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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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In the depths of Tel Aviv’s bus station, a fragile refuge for those with nowhere else to go during war
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Two floors underground, past dumpsters and oil-laden puddles, through a reinforced Cold War-era door, a bomb shelter is buried underneath Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station.
Built in 1993 to accommodate more than 16,000 Israelis, the shelter found a new life during the Israel-Iran war as a public refuge for residents of Neve Shaanan, among Tel Aviv’s most diverse neighborhoods and one of its poorest, home mainly to asylum seekers and foreign workers.
With few other options for public shelters in south Tel Aviv, residents pitched tents in the squalor of a space that had fallen into disrepair — with pipes dripping and rats scurrying — for more than 38 days as Israel and Iran exchanged missile fire until a ceasefire that began on April 8 halted the fighting.
“It’s very difficult. Not just because of the war, but because of the conditions we’re living in,” Gloria Arca, who took refuge inside the shelter with her son, Noam, said in Spanish during an interview in April. “We’re protected from the missiles, but inside we’re not safe.”
For many Israelis, the bus station occupies a space that balances between nostalgia and revulsion. Until 2018, the station was a main node for travel into and out of Tel Aviv. Since then, ridership has dropped, and now the hulking structure is seen as little more than an eyesore. During Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last year, a short video by Israeli comedians went viral for sharing the station’s GPS coordinates in a video that jokingly urged Iran, “Please don’t bomb this bus station.”
Yet the station also offers a concrete window into Israel’s widening reliance on foreign workers, which has surged in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.
When there is no war on, the shelter functions as a community center, complete with a Filipino church, a refugee health clinic, and retailers catering to customers in more than a dozen languages.
During wartime, the station takes on a new and vitally important role as a shelter for those who have none in their homes or neighborhoods, no family in the country whose homes they can flee to and little ability to pay for temporary accommodations somewhere safer.
Arca, who came to Israel more than two decades ago from Colombia and is in the country legally, knew that it would take her and Noam more than 10 minutes to get to a shelter from their home — longer than Israel’s advanced missile warning system allows. So they decided to move into the bus station, pitching a tent alongside some of their neighbors.
Depending on the day, more than 200 residents spent their nights in the shelter during the war, according to Sigal Rozen, public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants.
“It’s not easy, especially with young children and families with special needs,” she said. “You can’t get up in the middle of the night and just run.”
The Hotline, with funding from the Tel Aviv Municipality, worked to improve conditions in the shelter, but the starting point was dire. During a visit in April, rats could be seen scurrying across newly installed artificial turf meant to brighten the space, and mosquitoes landed on visitors’ ankles before being chased off.
More than anything, Arca worries about safety in the shelter — but not from the war. “We’re protected from the missiles, but inside, we’re not safe,” she said. “Security is there, but they don’t do their job. Drug users come in and use the bathrooms. There are many children here, and we’re afraid.”
The challenging conditions were nothing new to many of the people who moved in, who represent an often unseen but growing sector of workers in Israel.
The category of “foreign worker,” a term used in Israel to describe non-citizen laborers, most of them from countries such as the Philippines, India, and Thailand, who enter the country on temporary work visas tied to a specific employer, has long been a fraught designation.
Dominant in some industries, such as home health care, where there are so many foreign workers that the role is known as “filipina” in Hebrew, foreign workers have taken on greater shares of other sectors in recent years, particularly after Israel banned Palestinian workers from Gaza and the West Bank after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. With Israelis increasingly reluctant to take low-paying manual labor jobs, the Israeli government has moved to fill the gap by permitting employers to hire more foreign workers.
Israel’s foreign worker population rose by 41% in 2024 alone to more than 156,000. By 2025, the total had reached 227,044. It is expected to grow even more in the coming years, as the government has set a ceiling of 300,000 workers.
For many Israelis, footage that circulated after the ceasefire showing long lines of foreign workers arriving at newly reopened government offices to renew their visas offered a stark illustration of the growing sector.
It is not uncommon around the world for people from impoverished countries to migrate to countries with more work and higher pay. For the workers, occupying a tenuous legal status can be worth it to be able to support their families, send their children to stronger schools and earn wages on a different scale than in their home countries.
Evelyn, a Filipina caregiver sheltering with her three children beneath the Central Bus Station, declined to give her last name out of fear of deportation. “In Israel, I can earn 10 times what I do in the Philippines. So I have money to send back to my family — not just taking care of my kids here, but my parents in Manila.”
But advocates for the workers say foreign worker status, and Israel’s increasing reliance on foreign workers, creates conditions that are ripe for abuse. Ohad Amar, executive director of Kav LaOved, a nonprofit that works to uphold equal labor rights for all workers in Israel, said the workers are “enduring conditions akin to modern slavery.”
Many foreign worker visas in Israel are tied to a specific employer and are non-transferable. Kav LaOved has documented numerous cases of delayed or unpaid wages, as well as workers who feel pressured to remain silent about abuse from their employers lest they lose their immigration status.
“Israel had not relied on migrant workers in the same way before. This is the first time at this scale,” Amar said. “Every day we are getting reports of workers’ rights violations, and we are completely overwhelmed.”
During wartime, foreign workers are frequently exposed to Israel’s unique dangers in extreme ways. On Oct. 7, as sirens blared, foreign workers were slaughtered in the fields of kibbutzes near Gaza. During the most recent war, videos circulated online of construction workers from China who filmed themselves stranded high in the air during missile barrages, afraid and without protection.
