Has the Democratic Party turned just on Israel or on Jewish Americans, too? Is it really becoming antisemitic?
That’s what Joel Rubin, a former Obama State Department official and Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign’s Jewish outreach director, argues in his recent op-ed in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, headlined: “I Worked for Bernie Sanders. The Democratic Party Is Turning Against the Jews.”
He tells Mehdi, “Anti-Zionists are clearly hostile to the idea that the state of Israel should exist, and that, for Jews worldwide and American Jews, that’s a line too far.”
But journalist and Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, begs to differ.
Mehdi invited both leading Jewish voices to debate this polarizing and very topical issue on ‘Mehdi Unfiltered,’ where Beinart pushes back against Rubin, arguing, “There’s a very legitimate debate about whether you can support a state like that [Israel] and still have progressive, small-D democratic values, and there’s nothing antisemitic about saying you can’t.”
In this 45-minute debate, the two go back and forth on:
Their definitions of Zionism
Whether progressive Democrats are right to try and push Zionists out of the tent
Whether Bernie Sanders, Abdul El-Sayed and others are fueling antisemitism on the left
How Israel fits into the American Jewish identity
And the ADL’s role in liberal and Democratic Party politics.
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