by J. Pharoah Doss
Last month, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David Wecht announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party because of its “acquiescence to Jew-hatred.” U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) said he understood Wecht’s decision and then added that the Democratic Party must confront its antisemitism problem.
The Democratic Party’s antisemitism problem began after October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from Gaza, murdering over 1,000 people and seizing over 200 hostages. Israel declared war and launched a military campaign that killed Hamas terrorists along with tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party did not condemn the attack on Israel, arguing that international law granted the Palestinian people the right to oppose Israel’s foreign occupation.
Left-wing student groups on college campuses demanded a cease-fire in Gaza, accused Israel of genocide against Palestinians, and expressed enmity toward Jewish students with slogans such as “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Moderate Democrats backed the student group’s freedom of speech.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League reported 8,873 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2023, a 140 percent increase from the 3,698 documented in 2022. What was even more concerning was that the giant spike in antisemitic incidents occurred between October 7 and the end of 2023, resulting in 5,204 antisemitic incidents in just two months.
Midway through 2024, Julian Epstein, the former chief counsel to the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, published an op-ed in The Hill titled “Democrats’ fight against hate crimes vanishes in the face of antisemitism.”
Epstein argued that for the past few decades, Democrats have consistently demanded a strong response to the rising number of hate crimes motivated by race, ethnicity, ancestry, or sexual orientation. Among other things, they have insisted on universal condemnation of the crimes. The left’s concern about racism appears less pressing when it comes to Israel and the Jews. Although hate crime laws specifically identify violence, intimidation, and harassment on school campuses—including impeding free movement, as has repeatedly happened to Jewish students—as a federal crime, most Democrats have not insisted on federal criminal prosecutions for the more than 1,500 reported antisemitic incidents on college campuses since the Oct. 7 attack.
By the end of 2024, the Anti-Defamation League had recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the United States, up 5 percent from the previous year.
The next year, the American Jewish Committee’s State of Antisemitism in America Report revealed that violent antisemitic acts in 2025 have made the majority of American Jews feel less safe. More than four out of ten people in the United States have directly witnessed or heard antisemitism and recognize it as a problem.
Last month, Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) authored an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing his fellow Democrats for failing to condemn antisemitism and hateful rhetoric from the left while quickly going to the media to condemn the right for the same offenses. The double standard Gottheimer mentioned was widely ignored because his fellow Democrats were too busy attacking the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais when the court decided that Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-Black congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Democratic leaders, civil rights groups, and left-wing pundits warned that red states would use the Supreme Court decision, which ruled that states cannot rely too heavily on race to draw congressional maps, to redistrict their states in ways that favored Republicans, and that red state redistricting would be Jim Crow all over again. Democratic leaders, civil rights activists, and left-wing pundits went even further, claiming that Republican lawmakers who began redistricting in their states were acting like members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Democratic leaders, civil rights activists, and left-wing pundits are so used to resorting to hyperbolic smear tactics that they didn’t realize that the KKK comparison more accurately describes them than their opponents.
Since the left sees Blacks as historical victims and Republicans and Jews as power brokers, they forgot all the historical targets of the KKK. The first formation of the KKK emerged in the South after the Civil War during the Reconstruction period. The KKK targeted Blacks, but their main targets were Republican leaders, Radical Republicans, and White supporters of Reconstruction because these groups sought civil rights for Blacks. During the second rise of the KKK in the 1920s, the KKK not only targeted Blacks but also Jews, Catholics, and immigrants.
During the past decade it was the left that promoted the concept that “silence is violence.” It meant whoever failed to speak against White supremacy, discrimination, or hate crimes against minorities endorsed the injustice.
At this moment in history, the Democratic Party’s silence concerning the rise of antisemitic incidents in the United States does not make them complicit in the injustice, but a KKK comparison fits them more than it does Republicans who seek to redraw congressional maps in their favor.
