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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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Harvard Faces $113 Million Budget Shortfall After Trump Cuts
Illustrative: Anti-Zionist Harvard students participating in a sit-in against Israel amid its war targeting Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Nov. 16, 2023. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect
Harvard University registered a $113 million budget deficit caused chiefly by the Trump administration’s confiscation of much of its federal contracts and grants as punishment for, among other alleged misdeeds, its admitted failure to combat antisemitism on campus, a Harvard report revealed last week.
According to Harvard’s “Financial Report: Fiscal Year 2025,” the university’s spending exceeded the $6.7 billion it amassed from donations, taxpayer support, tuition, and other income sources, such as endowment funds earmarked for operational expenses. Harvard also suffered a steep deficit in non-restricted donor funds, $212 million, a possible indication that philanthropists now hesitate to write America’s oldest university a blank check due to its inveterate generating of negative publicity — prompted by such episodes as the institution’s botching the appointment of its first Black president by conferring the honor to a plagiarist and its failing repeatedly to quell antisemitic discrimination and harassment.
Despite the 2025 fiscal year deficit, the total value of Harvard’s endowment grew by 11.9 percent to $56.9 billion, according to the report. However, school officials noted the challenge that federal pressure has presented to its financial situation.
“Even by the standards of our centuries-long history, fiscal year 2025 was extraordinarily challenging, with political and economic disruption affecting many sectors, including higher education,” Harvard president Alan Garber said in a statement. “We continue to adapt to uncertainty and threats to sources of revenue that have sustained our work for many years. We have intensified our efforts to expand our sources of funding.”
US President Donald Trump’s abrupt cancellation of taxpayer funds awarded to Harvard maimed the university as well, dropping its federal sponsored revenue fell by 8 percent to $629 million and incinerating exorbitant dollar amounts from Harvard’s portfolio. Speaking to The Harvard Gazette on Thursday, Harvard’s chief financial officer Ritu Karla pointed to “$116 million in sponsored funds — which are reimbursements for costs the university has already incurred” that “disappeared almost overnight” when Trump penalized Harvard in April.
Harvard will continue to feel Trump’s wrath as it pays out a new tax on endowment investments which Congress imposed on the country’s wealthiest universities in July. Its liability could be as high as $368.2 million, climbing to $454.8 million by 2030, according to an analysis conducted by American Enterprise Institute (AEI) researchers Mark Schneider and Christopher Robinson.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, in April, Trump ordered the expropriation of $2.26 billion in Harvard’s federal funds after the institution refused to agree to a wishlist of policy reforms that Republican lawmakers said would make higher education more meritocratic and less welcoming to anti-Zionists and far-left extremists. Contained in a letter the administration sent to Garber — who subsequently released it to the public — the policies called for “viewpoint diversity in hiring and admissions,” the “discontinuation of [diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives],” and “reducing forms of governance bloat.” They also implored Harvard to begin “reforming programs with egregious records of antisemitism” and to recalibrate its approach to “student discipline.”
Harvard refused the president his wishes even after losing the money and took the issue to federal court. Meanwhile, it built a financial war chest, leveraging its GDP-sized assets to issue over $1 billion dollars in new debt and drawing on its substantial cash reserves to keep the lights on. Eventually, it overcame the administration in the first stage of litigation, securing from a judge appointed by former US President Barack Obama restitution of some of the funds the administration impounded — but the nine-figure sum it lost in the process has led to its largest budget deficit since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to The Harvard Crimson.
“We are also examining operations at every level of the university as we seek greater adaptability and efficiency,” Garber said in Thursday’s statement. “In parallel, we continue to ensure that our academic environment nurtures excellence in all of our endeavors. We are promoting open inquiry, constructive dialogue, and viewpoint diversity, and pursuing our priorities with the resolve that the times demand.”
In additional commentary contributed to the report, Harvard treasury officials Timothy Barakett and Ritu Kalra said, “All of these developments have raised new questions about the financial foundations of higher education and underscore a shifting federal policy environment that will shape the future.” They also said that the “this result could have been much worse,” adding, “it reflects not only the magnitude of the disruption, but also the discipline of a university community that acted quickly and with resolve.”
More disruptions are forthcoming, as Harvard may have to fight again for its taxpayer funds before a US Supreme Court with which it lost a historic case that ended racial preferences in admissions, a policy once popularly known as “affirmative action,” because the court found Harvard’s own imposition of the practice on applicants resulted in widespread discrimination against Asian Americans.
