Did we really think it wouldn’t come to this?
For the past several years, the Jewish community has been accused, rather relentlessly, of hysteria.
When anti-Jewish hate crimes surged and consistently outpaced those targeting other religious groups, we were told that Jews only appeared disproportionately victimized because they report crime at higher rates. Never mind that the claim itself was dubious. Apparently, even reporting antisemitism had become suspect.
When Jewish students, parents, and community leaders warned that the increasingly volatile rhetoric at pro-Palestine marches and university encampments was creating a hostile environment for Jews, we were accused of stifling criticism of Israel. Concerns about intimidation, harassment, and glorification of terrorism were dismissed as attempts to shut down political speech.
When Jeffrey Epstein was reimagined as a Mossad agent and the so-called “Epstein class” became shorthand for a shadowy cabal of evil Zionists running the show behind the curtain at the White House, Jews who pointed to the obvious antisemitic undertones were painted as paranoid, sex pest-harboring devils.
And when “antisemitism” became something many people associated exclusively with goose-stepping Nazis and swastikas, while even the most extreme forms of anti-Zionist rhetoric were granted automatic political legitimacy, it became evident that today’s Jew-haters had finally hit the jackpot and found this generation’s get out of jail free card. The language had changed. The underlying impulses had not.
So why was anyone surprised when Texas Democratic congressional candidate Maureen Galindo announced that, if elected, she would convert an ICE detention center into a prison and “castration center” for American Zionists, whom she characterized as pedophiles??
To the Democratic Party’s credit, Galindo’s comments were swiftly and widely condemned. One could reasonably argue that Galindo represents a fringe case, an extremist whose rhetoric was immediately rejected by her own party, even politicians whose views on Israel aren’t exactly charitable, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called them “absolutely disgusting.”
But that raises a more uncomfortable question.
This is absolutely disgusting.
This bigoted garbage and antisemitism should be nowhere near our politics.
If you’re in TX-35, vote for @johnnygarciatx.
And the donors behind the Republican super PAC funding her should be exposed. https://t.co/0rnQrd1P4b
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 19, 2026
Was Galindo merely an isolated extremist, or was she drawing conclusions from a political and cultural environment that has spent years normalizing the idea that Zionists are uniquely sinister, uniquely dangerous, and uniquely deserving of public contempt?
Because once a group of people is routinely portrayed as malignant, corrupt, oppressive, or morally beyond redemption, it should not surprise anyone when someone eventually decides that punishment rather than persuasion is the appropriate response.
That’s not to say all, or even most, Democratic politicians are unabashed Jew-haters. But there is something to be said about the permissiveness that has characterized parts of the party’s response to Jew hatred over the past decade, and the ease with which many leaders have pointed fingers across the aisle when tasked with confronting the antisemitism metastasizing among their own ranks.
When pro-Palestine protestors proudly waved the flags of designated terror organizations and chanted slogans that glorify violence against Jews, too many politicians waxed poetic about the protestors’ unwavering commitment to human rights rather than confront the uglier elements of the movement. When blatant disinformation and falsehoods about Israel and, at times, the Jewish people became accepted as fact, the Democrats failed to correct the record, reluctant to upset a vocal segment of their base.
For many American Jews, the message was difficult to miss. One of the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting demographics found itself treated as politically expendable. After all, Jews make up only about 2.4% of the American population. They are unlikely to determine the outcome of a national election.
“We went faster to concentration camps than I expected,” Jewish Democrat Jared Moskowitz remarked in response to Galindo’s threats.
In one sense, Moskowitz is right. It’s hard to accept that the Golden Age of American Jewry may be drawing to a close. The United States has afforded Jews a level of security, prosperity, and acceptance unprecedented in Diaspora history. Understandably, many Jews struggle to imagine that reality changing.
But if historical patterns are to serve as any indication, perhaps the sudden jump from whitewashing pro-Hamas university encampments to castration camps for Jews isn’t as drastic as we’d like to think. The distance between social hostility and explicit threats can shrink with alarming speed.
The lesson is not that America is Third Reich Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Historical analogies are rarely that simple. The lesson is that antisemitism often advances in stages, moving from rhetoric to exclusion, from exclusion to discrimination, and from discrimination to something far worse.
It’s how antisemitism has always worked. German Jews learned this lesson the hard way. During the Weimar Republic, many believed themselves fully integrated into German society. Eastern European Jews derided German Jewry as “more German than the Germans.” Yet within two decades, Hitler had denaturalized German Jewry, stripping them of their citizenship, livelihoods, and legal protections. A decade after that, two-thirds of European Jewry had been reduced to ashes.
The Soviet experience followed a different path but arrived at a familiar destination. During World War II, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was Joseph Stalin’s pride and joy; after all, it raised $33 million on behalf of the Soviet war effort to defeat the Nazis. Three years later, Stalin had them shipped off to the Gulag or executed, point-blank, in a Moscow basement during the Soviet Union’s anti-Jewish campaigns, all under the guise of combating Zionism.
To be clear, nobody is rounding up Jews or “Zionists” to concentration camps. Mainstream Democrats condemned Galindo’s comments, as they should have. American Jews have not lost their civil rights. Yet legal equality on paper doesn’t quite always guarantee social acceptance in practice.
The more troubling question is whether rhetoric like Galindo’s is really as shocking as many people would like to believe.
If people are told day after day that Israel is a uniquely illegitimate, genocidal, apartheid, settler-colonial state born in sin, and that Zionism is not merely a political ideology but a moral stain, then it should not be surprising when some begin to conclude that Zionists themselves are beyond the bounds of acceptable society. If Zionists are portrayed as inherently oppressive, violent, or corrupt, why wouldn’t someone eventually argue that they deserve punishment rather than debate?
Who wouldn’t want to imprison people they sincerely believe are child killers? Who wouldn’t want to stop the “Epstein class” from hurting innocent girls?
Ideas have consequences.
Nor is this dynamic confined to one side of the political spectrum. The so-called “Woke Right” has increasingly peddled the same anti-Israel, anti-Zionist conspiracies and fuses them with good, old-fashioned, Medieval anti-Judaism. This new Conservative wing has found an audience with populist isolationists in the Republican Party, including Vice President JD Vance. The Jewish people may remain in good standing with the current administration, but who’s to say what will happen in the next five years? The next 10? Political coalitions evolve. Public attitudes change. No alliance is permanent.
That is what makes the current moment so unsettling.
Across a growing number of professional, educational, and social spaces, Jews report being subjected to ideological litmus tests that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Jewish students increasingly describe being held collectively responsible for the actions of a foreign government. Jewish professionals in fields ranging from publishing to medicine to academia report feeling pressure to publicly distance themselves from Israel in order to remain socially acceptable. Public discourse has become saturated with claims that are often repeated widely before being scrutinized, corrected, or challenged.
Galindo may be perceived as a nutcase now, but how can we be so sure that someday in the not-so-far-off future, mainstream American politicians won’t reach the same conclusions?
Here’s the thing: the best time for American politicians across the aisle to nip anti-Zionist hate in the bud was on October 7th, when anti-Israel activists celebrated online and in the middle of Times Square. The next best time is now.
Editor’s note: Maureen Galindo lost her May run-off race for Congress; she earned 40% of the vote.
