The Democratic Party is being taken over from the inside, and the people doing it are not hiding their intentions.
Zohran Mamdani runs New York City as an open member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed – the radical socialist who explained away the jihadist who rammed a truck packed with explosives into a Michigan synagogue and its children’s center by telling us that “hurt people do hurt people” – won the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who killed Amazon’s proposed project in Queens and the thousands of jobs it would have brought to New Yorkers, is the DSA’s brightest star. The organization now operates roughly 190 chapters across the country, and among Democratic voters it polls better than the Democrats in Congress do.
These are not your grandfather’s union organizers. The DSA platform released this year calls for abolishing the United States Senate, defunding the Pentagon, transferring ownership of major corporations to the public, replacing the President and the Supreme Court with bodies subordinate to Congress, and defunding the police.
And they do not stop at economics. This new version of socialism fuses its insane economic prescriptions with a virulent hatred of America, Israel, and Western civilization itself. This is the movement rising in America. And standing near the front of it, as usual, are the DSA’s most beloved useful idiots: Jewish leftists.
Bernie Sanders is the movement’s elder spokesman and its closest thing to a thought leader. Yet he is far from alone. When Mamdani ran for mayor, seven New York rabbis published an open letter announcing that they had voted for him and that “supporting Zohran and Brad was, for us, an explicitly Jewish act.” They dismissed the antisemitism concerns raised about Mamdani as “false accusations,” defended the slogan “globalize the intifada” on the grounds that it means different things to different people, and placed themselves in a proud line running from “Jewish garment workers and labor organizers to generations of socialists and civil rights activists.”
Worse, Jewish voices insist that God is on socialism’s side. Before his passing, Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote that “Torah-tradition ethics run counter to the values of the capitalist marketplace which encourages each individual to seek his or her own wellbeing without regard to others.” He argued that Israel is not yet a truly Jewish State, because Israel forfeited its claim to Jewish values when it “chose instead to be a modern capitalist state.” Jewish socialists argue for what they call a Jewish ecosocialism, quoting Leviticus beside Karl Marx and concluding that the laws of the Bible make it “simply impossible for society to develop into a class of owners and one of dispossessed workers.”
They point first to the sabbatical year. The Bible commands the farmers of Israel to stop working their fields and let the land rest every seventh year (Leviticus 25:3-4), and also releases every outstanding debt that one Jew owes to another (Deuteronomy 15:1-2). Imagine a law in America that erases every mortgage and every student loan every seven years!
The Jubilee goes further still. In the fiftieth year, every field in the land of Israel returns to the family that first received it (Leviticus 25:10). Here, they argue, is a biblical law that redistributes the wealth of the nation and prevents any family from growing rich at the expense of another.
Then come the laws protecting the poor. A farmer may not harvest the corners of his field, and he may not go back for the sheaves his workers dropped, because that produce belongs to the poor (Leviticus 19:9-10). No Jew may charge his fellow Jew interest on a loan (Exodus 22:24).
Above all they cite the prophets. Amos denounces the wealthy men of Israel who “have sold for silver those whose cause was just, and the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 2:6), and demands that justice well up like water and righteousness like an unfailing stream (Amos 5:24). The Jewish left reads Amos as the first socialist.
String these verses together, and you have a God who stands against private wealth and a Bible that reads like the DSA party platform.
Are they right? Is the God of Israel a socialist?
Pull a verse out of the Bible and read it on its own, and you can make it say whatever you want it to say. The Jewish left specializes in selective citation of the Bible, and it is not hard to understand why. Most of these ideologues cannot read the Bible in Hebrew or the Sages in Aramaic, and they have never studied a page of Talmud in their lives. Yet the less they know, the louder they claim to speak in the name of the Torah and on behalf of all Jews.
Read the laws in full and they say something very different.
Start with the Jubilee, the law they cite most often. The Jubilee does not hand a single field to the government or to the collective. It returns every field to the family that owned it. The entire purpose of the law is to guarantee that every Israelite family holds property of its own, permanently, beyond the reach of anyone powerful enough to take it away. This is the opposite of what socialism does.
The Bible fiercely defends private property, and it defends the small landowner against government overreach. King Ahab wanted a vineyard next to his palace and offered Naboth a better vineyard in exchange, or a fair price in silver. Naboth refused, because the land was his family’s inheritance. The most powerful man in Israel could not take one field from one farmer. When Jezebel arranged false witnesses and had Naboth killed for it, God sent Elijah to announce the destruction of the entire royal dynasty over a single stolen vineyard (I Kings 21).