Furthermore, Harvard remains under investigation over its handling of campus antisemitism. The US House Committee on Education and the Workforce wrote to Garber last month asking the university to comply with requests for internal communications regarding discrimination complaints filed by Jewish students.
The committee said it is especially interested in documents related to an October 2023 incident in which two anti-Zionists activists, joined by a mob, assaulted a Jewish graduate student while screaming “Shame!” at him as he struggled to free himself.
“Obtaining the documents will aid the committee in considering whether potential legislative changes, including legislation to specifically address antisemitic discrimination, are needed,” said the letter, authored by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). “Harvard does not appear to have disciplined — and instead has rewarded — two students who assaulted an Israeli Jewish student who was filming a ‘die-in’ protest on Oct. 18, 2023.”
Walberg and Stefanik also demanded confirmation of Harvard’s decision to pause a partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank. The Harvard-Birzeit partnership was put into abeyance following an internal investigation of Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights (FXB), the institution directly affiliated with Birzeit. It is not clear what ultimately caused Harvard to discontinue the arrangement, but it is a move for which prominent members of the Harvard community and federal lawmakers have clamored before.
“As you know, postsecondary institutions that receive federal funds must maintain a safe learning environment and fulfill all obligations under Title VI and its accompanying regulations,” they continued. “This includes the obligation to promptly address discrimination, including harassment that creates a hostile environment, wherever such circumstances may be found to exist.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Tel Aviv Soccer Game Abruptly Canceled After Dozens Injured by Fans Throwing Smoke Grenades, Violent Riots
Soccer Football – UEFA Europa League – Maccabi Tel Aviv v GNK Dinamo Zagreb – TSC Arena, Topola, Serbia – October 2, 2025 Maccabi Tel Aviv players pose for a team group photo before the match. Photo: REUTERS/Zorana Jevtic
An Israeli Premier League soccer game on Sunday at Tel Aviv’s Bloomfield Stadium between city rivals Hapoel and Maccabi was abruptly canceled shortly before kickoff due to “public disorder and violent riots” by fans in and around the stadium, according to Israel Police.
The match was called off out of concerns for public safety after a group of soccer fans threw dozens of smoke grenades and pyrotechnics devices onto the field inside the stadium, police said. The Associated Press cited a police spokesperson who said 42 people were injured, including five police officers, and dozens of people were arrested. Rioting fans outside of the stadium, who were upset about the canceled game, threw bottles and assaulted police officers, and one police officer was injured and required medical treatment, according to authorities. More than a dozen fans wearing masks were detained for unlawful assembly during the riots. Before the match, police also arrested a suspect, in his 20s, who attempted to smuggle four fireworks into stadium.
“Disorderly conduct, riots, injured police officers, and damage to infrastructure – this is not a soccer game, this is a breach of order and serious violence,” said Israel Police. “Following disturbances of public order and risk to human life ahead of the start of the soccer match at Bloomfield Stadium, the Israel Police has notified the teams’ management and the referees that it has been decided not to allow the match to take place,” the police force added.
“This is not scenery – this is a life-threatening danger,” Israel Police said Monday in a post on X that included a clip of the smoke grenades and flames being thrown inside Bloomfield Stadium. Tel Aviv District Commander Deputy Commissioner Haim Sarigrof said the police force has “zero tolerance for violent incidents.”
Maccabi Tel Aviv said in a statement that the game was canceled after flares were thrown by Hapoel fans, not supporters of the Maccabi team, according to the Associated Press. Hapoel Tel Aviv described the decision by police to cancel the game as “reckless and scandalous” and said most of the injuries were allegedly caused by police officers.
“In reality, most of the injuries from the event were actually caused by the brutal police violence at the end of the match, as a direct result of the scandalous decision to cancel the event,” Hapoel claimed. “Everyone saw the disturbing videos — children being trampled by horses, police officers beating fans indiscriminately. The police have taken over the sport — and we call from here on the leaders of Israeli football to do everything in their power to put an end to this, otherwise there will be no football here.”
“It goes without saying that the club’s management condemns all acts of violence—and will fight against lawbreakers, even if they are wearing uniforms,” Hapoel added.
Bloomfield Stadium is shared by both Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Tel Aviv, but Hapoel is designated as the home team. Maccabi fans have been banned from attending the team’s Europa League match against Aston Villa next month in the United Kingdom because of security concerns by British police regarding anti-Israel protests. In November 2024, Maccabi fans were violently assaulted in a premeditated and coordinated attack following a soccer game in Amsterdam between the soccer team and the Dutch club Ajax.
