.
“In Australia, there was a terrible attack … and that was an antisemitic attack obviously,” Trump said during a Christmas reception at the White House on Sunday, paying respects for the victims of attacks at Bondi and another shooting at Rhode Island’s Brown University.
‘SAW BODIES ON THE GROUND’
A bystander captured on video tackling and disarming an armed man during the attack has been hailed as a hero whose actions saved lives.
In Bondi, hundreds of police personnel remained on site on Monday as the suburb’s main road remained closed, after being declared a crime scene.
Rabbi Mendel Kastel, whose brother-in-law Eli Schlanger was killed in Sunday’s attack, said it had been a harrowing evening.
“You can very easily become very angry and try to blame people, turn on people but that’s not what this is about. It’s about a community,” he said.
“We need to step up at a time like this, be there for each other, and come together. And we will, and we will get through this, and we know that. The Australian community will help us do it,” he added.
Local woman Danielle, who declined to give her surname, was at the beach when the shooting occurred and raced to collect her daughter who was attending a bar mitzvah at a function center near where the alleged shooters were positioned.
“I heard there was a shooting so I bolted there to get my daughter, I could hear gunshots, I saw bodies on the ground. We are used to being scared, we have felt this way since October 7.”
Sunday’s shootings were the most serious of a string of antisemitic attacks on synagogues, buildings and cars in Australia since the beginning of Israel‘s war in Gaza in October 2023.
Australia’s Jewish diaspora is small but deeply embedded in the wider community, with about 150,000 people who identify as Jewish in the country of 27 million. About one-third of them are estimated to live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, including Bondi.
Major cities including Berlin, London and New York stepped up security around Hanukkah events on Sunday following the attack at Bondi.
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World Reacts to Deadly Shooting at Australia’s Bondi Beach
People walk at the scene of a shooting incident at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia, December 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kirsty Needham
At least 11 people were killed and dozens wounded when gunmen opened fire during a Jewish holiday event at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Sunday, Australian officials said.
Following are comments from world leaders in the wake of the deadly shooting:
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA
“This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy, a celebration of faith.
“At this dark moment for our nation, our police and security agencies are working to determine anyone associated with this outrage.”
SUSSAN LEY, OPPOSITION LEADER OF AUSTRALIA
“Australians are in deep mourning tonight, with hateful violence striking at the heart of an iconic Australian community, a place we all know so well and love, Bondi.”
BRITAIN’S KING CHARLES
“My wife and I are appalled and saddened by the most dreadful antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish people attending the Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach.
“Our hearts go out to everyone who has been affected so dreadfully, including the police officers who were injured while protecting members of their community. We commend the police, emergency services and members of the public whose heroic actions no doubt prevented even greater horror and tragedy.”
FRENCH PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON
“In Sydney, an antisemitic terrorist attack struck families gathered to celebrate Hanukkah. France extends its thoughts to the victims, the injured and their loved ones. We share the pain of the Australian people and will continue to fight relentlessly against antisemitic hatred, which hurts us all, wherever it strikes.”
US SECRETARY OF STATE, MARCO RUBIO
“Antisemitism has no place in this world. Our prayers are with the victims of this horrific attack, the Jewish community, and the people of Australia.”
UN SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTONIO GUTERRES
“I am horrified and condemn today’s heinous deadly attack on Jewish families gathered in Sydney to celebrate Hannukah. My heart is with the Jewish community worldwide on this first day of Hannukah, a festival celebrating the miracle of peace and light vanquishing darkness.”
FRIEDRICH MERZ, CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY
“The antisemitic attack at Bondi Beach during Hanukkah leaves me utterly shocked. My thoughts are with the victims and their families. This is an attack on our shared values. We must fight antisemitism – here in Germany and around the world.”
NARENDRA MODI, PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA
“Strongly condemn the ghastly terrorist attack carried out today at Bondi Beach, Australia, targeting people celebrating the first day of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.
“On behalf of the people of India, I extend my sincere condolences to the families who lost their loved ones. We stand in solidarity with the people of Australia in this hour of grief. India has zero tolerance towards terrorism and supports the fight against all forms and manifestations of terrorism.”
KEIR STARMER, UK PRIME MINISTER
“Deeply distressing news from Australia. The United Kingdom sends our thoughts and condolences to everyone affected by the appalling attack in Bondi Beach.”
CHRISTOPHER LUXON, PRIME MINISTER OF NEW ZEALAND
“Australia and New Zealand are closer than friends, we’re family. I am shocked by the distressing scenes at Bondi, a place that Kiwis visit every day.
“My thoughts, and the thoughts of all New Zealanders, are with those affected.”
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL
“A few months ago, I wrote a letter to the prime minister of Australia. I told him that their policies pour fuel on the antisemitic fire. It encourages the Jew hatred now stalking your streets. Antisemitism is a cancer. It spreads when leaders stay silent, and you must replace weakness with action.
“This didn’t happen in Australia, and something terrible happened there today: cold-blooded murder. The number of those murdered, sadly, grows, with each moment.”
GIDEON SA’AR, FOREIGN MINISTER OF ISRAEL
“I’m appalled by the murderous shooting attack at a Hanukkah event in Sydney, Australia.