The seventh year collapses under the same examination. The Bible releases loans in that year and touches nothing else, so a man’s field, his house, his flocks and his business all remain entirely his own. And when lending later dried up as the seventh year approached, leaving the poor unable to borrow at all, Hillel instituted the prosbul, a legal instrument that allowed loans to survive the year of release. The fault lay with the lenders and not with the law. The Bible warned them never to refuse a poor man because the year of release was approaching (Deuteronomy 15:9), and when lenders violated that commandment and shut their wallets anyway, the Sages found a way to keep credit flowing to the poor.
As for charity, the Bible commands us to give it and does not authorize the government to take it. “You shall surely open your hand to him” (Deuteronomy 15:8). The commandment speaks to each of us personally. It forces us to look at the man we are helping, and it changes the kind of people we become. The economic redistribution demanded by the socialists accomplishes none of this.
It should be clear by now that the socialists twist the meaning of the Bible to fit their ideology. But the problem with socialism goes far deeper than any one verse or law. Socialism is a rejection of the entire ethos of the Bible and the prophetic tradition.
Millions of people know and love to cite Isaiah’s vision of a world at peace. His powerful words are engraved on a stone wall in New York City, directly across the street from the United Nations:
These words are genuinely moving, and a powerful reminder of what God wants for humanity. Yet almost nobody reads the verse that comes directly before it, the verse that tells us how we will bring about the peace we are all yearning for.
Isaiah gives us the entire sequence, and every step of it depends on the step before it. The nations of the world will come up to Jerusalem because they want God to teach them how to live, and the people of Israel will teach them His ways, thereby bringing the Torah from Zion to all mankind. Only at the end of that long road, after the entire world learns to live according to the Torah, will the weapons become farm tools. The peace Isaiah promises is the fruit of a world that accepts the Torah of the God of Israel. There is no shortcut to peace, or any other road that will bring us there. Remove the Torah from Isaiah’s vision and nothing remains but a beautiful but empty slogan.
Abraham Livni, the twentieth century French Jewish thinker, wrote that the people who selectively quote the prophets this way “could be likened to educators who teach their young students the advantages and uses of electricity, but refuse to convey to them, perhaps out of ignorance, how electricity is produced.”
This is no innocent mistake: “Those who prefer to see no more in the prophetic message than this ideal of a totally equitable and pacific society are Utopian dreamers or are simply naive… But are our Utopian idealists really such gentle lambs? Are they not, rather, subtle destroyers?”
In other words, the socialists who claim to be the prophets of our generation, who carry the banner of equality and insist that they are fighting for the average man, are the most angry, intolerant and hateful people in America today. They shout down anyone who disagrees with them, hound Jewish students at college campuses, and when Jews are murdered, they explain that the killers were themselves victims who had been pushed too far.
How do socialist idealists become such terrible people? Because they are not prophets at all. They are revolutionaries, and a revolutionary is a very different kind of man.
“The revolutionary aspires to overthrow existing institutions, but the future in his eyes is no more than a rootless, abstract Utopia. Inasmuch as he is incapable of recognizing the value of history, he throws overboard the good with the bad.”
The revolutionary socialist has no interest in learning the lessons of history. The American founders divided the powers of government and created separate chambers of Congress because they studied what happens when too much power is concentrated in the hands of one person or legislative body. The DSA platform, oblivious to the wisdom of the Constitution, calls for abolishing the Senate and placing the President and the Supreme Court under the control of Congress.
Every country that tried socialism ended up with shortages, famine and secret police. Cuba is the example closest to home, a police state where ordinary people have waited in line for basic food for sixty years. And yet the DSA recently published a statement that ended with the words “Long live the Cuban Revolution.” Socialists do not argue with the lessons of history. They live in proud and purposeful ignorance of them.
The prophets of Israel were the opposite kind of men. They lived with a constant awareness of Israel’s eternal covenant with God. Amos and Isaiah were not revolutionaries proposing a new system to replace an old one, but rather rebuking Israel for abandoning the values of the Bible. The prophet wants a transformed world every bit as much as the revolutionary does. Isaiah promised a day when the wolf would lie down with the lamb and the earth would be filled with the knowledge of God. But the prophet knows that this new world can only grow out of the covenant Israel already carries, the way a tree grows from a seed, and that a man who throws the seed away will never see the fruit.
Which brings us back to the leftist rabbis and Jewish activists who assure us that socialism is the authentic voice of the Torah. Livni asks: “Can these Jews, who take themselves for idealists and apostles of justice and peace, be educators worthy of trust and confidence, when they have cut themselves off from their Source and lost the Memory of their people and their prophets?”
Jewish socialists want Isaiah’s plowshares without Isaiah’s God. Sadly, but predictably, they will get neither.
