Jews Are Not and Have Never Been 'Oppressed' in America
The Left has turned on the Jews. That doesn't make us an oppressed minority.
In a new interview, Brad Lander, a Jewish progressive candidate for New York’s 10th Congressional District, told the New York Times on the subject of criticizing AIPAC something astonishing: “I feel queasy talking about it, given the antisemitic tropes at play here about Jews and money and power,” Lander says. “But I have to.”
Did you catch that? He feels “queasy” about engaging in antisemitic tropes, but c’est la vie! It’s the Left in 2026, after all! He has no choice! They’ve forced his hand!
What a thing to admit.
Of course, he is only saying the quiet part out loud. He’s far from alone. Today, the Free Beacon revealed that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s chosen candidate for New York’s 13th championed a terrorist convicted of plotting an Israeli supermarket bombing that killed two people. She also notoriously marched on October 8th—not for the Israeli victims of October 7, but for their Palestinian perpetrators. Of course, it’s not surprising from the mayor, who doesn’t believe Israel should exist and has palled around with Hasan Piker, an antisemite who said he’d vote for Hamas over Israel.
The sad fact is, every day brings more evidence that the Left has turned on the Jews.
But let no one mistake this for “oppression.”
It’s nothing of the kind.
It’s a small elite that has turned on the Jews in a country where that’s deeply unpopular, a country whose government has resolutely refused to endorse such hatred throughout its long and glorious history, and whose people have never allowed antisemitism to become mainstream in the 350 years Jews have been living on American soil. Even in Mamdani’s New York, our police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, is a proud Zionist committed to protecting Jews and marching for the Jewish state.
This distinction between elite racism and state-sponsored oppression is crucial to understanding the state of Jews in America in 2026—but also our history in this country. Despite what many American Jews have come to believe, we were never oppressed here.
But they didn’t let us into the Ivy Leagues! people will angrily tweet at me.
True enough. But would you call Asian Americans “oppressed” today? Because they did the same thing to them for decades. Many of the people who insist Jews were and are an oppressed minority in America wouldn’t consider that “oppression.”
We much more than any other minority were seen not as guests but as founding partners in the creation of this great nation, as I chronicle in my new book The Jews and the Left. The Founding Fathers thought they had a covenant with God to protect the rights and religious liberties of every American citizen, and they saw those ideas as being passed to us through the Torah. They saw Jews as the living, breathing embodiment of the source material of the civilization they were trying to build.
This is something that’s difficult for many American Jews to comprehend, but it is simply a fact: We were never oppressed here.
There has never been an America without Jews. We arrived here in 1654 and never left.
This is not to deny the rising antisemitism on the Left. It is to deny that this anti-Jewish sentiment from American leftist elites constitutes “oppression.”
Certainly, in Europe, the old hatred is at play in the Left’s current hatred of Israel. But there is a real difference in the way the global Left and the American Left engage in their anti-Israel activism. It’s this exact point: There is no history and no present day existence of state-sponsored oppression, because in America we are being thrown in with the white majority by the Left, a white majority that has always resolutely refused to see us as an other.
Ask yourself the following three questions:
Does the Left hate Jews more than they hate white people?
Does the Left hate Jews more than they hate Christians?
Does the Left hate Israel more than they hate America?
The answer to all those questions is no.
But certainly, none of the people arguing Jews are oppressed would allow the same argument to be made about white Christians, or American conservatives.
There's no doubt been a real intensification of hatred against Israel and Jews because it was in the news, but what’s actually happened is the American Left has put us in the “oppressor” camp, which is to say, they have put us in the white camp in their woke binary. They've put us in the conservative camp.
The Left hates power and strength and nation states and the Judeo-Christian binary of right vs. wrong tthat this nation was founded on. Instead, it worships weakness and abjection (my book goes into great length explaining how and why the Left abandoned labor rights and civil rights for wokeness) and views oppression as inherent virtue. This creates in the white privileged Leftist elite in America oppression envy: They can only achieve moral authority by proxy to the oppressed.
This is obviously a deeply sick worldview, and it’s why the Left excuses terrorism: The oppressed have no moral responsibilities because their weakness is their virtue. That’s why the Left sided with Hamas.
Yet the response to this godless binary from some Jewish organizations has been the exact opposite of what it should have been.
They seem to believe that the way to fight antisemitism from the Left is to fight for inclusion in the oppressed category. Instead of fighting the binary of oppressor/oppressed, they chose to fight our placement on the side of the oppressor: How dare you suggest we are oppressors! We, too, are oppressed! How dare you treat Jewish students the way you treat conservative students! Treat them with the kid gloves you’ve afforded trans students! Hence organizations like the ADL fighting tooth and nail to get Jews included in DEI.