Earlier this year, an Israeli Premier League match between Maccabi Haifa and Maccabi Tel Aviv was canceled midway through the game for security reasons after Haifa fans threw flares at athletes.
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US Steps Up Diplomacy After Gaza Truce Shaken
Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 19, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
US envoys met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday aiming to corral Israel and Hamas to get the Gaza ceasefire plan back on track after an explosion of violence over the weekend that threatened to derail the week-old truce.
Israel and Hamas have both recommitted to the ceasefire plan brokered by US President Donald Trump since Sunday’s flare-up in which a Palestinian attack that killed two soldiers prompted an Israeli bombardment in Gaza.
However, with even the first stages of the truce shaken by repeated flashes of violence, including on Monday, it was far from clear whether the US will be able to keep pressure on the two sides and maintain momentum to end the conflict.
The latest events reflected the stumbling blocks to keeping the long-sought ceasefire from unraveling and securing a lasting peace after two years of war in Gaza. Key questions of Hamas disarming, further Israeli troop pullbacks, and future governance of the Palestinian enclave remain unresolved.
TALKS ON NEXT PHASE OF CEASEFIRE PLAN
Trump, keeping pressure on both Hamas and Israel as he seeks to salvage the signature foreign policy achievement of the first year of his second term, said on Monday the US was taking many steps to maintain the ceasefire.
He told reporters the “Hamas situation” would be handled quickly but that he had not told Israel to “go in and take care of it.” He said that while Hamas was in violation of the agreement, he did not believe its leadership was responsible but that it was facing “some rebellion” in its ranks.
If Hamas leaders do not straighten it out, “we’re going to eradicate them if we have to,” Trump said at the White House. But he insisted that such actions would not involve US troops on the ground.
During their visit that began on Monday, the US envoys, Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, were expected to try to shore up the truce then start talks on the next, more difficult, phase of the 20-step plan.
US Vice President JD Vance was also due to visit Israel on Tuesday, with Netanyahu saying the pair would discuss regional challenges and opportunities.
High-level US diplomacy in the region, with talks also due later on Monday with Hamas in Egypt, underscored the priority Trump has placed on cementing the ceasefire after proclaiming last week the deal heralded “the historic dawn of a new Middle East.”
On Monday, Palestinian medics said three more people had been killed by Israeli tank fire near the “yellow line” inside Gaza demarcating Israel’s initial military pullback from the main populated areas.
The Israeli military said forces had fired at militants who crossed that line, which it was started marking with concrete barriers and yellow poles about every 200 meters (219 yards).
Gaza City residents reported confusion over the line’s location due to the lack of a visible boundary.
HAMAS TO HAND OVER BODY OF ANOTHER HOSTAGE
Witkoff and Kushner’s visit to Israel, aimed at discussions on the next phase of Trump’s complex ceasefire plan, was scheduled before Sunday’s flare-up in violence, according to US and Israeli sources.
Israel is unlikely to publicize any progress in the talks until the remains of more hostages are returned.
The Red Cross received the body of another hostage from Hamas on Monday and transferred it to the Israeli military, Netanyahu’s office said.
Israel believes Hamas could hand over up to five more bodies immediately. Other bodies among 15 still in Gaza may be hard to recover because of destruction in the enclave.
Egypt will host talks in Cairo on Monday with Khalil Al-Hayya, Hamas’s exiled Gaza chief, over ways to follow up on implementing the ceasefire, the group said in a statement.
A Palestinian official close to the talks said the group‘s delegation would discuss formation of a technocratic body to run Gaza without Hamas representation.
Hamas and other allied factions reject any foreign administration of Gaza, as envisaged in the Trump plan, and have so far resisted calls to lay down arms, which may complicate implementation of the deal.
RESIDENTS FEAR MORE OUTBREAKS OF VIOLENCE
Israel said it launched strikes across the enclave in response to a Palestinian attack that killed two soldiers operating inside the agreed deployment line in Rafah in southern Gaza.
Hamas’s armed wing said it was unaware of clashes in Rafah and had not been in contact with groups there since March.
Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group, has detailed what it calls a series of violations by Israel that it says killed 46 people and stopped essential supplies from reaching the enclave.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said any Hamas terrorists in areas of Gaza still under Israeli control must leave immediately and anyone remaining beyond the yellow line would be targeted without warning.