El-Sayed’s victory stemmed from three factors – decades of mounting Muslim immigration, the ‘progressive’ left’s obsession with Israel and the notable economic struggles of younger Americans. He is no moderate, and sports close ties to hardline Islamic groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, a century-old organisation that has been crucial to the growth of Hamas, al-Qaeda and ISIS.

This is a man who expressed concern about offending people who were ‘sad’ about the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, a religious fanatic who, besides hating both America and Israel, recently executed over 30,000 of his own people. El-Sayed also claims the only reason Democrats support Israel is money, but he has his own ties to Qatar, whose influence operations and massive investment in universities in America far exceed those of Israel.

Today, American Jews are experiencing something that has already happened to Jews in Europe, where their population has shrunk by almost two-thirds since the Holocaust. In both the UK and the rest of the continent, being Jewish – particularly Israeli – has become a ticket to marginalisation and exclusion. Even before the war in Gaza, it was reported that barely half of Europeans think Israel has a right to exist.

In America, the once-potent Jewish establishment no longer provides an adequate shield. It was unable to prevent New York, arguably the most Jewish-dominated global city in history, from electing as mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken anti-Zionist with little empathy for Jews, who has surrounded himself with people, including his wife, who traffic in anti-Israel memes.

Remarkably, a defeated far-left candidate in Texas still won 36 per cent of the primary vote with a platform that suggested setting up concentration camps for ‘American Zionists’. In New Jersey, the Democrats have nominated Adam Hamawy, someone with links to an alleged al-Qaeda front, in a safe blue seat. Another New Jersey district followed a similarly anti-Israel course. This is in addition to three more Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) clones elected as congressional candidates for New York.

More worrying still, we are seeing mob violence reminiscent of the Brownshirts in 1920s Germany. DSA-affiliated radicals go to Democratic conventions, like the one in Michigan, heckling those deemed not sufficiently anti-Zionist. The state’s attorney general, who is Jewish, refused to attend, to avoid being ‘chased around’, ‘harassed’, ‘yelled and screamed at’ and ‘booed off stage’. Washington State’s party gathering was little better, where Israel was denounced for its supposed ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’, and the rise in anti-Semitism was blamed – you guessed it – on the Jews.

Anti-Semitism is now being normalised. More Americans, notably young Democrats, are more favourable to the Hamas interpretation of the 7 October pogrom than that of Israel. The media, long seen as ‘controlled’ by the Jews, routinely follows Hamas and Iranian talking points.

To anyone brought up in America in the 1970s and 1980s, this seems almost incomprehensible. Anti-Semitism was rare even at Berkeley, where I went to college, and hardly noticeable over decades of reporting in virtually every part of the country. It is now demonstrably worse.

Erwin Chemerinsky, Berkeley’s law-school dean, wrote in the LA Times that ‘nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism’ now clearly evident at his and other universities. UCLA, always eager to catch up with its more prestigious sibling, allowed protesters to create what amounted to a Jew-exclusion zone during its long Gaza encampment in 2024, while the student council condemned a speech from a hostage held by Hamas for 505 days.

Virtually every traditional bastion of Jewish achievement in America has now become a beating heart of anti-Semitism. At universities, Jewish students and professors are harassed in the name of anti-colonialism. Teachers’ unions, often founded and led by Jews, now advocate for such outrages as California’s openly anti-Zionist ethnic-studies programme, which largely dismisses Jews as white oppressors and Israel as a cruel colonialist power.

This trend has caught many by surprise, as American Jews have thrived economically, culturally and politically. But now they find themselves banned from the literary world and cultural events, while suffering hate crimes that dwarf anything affecting Muslims, black people or Asians. The left-wing of the Democratic party actually prefers Iran and China, two autocracies, over a democratic, if flawed, Israel.

Some suggest that this will lead Jews towards the generally more pro-Israel Republicans. But this too could prove a fool’s errand, given the resurgence of right-wing anti-Zionism promoted by the likes of vice-president JD Vance’s hero, Tucker Carlson, and podcaster Candace Owens. The online right’s insistence that Jews have special powers has been a feature of anti-Semitism dating back to at least the Middle Ages.

It could get worse, particularly as we head to the 2028 elections. For all his seeming corruption and crazy ideas, Donald Trump has been a decent friend to both Israel and American Jews. But his most likely successor, Vance, has refused to winnow the Jew-haters from the right, and buys into conspiracy theories about Israelis, even blaming them for undermining his bogus deal with Iran.