This is such a mistake. First of all, it’s false. Second of all, it’s doubling down on the very mindset that got us here in the first place.
Perhaps most troubling, it is endorsing a falsehood in order to curry favor with the people who hate us by participating in the smearing of those who have and will always have our backs.
None of this is to deny that Jews faced intermittent antisemitism here. Elite spaces were always places where antisemitism would crop up. In the Gilded Age, for example, there was a spike in antisemitism from the elites when the robber barons with their newfound millions tried to infiltrate the old monied families of New York society, which resulted in an explosion of antisemitism from those elites trying to keep out the new blood. You had quotas on the most elite universities, leading to the creation of Jewish institutions. Some of the best firms and doctors’ practices wouldn’t hire Jews. There were restricted neighborhoods that didn’t let Jews buy property.
This is not “oppression.” It’s just garden variety racism.
Oppression is when the government gives them a hand and underwrites their racism. It’s when it’s systemic and state sponsored. It’s when you are in a different tier legally and that defines your opportunities and outcomes, defines how the law treats you.
The history of Jews in America is the opposite of that, as I write at great length in my book. Even the most famous instances of antisemitism in America—the lynching of Leo Frank, Henry Ford, the Klan firebombing synagogues—were ensconced in a massive rejection from Americans nationwide. In the weeks before Leo Frank was lynched, hundreds of thousands of letters poured in from across the nation begging the judge for leniency and deploring the conditions of his trial. Henry Ford had to apologize for his antisemitic publication, The Dearborn Independent, when he wanted to run for office, because it was well known that you couldn’t go full antisemite and expect to succeed politically in America. (When Ford’s candidacy failed, he went right back to publishing it.) Throughout the South, Jews were so precious to their Christian neighbors that when the Klan came for the Jews, the South turned on the Klan.
That one time during the Civil War when Ulysses S. Grant ordered the Jews to leave his military district? It was overturned by the time the Jews arrived in President Lincoln’s chambers to demand it be revoked.
“And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” Lincoln reportedly said to the Jewish delegation who came to complain.
“Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection,” a Jewish merchant from Kentucky, Cesar Kaskel, replied.
“And this protection they shall have at once,” said Lincoln.
The idea that with this history, American Jews would beg the Left to treat us as an oppressed minority fills me with horror.
It isn’t just wrong. Being this wrong about our history is a betrayal of our homeland, as I explained to the great Haviv Rettig Gur on his podcast.
We were never seen as guests.
We were never oppressed.
We were never seen as a beleagured minority or an immigrant community.
We were seen as founding partners in the creation of this great nation.
What do we owe the nation that, uniquely in the history of humanity, saw us that way, rather than as a thorn in their sides?
More than we’ve given, of late, starting with letting go of the myth that we’re oppressed.
I like Batya, but her notion that Jews in America were not oppressed is so off the mark. Simply because we could hide that we were Jews, by taking advantage of our lighter skin shade, and move into a more accepting society does not mean we were not oppressed. Yes Jews were able to use the American system to create successful laws and lives, but the reason they needed to do that is because they were marginalized by the powers that be.
There are investment banks, because Jews were not allowed to work for banks. There are “Jewish” law firms because they were not allowed to become partners in White Shoe Law Firms. There are Jewish social clubs, because Jews were not allowed in the Older Country clubs. Brandeis University was created because of jewish quotas at the ivy leagues. There were parts of deeds that houses could not be sold to Jews.
I grew up in the Bible Belt, and was singled out with my sister by the public schools because we would not celebrate Christmas. We had to say christian prayers in public school even after the Supreme Court cases. Antisemitism was pervasive and is still pervasive within large parts of American society.
And considering that Crown Heights was a pogrom, and she herself wrote for years about the physical assaults and antisemitism being faced by religious Jews in Brooklyn how can she say that physical threats were not part of the American landscape.
I think Batya is mixing ideas here. No there was not an outward Pale of Settlement, and the ghettos were more because refugees and immigrants tend to live close to each other and there was no outward laws defining where Jews could live, but it doesn’t mean that Jews were always welcomed and that society was welcoming. Now lets talk immigration…..WW2, the Holocaust….
I will deal solely with today. I ( and we) are not oppressed. But we are despised by some. What is important is knowing who the some are. I am less concerned with an anti Semite who has no interest in socializing with me than one who has political power ( or is a strong supporter of a person who has such power).
In years gone by the liberal Jewish assumption or proclivity was to put that label on Christians . Many leftist jews still bitterly cling to those assumptions. While there are some church goers in particular churches ( that lean hard left) who may still deserve this broadbrush, the vast majority of Christians who live in accordance with their Christian values are anything but oppressors. Recent polling makes this clear. As do recent various words and actions and protests where jews are among those targeted . This is one of the objectives and lessons of intersectionality that is omnipresent in many settings.