DSA’s rise carries a warning for American Jews
by Don Feder · The Washington TimesOPINION:
If you were a Jew living in the Weimer Republic during National Socialism’s rise to power, would you be at all concerned? It’s Weimar Germany in America today, thanks to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The Democratic/DSA candidate for the Senate in Michigan, Dr. Abdulrahman Mohammed El-Sayed, is an anti-Israel whack job who has been endorsed by every prominent Democrat from former Vice President Kamala Harris to California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Democrats say their party is “a big tent.” It is looking more and more like a big beer hall.
Dr. El-Sayed questions Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He does not question the right of 25 nations to exist as Muslim states. The cross between Yasser Arafat and Ernesto “Che” Guevara calls Israel’s war on terrorism in Gaza “genocide.”
Dr. El-Sayed is just one of the DSA’s nightmare creatures rising from the boneyard of the Democratic Party. Zohran Mamdani is the DSA mayor of New York City, the most Jewish city in America. His Honor has promised to make the cattle cars run on time.
Mr. Mamdani has threatened to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the latter sets foot in the Big Apple, thus targeting the leader of the only democracy in the Middle East.
Since Mr. Mamdani became mayor, hate crimes against Jews have skyrocketed. In July, attacks on Jewish New Yorkers increased almost 70% over the same period last year.
The mayor says he opposes both Zionism and antisemitism. But anti-Zionism is antisemitism. If Israel ever ceased to exist, 7.8 million Jews – nearly half the world’s Jewish population — would be at the mercy of 350 million Arabs.
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For the Democratic Socialists of America, hating Israel is an article of faith, even more than public ownership of corporations or taxing the rich into extinction.
On Aug. 13, 2025 the DSA passed its infamous “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA” resolution which describes Israel as “a racist, imperialist, settler-colonialist project.”
The statement is breathtaking in the scope of its ignorance and malice. Israel was a Jewish state for over 1,000 years before there were so-called Palestinians, an invention of Arab and Soviet propagandists following the Six Day War. How do people colonize their own land?
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, notes that the DSA was founded in the 1980s by writer/activist Michael Harrington, who was staunchly pro-Israel. Back then, DSA was socialist but not yet Marxist.
The evil that is the Democratic Socialists of America is seen in its grotesque response to the murder of 1,200 Jews on Oct. 7, 2023. In an interview with The New Yorker, DSA co-chair Megan Romer called the slaughter “the inevitable backlash” to Israeli policy, which has turned the Gaza Strip “into an open-air concentration camp.”
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I suppose it was the Israelis who put Hamas in power and turned Gaza into a terrorist enclave. Ms. Romer and the DSA are defending – nay, celebrating – the murder of 1,200 civilians, the rape and sexual mutilation of Jewish women and the burning alive of Jewish children as well as the horror inflicted on hostages.
Whatever the DSA’s claims that it hates Zionism, not Jews, its leaders know who supports Israel. That is why pro-Hamas mobs terrorized Jewish students on U.S. college campuses for more than two years.
Shortly after Dr. El-Sayed won the Senate nomination, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is both a Democrat and a Jew, announced that she would not attend her party’s state convention this year for fear of being harassed.
Just keep telling yourself that it can’t happen here. After all, America is the home of religious tolerance, right?
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Many Germans thought the comical little man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache could never come to power in the land of science and culture. In the Third Reich, culture became book burning while science built the gas chambers.
There is a Baltimore rabbi who is challenging a Montgomery County, Maryland, law that won’t let him carry a gun in the vicinity of his synagogue. With Messrs. Mamdani and El-Sayed as the future of the Democratic Party, every Jew should go armed.
Even more than hatred of Israel, the DSA is driven by hatred of America, which it also views as a racist, imperialist, settler-colonist project. Since America was founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic, they have another reason to hate Jews.
You know what’s worse than being a Jew in Weimar Germany? Being a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto.
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• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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