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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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Why is this chef opening a kosher Israeli restaurant in LA right now?
How do you explain Malka, the new kosher Israeli restaurant in Beverly Hills?
I’m not talking about the food — I haven’t eaten there yet — I’m talking about the fact that it’s opening at all. Why would Eyal Shani — many of whose restaurants worldwide have faced protests, vandalism and physical attacks — dare to open another restaurant at this particularly fraught time?
“The whole situation is leading me to open more, more, more,” Shani told me when we met last week. “That is my reaction as a Jewish man. If they are trying to kill you, you should make a lot of children. And these are my children.”
We were sitting in the empty restaurant on the ground floor of the boutique SIXTY Hotel. Shani, who is 67, wore a T-shirt and dark khakis. With his stubbly beard and unruly gray hair, he could pass for an intense, very post-grad philosophy major. He put a plate of farmers market green grapes between us.
The night before, at a pre-opening event for journalists, influencers and, it seemed, models, the same space was packed. Piles of fresh raw vegetables — a Shani signature — filled the long bar counter along with perfect rectangles of toasted focaccia topped with either steak tartare or smoky eggplant caviar. The crowd swelled, the music blared, trays of mojitos and palomas disappeared. It was signature Shani — a frolic of nature, noise and Israeli food.
Now, the large, modern space — a rare high-end restaurant in Los Angeles’ ever-struggling kosher restaurant scene — was quiet. Shani leaned back into an earth-toned banquette and reflected for a moment on how those two words, “Israeli food,” have become so toxic, especially following Oct. 7.
Demonstrators accuse Israeli chefs of passing Palestinian food off as Israeli and of being complicit in their government’s actions. Shani’s business partner, Shahar Segal, did engage in marketing work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the controversial U.S.-Israeli organization established to feed Gazans. But Israeli restaurants around the world with no such involvements have faced similar protests, as have Jewish-owned restaurants with no ties to Israel.
Malka’s opening follows the closure of Shani’s restaurants Miznon in Melbourne and Gila & Nancy in Berlin, both targeted by mobs chanting anti-Israel slogans.
The rioters in Melbourne entered MIznon, threw chairs, chanted “Death to the IDF!” and only stopped when the two owners of a nearby pizza place — both Lebanese — confronted them.
“In the end, they succeeded to kill the restaurant,” Shani said. “They almost killed our staff there.”
Shani happened to be at the restaurant in Berlin when dozens of protesters surrounded it, shouting, “Stop feeding genocide!”
He raced into the kitchen, put together some food platters and went outside to offer the demonstrators the opportunity to eat and talk.
“They didn’t want to eat,” he said. To them, he added, “Eating from an Israeli is like eating from Satan.”
Shani rejected the charge commonly leveled at Israeli chefs — that they have stolen Palestinian foods and recast them as Israeli.
“I always declare that I took a lot of inspiration from the Palestinians,” he said.
In 1989, Shani opened his first restaurant, Oceanus in Jerusalem. He was 29 and, he said, he knew nothing about food except that he loved bringing people together around it. He wanted to make something like the fresh focaccia an Italian Jewish neighbor once served him. The closest thing to it was the Arabic laffa Shani would buy from a closet-sized bakery in West Jerusalem.
“I had a cook, a Palestinian man from Hebron, a very talented man,” Shani said. “I loved him. He said, ‘Eyal, no problem, my grandmother makes it every day.’ He showed me.”
Shani brushed the finished bread with olive oil and showered it with fresh rosemary.
I told Shani that I ate at the now-closed Oceanus at the tim and to this day remember being served, when we sat down, fragrant sheets of his focaccia-laffa.
“It was a hybrid,” Shani said, “Palestinian, Italian and new Israeli. Each one is getting influenced by the other. You can’t do it with just one brain.”
Malka, a strictly kosher restaurant, presents a different kind of challenge to Shani, who is not an observant Jew. His Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant Shmone offers, for instance, “A mountain of grilled calamari, okra, tomatoes and yogurt.”
But the chef who turned flour, yeast and water into a hybrid Palestinian-Israeli-Italian flatbread revels in facing constraints like kashrut.
“Each culture leads with its limitations,” he said. “These limitations are a blessing — they’re shaping your creation.”