The first death in the latest round of fighting with Iran was Mary Anne Velasquez de Vera, a foreign worker in Israel from the Philippines. At the end of March, two other foreign workers were killed by a Hezbollah rocket while working in a field in northern Israel after they were unable to reach shelter.
Feeling physically vulnerable is an experience many foreign workers in Israel know well. Evelyn, a migrant from the Philippines who slept in the bus station with her children during the war, described how, in an industry as intimate as caregiving, working with elderly people who struggle to make it to a shelter, workers can feel pressured to stay in the building during an attack.
“They can’t exactly tell their employer they left grandma in the building during a missile attack, because they’ll get fired and lose their visa,” Amar said.
Some of the risks are much less visible. Evelyn was out of work as a housekeeper for the duration of the war, when her employer, an elderly woman, left the country. She lived on donations from community members and civil society organizations.
“Here is still better than back home,” she said. “But we are all struggling, and not just because of the shelter. If I can’t start working soon, I really don’t know what I will do.”
Workers like Evelyn who lack work visas must rely on informal employment, making them ineligible for compensation from Bituach Leumi, Israel’s national workers’ insurance, when they go unpaid. But having a visa did not solve the challenges of war, Rozen said.
The threat of losing their visa if they lose their employment hangs over the heads of the workers, forcing them into difficult decisions, like whether to leave their children with volunteers at the shelter or alone at home.
“Even those who still have work face a problem. If a single mother has children and there’s no school, where does she leave them? She can’t bring them along when there’s an alarm,” Rozen said. “So even when work exists, many can’t do it.”
She said the war had offered a glimpse into the as-yet-unaddressed challenges that come along with Israel’s increasing reliance on importing labor from abroad. The country’s labor market didn’t come to a standstill, as was the case in other countries in the region such as the United Arab Emirates where the vast majority of workers are migrants who tried to leave, but for Rozen, something new and troubling was laid bare.
“If you don’t want foreigners here, then don’t recruit them,” Rozen said. “But you can’t recruit them, triple their numbers, and then expect them to disappear when there’s a war.”
The post In the depths of Tel Aviv’s bus station, a fragile refuge for those with nowhere else to go during war appeared first on The Forward.
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Nearly half of young Americans view US relationship with Israel as a burden, survey finds
(JTA) — Nearly half of young Americans, 46%, believe that the United States’ relationship with Israel is mostly a burden to the United States, according to a new survey from the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Harvard Youth Poll, which polled 2,018 Americans aged 18 to 29, found that just 16% of those surveyed described the U.S. relationship with Israel as mostly a benefit.
Respondents were asked about their view of other U.S. alliances, including Canada, which 53% saw as beneficial, and Ukraine, which 21% saw as beneficial. Israel received the lowest perceived benefit of any country tested.
The survey also found that 55% of young Americans believe the U.S. military action in Iran is not in the best interest of the American people.
It comes as attitudes about Israel among young Americans in recent years have grown sharply negative. Earlier this month, a Pew Research Center survey found that 70% of Americans aged 18 to 49 held a somewhat or very negative opinion of Israel. That view was split among partisan lines, with 84% of Democrats in that demographic holding a negative view of Israel, compared to 57% of Republicans.
The Harvard survey was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs between March 26 and April 3 and had a margin of error of 2.74 percentage points.
The post Nearly half of young Americans view US relationship with Israel as a burden, survey finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Long Island father and teen son arrested after investigation into swastika drawn in school bathroom
(JTA) — A father and his teenage son were arrested Wednesday after an investigation into swastika graffiti at the teen’s school led police to search their home, where authorities said they found chemicals used to make explosives.
The arrests stemmed from an investigation into swastika graffiti found in a boys’ bathroom at Syosset High School on Long Island. After police determined that a 15-year-old student had drawn the swastika, the Nassau County Police Department sent officers to his home.
There, the teen told the officers about the explosive materials, according to prosecutors. He said his father had purchased the chemicals for him to build rockets.
During the subsequent search of the home, police found “highly unstable” materials that had been combined to make explosives, including nitroglycerin, multiple acids, oxidizers and fuels. They began to evacuate people in adjacent homes, fearing an explosion.
The teen was not identified by police due to his age. Francisco Sanles, 48, who was arrested at the scene, has pleaded not guilty to seven criminal counts, including criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child. His son was charged with five counts, including criminal possession of a weapon, criminal mischief, aggravated harassment and making graffiti.
Swastika graffiti is relatively commonplace in schools, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting over 400 incidents in 2024: Syosset High School itself was hit by a spate of antisemitic graffiti, including swastikas, in 2017. But it is relatively rare that incidents result in arrests.
In an email to the school district Wednesday night, the Syosset School District — which enrolls a large number of Jewish students — said its investigation had identified the student for the police, and he would face “serious consequences pursuant to the District’s Code of Conduct.”
“Antisemitism and hate speech have no place in our communities or in our schools,” the district said. “Syosset has long been proud of being a welcoming, empathetic, and inclusive community and those values remain firm. We protect those values and this community by confronting and holding accountable those who traffic in any form of hate.”
In January, New York City Police arrested and charged two 15-year-old boys suspected of spraying dozens of swastikas on a playground in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood with aggravated harassment and criminal mischief as a hate crime.
The post Long Island father and teen son arrested after investigation into swastika drawn in school bathroom appeared first on The Forward.