Sadly, it’s unlikely the Democratic candidate will be much better. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an overexposed mid-wit, accepts the DSA’s view of Israel as a ‘settler-colonial state’ but, to the outrage of some backers, seems reluctant to embrace its total elimination. She certainly has a better chance than the two Jewish candidates, former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel or Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.

The Democrats will likely offer up some kind of spineless opportunist, like Gavin Newsom, or the word-salad queen, Kamala Harris. They will not go full DSA but will nibble around the edges, perhaps by accusing Israel of genocide. Neutrality – not even a defence of Israel’s right to exist – is about all Jews can expect from the likely next speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, even though he has a big red target on his back from the DSA.

The growing Muslim population poses another problem. Today, American Jews still outnumber Muslims by roughly two million – and remain deeply embedded in America’s economic life. By contrast, in the UK and France, Muslims now outnumber Jews by nearly 15 to one. Muslims won’t overtake Jews in America until at least 2040.

Looking to the future, one might look for solutions in the Torah, but as an old Latinist, my tendency is to favour Fabianism. This is named after the old Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, who used slow, flexible tactics, based on picking the best spots to fight off enemies, to achieve victory over the great Carthaginian general, Hannibal.

So start by picking allies who are least likely to attack the community. With El-Sayed on the Michigan ballot, Jews have to back the GOP contender Mike Rogers, a relative moderate with no record of anti-Semitism. Much the same can be said of GOP challengers in Wisconsin, where the DSA-backed Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Francesca Hong, campaigned with Hasan Piker, who has expressed support for Hamas.

A focus on the future of American Jews – rather than simply Israel – requires a distinct mindset. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defeat in Israel’s General Election this October would prove a major victory for at least half of American Jews who dislike him. His loss could be an opportunity, notes former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, to lower the anti-Israel sentiment threatening them as well.

American Jews, however strong our attachment to Israel, should realise our future does not run through Jerusalem. Nowhere in history have Jews prospered as they have in America. Jews played a role in the country’s settlement, not only in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles but also Charleston, Savannah, Galveston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Portland, Seattle and likely a host of others.

One clear response to the rise of anti-Semitism is to move. Increasingly, deep-blue states, particularly the big blue metros, may no longer be safe. One California judge handed out only a year’s sentence to an academic radical who killed a Jewish counter-protester. Jewish life is getting cheap again.

Many are headed to the South which, once seen as inhospitable, is emerging as the new place of refuge for Jews. Today, the key Jewish growth states, notes one study, include South Carolina, West Virginia and Florida, while those declining are New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Connecticut and California.

The numbers are impressive: Florida’s Jewish population, just over 175,000 in 1960, now stands at nearly 700,000. The Jewish community in Houston grew by 50 per cent between 1986 and 2016, while 1,800 more Jews a year move into the Dallas region. There were 9,000 Jews in Atlanta at the end of the Second World War but 60,000 in 1984 and near 100,000 today.

At the same time, Jewish university students are ditching the coastal schools for the South and the middle of the country. Of the schools ranked safest for Jewish students by the ADL, most are in the South, while eastern and western schools generally – particularly the Ivies and the top UC campuses – are bastions of anti-Semitism.

So, as the Jewish student percentage at the Ivies has crashed – dropping at Harvard, notes Tablet, from roughly a quarter to 6.7 per cent today – the first and third largest Jewish student population can now be found at the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida.

This demographic movement is typically American; when things get bad, people move. This was the essence of the westward migration, the Mormon hegira to Utah, the black migration from the South, and the movement of Eastern Europeans to the manufacturing and mining centres of the Rust Belt.

But moving won’t solve all problems. As US relations with Israel change, Jewish Americans need to see themselves not as vassals of Israel, but as a people in their own right. Their primary allegiance cannot be to a country that seems ever more Levantine, caught up in that part of the world’s endless bloodlust.

By comparison, most American Jews are European in culture and heritage. Their natural loyalty lies with the Enlightenment creation whose values are also their own. America’s Jews owe loyalty to a country whose first president, George Washington, was the first to allow ‘the stock of Abraham’ full equality, and a place where they could stay ‘in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid’. The politics of Benjamin Netanyahu can’t save American Jewry; the spirit of Washington can.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute. Find him on Substack here.