The kosher stricture against cooking meat together with dairy products didn’t faze him.
“Take me off dairy, put a beautiful bottle of olive oil in front of me — what are the limitations?” he said. “And if there would be no olive oil anymore in the world, I would quit, I would not cook.”
Beyond the kitchen, Shani said he wanted to reach more Israelis with his food. About 70% of Israelis are strictly kosher or prefer it.
“So how can it be that we’re only cooking for the hipsters in Tel Aviv?” Shani said. “It’s unfair.”
The marketplace has rewarded Shani’s ability to combine local ingredients and techniques with creativity and showmanship. The chef has around 70 restaurants — neither he nor his publicist knew the exact number — including Malka’s in Tel Aviv, Miami and New York.
And the backlash isn’t close to stopping him. Shani just announced a new restaurant project in, yes, Melbourne.
“It doesn’t make me frightened,” he said. “It’s the way my personality reacts. I think it’s the instinct of survival. You just keep going.”
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An unvarnished look at Polish Hasidic life before the Holocaust
In the decades before the Holocaust, Warsaw still teemed with Hasidim. Muranowska Street was virtually lined with shtiblekh (prayer and study houses), each with its own dynastic affiliation. But one day, a young man established a new shop on the street and brazenly kept it open on the Sabbath. Modernity had arrived.
Some Hasidim didn’t seem too concerned. As we read in the new English translation of Yechiel Hofer’s Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl, the protagonist, Reb Zalman, dismissed the whole scandal. The Sabbath, he shrugged, was simply too holy to be violated by people so unworthy. And in truth, Warsaw’s Hasidic enclaves continued to thrive, albeit in a more concentrated form.
Most Yiddish authors assumed the inevitable demise of Jewish tradition. In story after story, we read about pious, aging parents watching helplessly as their sons and daughters reject their ancestors’ ways to become Zionists, revolutionaries, assimilationists and, of course, Yiddish writers. Nobody, it seemed, could hold back the tide of progress.
But many interwar Polish Hasidic leaders were actually galvanized by the challenge of secularization. They launched ambitious, transnational fundraising initiatives, refurbished thousands of heders [traditional primary schools], and built hundreds of Hasidic yeshivas and Bais Yaakov girls’ schools. And as Hofer’s book shows, their shtiblekh recovered and proliferated down to the bitter end.
Hasidic Warsaw is one of the few works of modern Yiddish literature to present Hasidism as something other than moribund. Reminiscent of I.B. Singer’s In My Father’s Court, but more gracious, Hofer’s stories bring us into one corner of this impossibly thriving world: a Warsaw shtibl attended by followers of the Aleksander Rebbe. Reb Zalman, an irritable luftmensch (unemployed dreamer), is the shtibl’s most zealous member and the Hofer family’s most frequent Sabbath guest.
Reb Zalman’s pauper’s arrogance exasperates even his fellow Hasidim, who cannot resist pranking him. They appoint him “Purim Rabbi,” ply him with liquor, and get him to accept bribes. They lure him out of his Hasidic enclave to experience Gentile taunts and glares. Some try to help him gain a livelihood, but he proudly self-sabotages. Their most lucrative scheme, a tavern in the shtibl, fails because Reb Zalman decides to give all the liquor away.
Then there is Reb Zalman’s misogyny. He disdains his kind host, Hofer’s mother, who is “strictly observant, pious and indeed a Hasid in her own right.” She tactfully challenges his prejudices by recounting stories of her Grandmother Brayndl, a passionate follower of a Hasidic group called the Porisover Hasidim, who used to travel regularly to see the Rebbe, Reb Yankev Hersh [and] was deeply respected at the Rebbe’s court.” Yet Reb Zalman scoffs at even the most revered Hasidic women.
Hofer, in short, doesn’t romanticize interwar Hasidism. But he doesn’t dismiss it either. His family’s Sabbath table, he writes, provided even the ungrateful poor with a slice of Heaven. In the Aleksander shtibl, “deep seriousness combined with high-minded joy reigned.” Reb Zalman’s gift for quirky storytelling almost redeemed him in Hofer’s eyes.
Jonathan Boyarin is among the few scholars able to grasp not only the external, quantitative significance of the Polish Hasidic shtibl but its inner life: imperfect men swaying in prayer, chants, and study, occasionally halting to make a toast with vodka and herring or recount another edifying story. Yet Boyarin remains deeply attuned to Hofer’s gentle irony.
