The party’s over

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., a congressman for the past 45 years, will retire in January. A stalwart supporter of Israel throughout his tenure in Congress, Hoyer epitomizes the type of Democrat that is rapidly disappearing.

Hoyer represents another time — when most Democrats stood with the Jewish state. A recent Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Republicans are pro-Israel but only 17% of Democrats.

As a Democrat who supports Israel, Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida said, “It’s become lonely.”

In Congress, two antisemitic Republicans, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, have been cast aside. However, antisemites on the Democrats’ side continue to grow.

Some of the newly elected Democrats took antisemitism to a new level. Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed justified a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist attack on a Detroit-area synagogue where over 100 children were in school. His antisemitic remarks did not stop former Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama from campaigning for him.

In New York, Democrats chose Darializa Avila Chevalier as their Congresswoman. One day after the Oct. 7 massacre, Chevalier attended a rally celebrating Hamas’ terror against innocent civilians, including babies, children and the elderly.

The Democrats’ actions in the 119th Congress should be eye-opening.

In November 2025, 22 Democrats co-sponsored a House resolution accusing Israel of genocide. It takes a particular combination of evil and ignorance to accuse Israel of genocide, a word coined to describe the Holocaust, but now used to describe a lie that is easily disprovable.

In April, 40 out of 47 Democratic senators voted to block arms sales to Israel.

In July, 103 Democratic representatives voted to end aid to Israel, but no Democrat voted in favor of ending aid to Jordan.

Many Democrats fail to recognize the importance of supporting the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is an imperfect country worthy of criticism like any other, but unlike any other, it is a tiny country confronting terrorists seeking its destruction on seven fronts. 

One can only imagine the damage Democrats will do now that they have regained both houses of Congress.

However, it’s not only Congress where Democrats have abandoned the Jewish people. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani picked 18 people to serve on a judicial panel, but it turns out that 18 is not always a lucky number for Jews. In a city where an estimated 50% of lawyers are Jewish, not one of his picks was. Although Mamdani denied that he intentionally excluded Jews, there is a 1 in 262,144 chance of this randomly occurring.

Mamdani was the first mayor in over 60 years to skip the Israel Day Parade, yet he attended the parade celebrating Pakistan, a country where Christians are killed for practicing their faith and honor killings of women occur. 

Mamdani, a socialist who speaks of equity and fairness, is okay with Muslims controlling 99.9% of the land in the Middle East but is against Jews having self-determination in the other one-tenth of 1%.

It’s not just moderates and registered independents like me who are disheartened with the party. Some ardent, hard-left Democrats have also started sounding the alarm.

Jonathan Greenblatt, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, said the Democratic Party has an antisemitism problem that can be defined in three letters: DSA — Discrimination, Stereotyping and Antisemitism.

Ammiel Hirsch, a Reform rabbi and president of the New York Board of Rabbis, cautioned that Jews should not be loyal to any party. Instead, they “need to demand that the political parties earn our vote.”

Joel Rubin, who worked for Bernie Sanders, noted that political parties die when they kick out the Jews. He said that some of the most iconic Democrats such as Louis D. Brandeis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg would not be welcome in the party today, and he called on all Jews to speak up.

Saying “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. They left me,” Alan Dershowitz, a lifelong Democrat who cast his first presidential vote for John F. Kennedy, recently registered as a Republican.

In fact, it was Robert F. Kennedy who in 1948 said that Jews were the reason that the Arab population in Palestine almost doubled to 1.2 million between 1932 and 1944.

Kennedy referenced a pamphlet published by the Christian Council on Palestine that said, “All authorities, including Palestine Government officials and British investigating commissions not particularly favorable to Zionism, agree that Palestine's extraordinary progress has been due primarily to Jewish zeal and enterprise, and to the capital and labor brought in by Jewish immigrants. The extraordinary growth of the Arab population is primarily due to the reduction of the death rate, directly traceable to the better economic and health conditions introduced by the Jews.”

Today, documented historical facts such as these are ignored as many prefer to espouse a fictitious narrative that paints Israel as a villain that colonized the land.

Just as too many Republicans have adopted the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, too many Democrats are spreading lies about Jews and Israel.

Championing every other minority while overlooking antisemitism in some of its adherents, the Democratic Party has forsaken Jewish people who have long supported it, and has lost its moral high ground.

Farewell, Steny Hoyer. So long to truth, reason and justice. When it comes to the Democratic Party, for the Jewish people, the party’s over.

MARJORIE DAVIS lives in Providence. She graduated from Brandeis University and is a senior database specialist in a large, international technology company. An alternate version of this article appeared in the Times of Israel.