Political Observer on the political toxin of generations!
Jun 29, 2026
Can it even surprise that John Podhoretz is the son Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter? Who can forget Normans claim to fame was ‘Making It’ ? His telling Jackie Kennedy to ‘fuck off’ was the epitomie of the class biass of a born political nihilist, on the make. Even the New York Review of Books republished this poisoned pen nililism.
Podhoretz mines the toxin of the Jewish Victimhood narritaive via ‘How the Left Abandoned the Jews’ & ‘The victories of anti-Israel democratic socialists aren’t a break from Democratic politics. They’re the culmination of a 40-year ideological shift that party leaders tolerated—and often encouraged’
How might the reader think about this ‘Jewish Victimhood Narrative’ refracted in the face of the continuinuing Gaza Genocide and the War in Lebanon? How can a comfortable American citizen clain the status of victimhood at such a remove? The Editors provide the preamble to the Podhoretz victimhood narritive:
In the week since New York City’s primaries—when three democratic socialist, staunchly anti-Israel candidates swept to victory—we’ve published a series of stories examining what the results mean for the country, and in particular, for Democrats, some of whom say they don’t recognize their own party any more.
This weekend brought a visceral illustration of the new mood we’ve been trying to capture. On Friday evening, California state senator Scott Wiener was on his way to a trans-led Pride Shabbat service in San Francisco—an event he’s joined for 22 years. At the entrance, protesters surrounded him, screaming: “We fucking hate you.” “You do not belong here.” And: “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of shit.” Wiener is a Jewish, openly gay man.
His offense? His stance on Israel—specifically, his refusal at a campaign event to declare that “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” He later reversed course, but no matter. The damage was done.
If you haven’t seen the video, we encourage you to watch it. It’s a stark example of something increasingly difficult to deny on parts of the left: No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.
How, exactly, did we get here? According to John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, the DSA-style antisemitism now permeating large parts of the Democratic Party did not emerge overnight. Rather, it was cultivated over decades, tolerated and emboldened by leaders who declined to confront it. And if we ever hope to understand it, Podhoretz writes, we must go back to the very beginning. —The Editors
Editor: Nothing quites prepares the reader for retelling of ‘American History’ via the lens of John Podhoretz at a mere 3872 words ! This telling excerpt offers a mere glimpse of the Podhoretz methodology:
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Conventional American politicians in both parties loathed the resolution—and under U.S. pressure in the wake of the end of the Cold War, it was rescinded in December 1991. But the animating idea behind the resolution had already gained purchase in academic journals and university departments. In 1989, UCLA professor Kimberlé Crenshaw devised the theory of “intersectionality,” according to which all political oppression stemmed from an imbalance between the powerful and powerless. Its application to the Middle East conflict was obvious: Israel was powerful, the Palestinians powerless, and therefore Israel was, by definition, an oppressor.
It became the most influential sociopolitical theory of our time. And it dovetailed nicely with the dominant book about the modern Middle East. That was Edward Said’s Orientalism, a jeremiad against the imposition of Western ideas on non-Western cultures. Said was an English professor at Columbia by day but moonlighted as an official of the Palestine National Council, and was a critic of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from the left.
The ideas (and disciples) of Crenshaw and Said were disseminated throughout the academy in the 1990s and 2000s. They became the default view in political science and Middle Eastern studies departments and on tenure committees. Those who preached the intersectional anti-Zionist gospel had the loudest voices on campus and the greatest influence on the college-educated Americans who came their way. Even as the Clinton and Bush administrations were widely viewed as friendly to Israel, and even though the halls of Congress were populated by friends of Israel, the next generation of American political activists was being trained in darker and uglier ideas.
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Political Observer.
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