For nine decades, the relationship between the Democratic Party and Jewish voters has been one of the most durable alliances in American politics. It began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 landslide, when Jewish voters found a welcome in the donkey’s tent despite the party’s own history of exclusion. But in a sharply worded column published this month, American Thinker’s Civis Americanus argues that the relationship has curdled into something resembling domestic abuse β and that Jewish voters should finally walk out.
From country clubs to keffiyehs: A shifting coalition
The column traces the alliance back to an era when Jews couldn’t join Republican-controlled country clubs, and the Democratic Party offered a political home. It acknowledges the party’s flaws β including some members’ ties to white supremacist groups and the segregation of the federal civil service. But it argues that on civil rights, the party evolved, and Jewish voters were instrumental in pushing it forward, with civil rights becoming, as the author puts it, “a way to define one’s Jewishness.”
The trouble, per the column, began in the last decade or two. The author points to a new set of Democratic allies: Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, former Michigan congressional candidate Abdul El-Sayed, New York City Council member Zohran Mamdani, and others. The column singles out the decision to make Minyon Moore, a Black Lives Matter director, chair of the 2024 Democratic National Convention. BLM, the author notes, has denied Israel’s right to exist and expressed support for figures including convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh and convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur.
At the 2024 convention, the author claims, Democrats appeared in Palestinian keffiyehs β a visual symbol that, alongside statements from party allies, contributed to a feeling among some Jewish attendees that they were no longer welcome. The column quotes Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who said she feared being harassed, chased, or booed off stage at Democratic events.
The argument is blunt: If harassment of any person based on race or religion does not result in immediate removal from Democratic events, that says everything about the party’s priorities. A Jewish Democrat who stays, the author suggests, is like a battered spouse unwilling to leave an abuser.
Warnings the column says were ignored
The piece argues that Jewish voters should have seen the warning signs earlier. It points to MoveOn.org’s Action Forum in 2006, which hosted antisemitic and anti-Catholic hate speech; then-Sen. Barack Obama’s 2007 moderated forums, where a moderator allegedly suggested using “Israel lobby” as a substitute for “Jewish lobby”; and Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, who suggested the U.S. deserved 9/11.
The author also criticizes the party’s response to campus antisemitism in 2023, and its association with Rev. Al Sharpton, particularly his role during the Crown Heights riots and the Freddy’s Fashion Mart incident, which the column compares to a hostile environment for Jews in New York City.
Policy fights as the breaking point
The column’s central metaphor reaches its nadir with a vivid scene: the Donkey returning home in a drunken rage, muttering about “justice in Palestine,” wearing a keffiyeh, and slapping the Jewish voter while screaming “Zionist” and worse. The author grounds this in legislative reality, citing a summer vote in which a majority of the Democratic House caucus β including North Carolina Reps. Deborah Ross and Valerie Foushee β voted to end aid to Israel.
Not all Democrats went along. The column credits Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Ritchie Torres of New York, and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania for pushing back, quoting Gottheimer’s complaint about Democrats who are “noticeably and shamefully silent when antisemitism comes from the far left.” But those voices, the author says, were shoved aside.
The Jewish voter, in the author’s telling, has tried to appease the party’s left flank β falsely accusing Israel of genocide like New York’s Brad Lander, acknowledging “white and Jewish privilege” β but it hasn’t helped. House Democrats, the column notes, overwhelmingly voted against a bill to strip federal funding from colleges that boycott Israel, with only 33 Democrats in support.
What the Jewish voter should do
The author says the mistake was not leaving the first time. It points to former Democrats like Alan Dershowitz and Pennsylvania jurist David Wecht as examples of Jews who already made that break. If Nessel had self-respect, the column says, she would too.
The column’s final scene offers a new possibility: the Republican “Elephant” has changed since the country club era. The author cites the House’s 237-169 vote for the “Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act,” which would strip federal funding from colleges engaged in boycotts of Israel. All but two Republicans supported it. The GOP tent, the author argues, now includes people of all races and ethnicities β an American melting pot.
“The Jewish voter realized that the Donkey she had married ninety years ago was no longer the same Donkey,” the column concludes. “It was time for a divorce.”
Whether that divorce happens remains to be seen. But for a political alliance as old as the New Deal, the column’s framing β however contentious β underscores a real debate about where the Democratic Party’s center of gravity has shifted, and whether Jewish voters still feel at home there.
Source: www.americanthinker.com β https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/the-democrat-donkey-domestic-abuser-of-the-jewish-voter/