Hasidic Warsaw, with its multitude of stories-within-stories, is in a sense a work of collective authorship. We behold a community of storytellers constantly striving to make each other better by means of humorous, cautionary tales. Secularist Yiddish writers drew liberally from such stories, stylizing and serializing them to great acclaim while assuming the demise of the very movement that sustained them. But only physical annihilation could do that.
The reader of Hasidic Warsaw is left with a deep sense of loss. Without storytelling, how can we hope to regain that kind of connectedness? How can future Jewish literature emerge as easily and naturally? In honoring the art of storytelling, Hasidic Warsaw reminds us of yet another world that was lost in the Holocaust.
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Peter Lorre, decades after ‘Casablanca,’ is the breakout star of ‘Coyote Vs. Acme’
The character actor Peter Lorre died in 1964. The doctor Peter Lorre is alive, quite possibly immortal and has never looked better.
In Coyote Vs. Acme, the long-awaited legal comedy in which Wile E. Coyote sues the mega-corporation behind all his contraption needs for decades of grievous injury, the Good Doctor is seen smuggling evidence outside of Acme labs. Soon thereafter, the company’s security forces him to step into a black hole in the ground that is then rolled up like an old carpet.
As a man who knows too much, he’s a threat to the business.
If it seems strange that the Hungarian-born Jewish performer known for his turn as a child murderer in M and black market peddler Ugarte in Casablanca should be revived as a whistleblower, you may be forgetting his earlier appearances in the Looney canon.
The first was as himself, voiced by Mel Blanc, sitting with a crowd of celebs in Ciro’s nightclub and admiring an oversized bubble covering up a burlesque performer. That short from 1941 scans as uncomfortably close to the house style of the Der Stürmer cartoonists. In subsequent episodes, Lorre was caricatured as a mad scientist, though shrunk down considerably even as his role grew.
In Hair-Raising Hare, Dr. Lorre lures Bugs Bunny into his castle in the hopes of feeding him to the gargantuan red monster Gossamer. (A flashing neon sign on his lair indicates that he is an “Evil Scientist.”) Bugs gets the upper hand by providing a manicure to the tennis-shoed behemoth, jousting him into a tin can and ultimately spooking him by drawing his attention to the fourth wall.
When Daffy Duck tricks his way into Lorre’s suburban home in Birth of a Notion, the diminutive doc tries through a series of booby traps to recover his wishbone for a science experiment. (Stan Freberg voices Lorre in this one.) When Daffy manages his escape, Lorre’s eyes turn toward his dog, Leopold, prompting the pooch to make his exit.
In these treatments Lorre is a lonely, depressive psychopath of the sort Lorre excelled at playing. His revival for 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action reimagined him as a different sort of villain: an underling for the Acme Corporation.
What Coyote Vs. Acme does is revolutionary not just for exploring the liability implications of cartoon case law, but for the redemption it offers Lorre, a kind of fitting tribute to a Hollywood legend whose life and career was cut tragically short by chronic pain and addiction.
This Lorre, who’s had a bit of a glow-up, sacrifices himself to sound the alarm for Acme’s evil R&D methods. It’s an apt arc for a refugee from Nazi Germany, among whose most recognizable work is his role in perhaps the greatest anti-fascist film of all time. While Ugarte takes advantage of refugees desperate for exit visas in Casablanca, the real Lorre helped many flee Europe ahead of World War II, just as cartoon Lorre works on behalf of his fellow toons. (His role as a complicit scientist also recalls his lone directorial effort, The Lost One, in which he plays a Nazi chemist haunted by the war.)
Coyote Vs. Acme’s Lorre also plays piano — not with a disembodied hand — and is revealed to be in a long-lasting — 80-plus years! — marriage with Tweety’s doting owner Granny.
With the film marking the largest-ever opening for Ketchup Entertainment, which snagged the distribution rights after Warner Bros opted to ditch the flick for a tax write-off, it’s too soon to tell if it will herald a Looney Tunes renaissance. However it shakes out, it has singlehandedly upped Peter Lorre representation in the films of 2026.
For those who don’t despise him — or who give him any thought — that’s victory enough.
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