How the Left Abandoned the Jews

Socialism is a universalist doctrine. What matters is not what religion you are, what ethnicity you are, what your national origin is. What matters is where you are on the social-stratification scale. Michael Harrington, the founder of the DSA, believed in “the coalition of the dispossessed,” by which he meant the financially dispossessed. The new DSA has amended Harrington’s vision. It is a coalition of the intersectionally dispossessed. It is a fulfillment, in some ways, of Jesse Jackson’s long-ago vision of a “rainbow coalition” that would come to rule the Democratic Party. And like Jackson’s “rainbow coalition,” the only hues that are considered unacceptable are blue and white. Those are the colors of the Israeli flag with its Magen David, its star, that represents the Jewish people, the flag and the star upon whom they spit.