Why the Left Has Turned Against the Jews: Cultural, Intellectual, and Spiritual Roots

Right now I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of The Jews and the Left by Batya Ungar‑Sargon—a UC Berkeley PhD, former deputy opinion editor at Newsweek, and herself of Jewish descent—which was released yesterday (June 2). I’ve really enjoyed listening to her interviews because her arguments are grounded in wide‑ranging, concrete data. One reason I’m eager to read her book is to compare her account of why the Left has turned against the Jews—a striking development, given that American Jews have been a reliable Democratic voting bloc for as long as anyone can remember—with my own understanding of the phenomenon.
 
Before getting to deeper reasons, let’s establish a few facts. As AI just confirmed for me—echoing what everyone already knows—college‑educated voters have favored the Democratic candidate in the last three presidential elections (2016, 2020, 2024), with the margin widening over time, while non‑college voters have moved increasingly Republican. During this same period, the Democratic Party has embraced a range of progressive policies: biological males competing in women’s sports, shutting down oil pipelines in the name of climate change, and DEI‑based hiring. And the Left’s response to Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023—which killed more than 1,400 Israeli civilians—revealed that hostility toward Israel, and often toward Jews themselves, has become part and parcel of progressivism.

So, the question Ungar‑Sargon raises is: why has the Left turned against the Jews?
One reason, in my view, is that college‑educated Americans were shaped—some would say indoctrinated—by overwhelmingly progressive university faculties. William A. Jacobson, a conservative clinical professor at Cornell Law School since 2007, was asked whether he was stunned by the open hostility toward Jewish students at Cornell after October 7. His answer: “No, not really stunned.” Why? Because universities have been hiring almost exclusively those who espouse progressive viewpoints, which now include hostility toward Israel. Speaking of Cornell—though he believes it represents American academia more broadly—Jacobson says: “They not only purged conservative faculty, but they also purged pro‑Israel faculty. If you’re a standard leftist academic—hostile to Zionism, believing Israel is a white supremacist state—you’ll have no problem getting hired. But if you take a more traditional or Israel‑friendly attitude, good luck being hired in the humanities or social sciences.”

How bad is this imbalance? Jonathan Haidt, co‑author of The Coddling of the American Mind and professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU, notes that while professors have long leaned left, a healthy intellectual environment requires a ratio of two or three liberals for every conservative. But in fields tied to social‑justice concerns, that ratio had collapsed by 2016 to more than ten to one. In academic psychology, the imbalance is even more extreme: seventeen left‑leaning professors for every one right‑leaning professor. As recently as the mid‑1990s, the ratio was four to one. The result, Haidt warns, is that students who spend four formative years in politically homogeneous departments are exposed almost exclusively to research from the left half of the spectrum and therefore tend to land “to the left of the truth,” on average.

When Haidt published his book in 2018, he did not include hostility toward Jews as a defining feature of leftism. I suspect he would today.

This helps explain why many college‑educated Americans—who overwhelmingly identify with the Democratic Party—have adopted the party’s increasingly hostile stance toward Israel. But it still leaves a deeper question: why did so many university professors become antisemitic in the first place?

There are many possible explanations—academia’s anti‑establishment leanings, ideological sympathy for Islam, or even financial incentives. But the intellectual explanation alone is insufficient. There is also a deeper, older pattern that Scripture itself identifies, a factor almost no one touches—including Ungar‑Sargon, who is a secular Jew.
Even if one believes that modern Israel has no special theological significance, one must acknowledge that ancient Israel was central to God’s redemptive plan. Without Israel, there is no tribe of Judah; without Judah, no David; and without David, no Jesus. Throughout Scripture, the Enemy repeatedly sought to “wipe Israel off the map”—from Pharaoh to Haman—precisely to obstruct God’s redemptive purposes. Modern attempts to destroy Israel, whether by Arab leaders or terrorist organizations, echo this ancient pattern, even if the actors—including our university professors—are unaware of the spiritual forces behind their hatred.

Why, then, are many evangelical pastors silent about hostility toward Israel? Three reasons come to mind.

First, some pastors react against the dispensational wing of evangelicalism, which often treats unwavering political support for the modern state of Israel as a litmus test of true faith. Understandably, many want to distance themselves from extreme statements like, “If you don’t support Israel, you might not be a believer,” or John Hagee’s claim that the 2014 Ebola outbreak was God’s punishment for President Obama’s Israel policy.

Second, many pastors hold the Reformed view that “Israel of the Bible is not Israel the nation.” Christopher Wright puts it bluntly: “Nowhere does the New Testament build its teaching about the future around a renewed independent state of Israel.” That may be correct. But George Ladd, an equally respected scholar, argues that Romans 11:26 (“And so all Israel will be saved”) refers to literal Israel. If so, today’s Israel may indeed have a role in God’s future purposes.

Third, pastors hesitate for the same reason they avoid addressing abortion, same‑sex marriage, or transgenderism: their congregations lean left. In churches like AMI, where nearly everyone has gone through four years of progressive academic formation, anything said from the pulpit that challenges left‑leaning assumptions invites pushback. A few years ago at the AMI Institute, there was a revolt among young attendees—almost all recent college graduates—after a veteran pastor addressed the Israel‑Palestinian conflict. When I asked one attendee whether he considered Israel and Hamas moral equals, he said yes.
We need to help our people think clearly about Israel. Israel is not infallible. Israelis, like all fallen humans, can act egregiously, and when they do, we should say so—just as God did in the Old Testament. That’s not antisemitic. Historian Paul Johnson notes that Arab terrorist bombings trace their origins to “Jewish terrorism” in the 1940s, led by the future Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin’s Irgun. Ironically, Johnson writes, “the future Palestine Liberation Organization was an illegitimate child of Irgun.” So when today’s Israeli soldiers act wrongly—whether desecrating a Christian statue or inadvertently killing civilians (in contrast to Irgun, which at times targeted civilians deliberately)—we should call it out, not as terrorism like Hamas, but as the sin of erring soldiers.

But having said that, we should also affirm Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign nation and its right to defend itself against those who seek its destruction. And ultimately, we should pray for the fulfillment of Romans 11:26—that “all Israel” (in the dispensational reading) or “elect Israel” (in the Reformed reading) will be saved.



 The views expressed here are solely my own and do not represent those of AMI.