Congressional candidate Brad Lander showed up last Saturday outside Madison Square Garden to protest a Hindu nationalist speaker. He came as a friend of the left, introduced himself as the Democratic candidate in New York’s 10th Congressional District, and said he was there to stand with the crowd. What he received in return was exactly what he deserved after a lifetime of pandering to a mob that will only see him as one thing: a Jew.
Brad Lander is not a practicing Jew by any stretch of the imagination. He has spent his whole political life in the same mold as Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders - using Jewish ethnicity as both a political sword and shield when convenient, and shucking that identity when it is not. Lander was a card-carrying member of the DSA but left after October 7th because the DSA’s celebration of the 1,200 murders was a bridge too far for him. Yet he still thinks that this group will accept him if he repeats their mantras.
Watch the video circulating online and you will see a man who spent years trying to become the acceptable kind of Jew. Lander called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. He said he would restrict American military aid. He beat Jewish incumbent Dan Goldman from the left on Israel. He is an ally of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and has talked about building a coalition of anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists. He has called Israel’s system essentially apartheid and joined in making AIPAC the new boogeyman.
None of it mattered. They called him a filthy Zionist and told him to get out. A man with a drum got in his face while others waved keffiyehs and chanted that they wanted no Zionists there. The mob does not discern between Netanyahu’s government and any other potential leaders in Israel. Anyone who believes in the idea that the Jewish people have a right to sovereignty in the Jewish homeland is the enemy. When a mob turns that word into a slur, they are not arguing about Gaza. They are arguing about whether Jews are allowed to exist as a nation.
There is a simple test. Replace Israel with the world’s only Jewish state. Replace Zionism with the Jewish people’s right to a sovereign home in the land they never stopped praying toward. The “distinction” between antisemitism and anti-Zionism collapses almost immediately. Nobody applies this standard to anyone else. There are Christian countries, Muslim countries, Buddhist countries, and ethnic nation-states from Japan to Armenia.
The same weekend, Governor Kathy Hochul offered the other half of the Democratic ritual. On Friday, she appeared at the Islamic Cultural Center School in the Bronx, stood before a room of Muslim leaders, and put on a black hijab. The clip spread on Sunday. She thanked an ambassador, an imam, and the executives of the organization while covering her hair for the men in the room. She has done this before, including at the funeral of a Muslim NYPD officer last year.
Democrats will call it respect. It is pandering. Hochul’s party lectures the country about feminism and The Handmaid’s Tale, then the governor of New York covers her head so she will not offend an audience her consultants have decided she must court. Two weeks before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Governor of New York put on the costume of submission and called it outreach. Political pandering is as old as the profession itself, but appearing before a group of people who exclude women and then proclaiming yourself to be a feminist icon is a bridge too far. But Hochul is not alone; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did the exact same thing a few months ago.
Hochul’s actions are the first act of the screenplay; Lander’s is the third. Pander to those who hate you, win the election, then get turned on when you are no longer politically useful. This playbook should stop working, but Democrats are always willing to move on to the next group that will get them power. They did it on the basis of labor, race, and gender, so religion is not a far cry.
The crowd that rejected Lander was the coalition Democrats have spent a decade flattering: the campus left, the keffiyeh set, the activists who treat Zionist as the new dirty word for Jew. The party pretends anti-Zionism is a foreign-policy disagreement and that covering a governor’s hair is just manners. Then a Jewish Democrat who already gave them the genocide line still gets told he is too Jewish to stand on their sidewalk.
Jews have tried this before. We have tried converting, assimilating, and becoming more universalist than the people who wanted us gone. Every generation produces a class of Jews convinced that if they denounce the embarrassing Jews over there — the religious ones, the Israeli ones, the ones who refuse to be embarrassed — the mob will make an exception. The mob does not make exceptions. It updates the list.
Lander can denounce the war, the settlements, and the aid package. The moment he will not say the Jewish state itself is illegitimate, he is ostracized. That is not a failure of messaging. That is the ideology working as designed. You cannot appease people whose problem with you is that you exist as a people.
It seems like a cosmic joke that these are the people who represent the largest Jewish populations in the country. Meanwhile, the annual convention of the Republican Jewish Coalition is happening in Las Vegas, and the speakers who are lining up have few, if any, Jewish communities in their districts. Senators Tim Sheehy of Montana and Jim Banks of Indiana do not have a Borough Park or a Monsey to answer to, and neither does Jim Jordan. They are in a ballroom at the Venetian this week anyway, standing with Jews, while New York’s governor covers her hair and a Jewish Democrat from one of the most Jewish districts in America gets chased off a Manhattan sidewalk for the crime of remaining a Zionist. There’s a lesson to be learned here, but asking Hochul and Lander to learn it is a fantasy.
Moshe Hill is a political analyst and columnist. His work can be found at www.aHillwithaView.com and on X at @HillWithView.