“These are the results of the anti-Semitic rampage in the streets of Australia over the past two years, with the anti-Semitic and inciting calls of ‘Globalise the Intifada’ that were realized today.”
IRAN FOREIGN MINISTRY SPOKESPERSON, ESMAEIL BAGHAEI
“We condemn the violent attack in Sydney, Australia. The assassination and killing of human beings, wherever it occurs, is reprehensible and condemned.”
URSULA VON DER LEYEN, EUROPEAN COMMISSION PRESIDENT
“Shocked by the tragic attack at Bondi Beach. I send my heartfelt condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims.
“Europe stands with Australia and Jewish communities everywhere. We are united against violence, antisemitism and hatred.”
DONALD TUSK, PRIME MINISTER OF POLAND
“My deepest condolences to the families of the victims of the terrible terrorist attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney. Antisemitism, wherever it appears, leads to acts of crime. Today, Poland stands with Australia in this moment of grief.”
KAROL NAWROCKI, PRESIDENT OF POLAND
“I express my full condemnation of the terrorist attack in Sydney. I extend my condolences to the families of the victims of this unimaginable crime.”
SPANISH FOREIGN MINISTER JOSE MANUEL ALBARES
“Horrified by the terrorist attack in Australia against the Jewish community. My solidarity with the victims and their loved ones, with the people and government of Australia.
“Hate, antisemitism, and violence have no place in our societies.”
JONAS GAHR STOERE, PRIME MINISTER OF NORWAY
“I am shocked by the horrific attack at Bondi Beach, Australia, during a Jewish Hanukkah event.
“I condemn this despicable act of terror in the strongest possible terms. My deepest condolences to all those affected by today’s tragic attack.”
ULF KRISTERSSON, PRIME MINISTER OF SWEDEN
“Appalled by the attack in Sydney, targeted against the Jewish community.
“My thoughts are with the victims and their families. Together, we must fight the spread of antisemitism.”
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After Australia shooting, Jewish leaders say Mamdani’s refusal to condemn ‘globalize the intifada’ has consequences
The shooting attack targeting a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s popular Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah, in which at least 15 people were killed, reignited sharp criticism of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the “globalize the intifada” slogan during the mayoral election.
“When you refuse to condemn and only ‘discourage’ use of the term ‘Globalize the Intifada,’ you help facilitate (not cause) the thinking that leads to Bondi Beach,” Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian and the State Department special envoy to combat and monitor antisemitism in the Biden administration, wrote on X in a post addressed to Mamdani.
Police said a father and son were behind the mass shooting in Australia, with authorities adding that they would need more time to determine a motive.
Mamdani, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, faced fierce backlash during the Democratic primary for defending the slogan used by some at the pro-Palestinian protests and perceived by many as a call for violence against Jews. After his surprise primary victory in June, Mamdani clarified that he understood why the phrase alarmed people and noted that it was not language he personally uses, but he declined to explicitly condemn it.
He later said he would “discourage” the use of that phrase after hearing from Jewish leaders who experienced the bus bombings during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.
Lipstadt included a link to a June Politico article detailing Mamdani’s initial refusal to condemn the slogan.
Rabbi David Wolpe, the emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and a harsh critic of Harvard’s handling of antisemitism on campus, wrote, “How about now, Mr. Mayor?” Republicans and Mamdani critics echoed the same sentiment.
New York City is home to the largest concentration of Jews in the United States.
Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams indirectly referenced the controversy during a press conference with Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who Mamdani has reappointed to serve in his administration. “That attack in Sydney is exactly what it means to ‘globalize the Intifada,’” Adams said. “We saw the actual application of the globalization of the intifada in Sydney.”
Reacting to Bondi Beach attack, Mayor Eric Adams says:
“That attack in Sydney is exactly what it means to ‘globalize the Intifada.’ We saw the actual application of the globalization of the intifada in Sydney…” pic.twitter.com/3EI3IZp3Dg
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) December 14, 2025
Mamdani issued a statement on Sunday, calling the attack in Sydney a “vile act of antisemitic terror” and “the latest, most horrifying iteration in a growing pattern of violence targeted at Jewish people across the world.” He said the deadly attack should be met with urgent action to counter antisemitism. He also reiterated his pledge to “work every day to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe — on our streets, our subways, at shul, in every moment of every day.”
A spokesperson for Mamdani didn’t immediately respond to comment on Lipstadt’s post.
In an interview aired Sunday, Mamdani responded to criticism from Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, who said after a meeting with Mamdani on Thursday that the mayor-elect’s refusal to recognize Israel specifically as a Jewish state could fuel antisemitism.
Hirsch, who also serves as president of the New York Board of Rabbis, was present at a 45-minute discussion with Mamdani as part of the mayor-elect’s outreach to Jewish leaders. Rabbi Joe Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the conversation was “candid” and “constructive.”
“Rabbi Hirsch is entitled to his opinions,” Mamdani told CBS New York’s political reporter Marcia Kramer on her program The Point. “The positions that I’ve made clear on Israel and on Palestine, these are part of universal beliefs of equal rights and the necessity of it for all people everywhere.” He added, “My inability to say what Rabbi Hirsch would like me to say comes from a belief that every state should be of equal rights, whether we’re speaking about Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere in the world.”
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