Jews leaving the Democratic Party are reacting not to criticism of Israel but to being told that our rights are subordinate. And maybe we’re acting like that because we have a lot of evidence that in the Democratic Party, today, the civil rights of Jews do not matter. There was an immediate tension between the “free speech” rights of anti-Israel protesters and the civil rights of Jews, and choices needed to be made. And at every point the Denocratic Party prioritized the free speech rights of the protesters over the civil rights of Jews. Democrats could have said that they were uncomfortable with the carnage in Gaza but really Jewish students at Columbia had nothing to do with all this and these college protests were getting out of hand and btw why were so many foreign students involved? But instead Democrats made the explicitly choice to frame the issue as one of free speech, and if that came at the cost of the civil rights of Jewish students, well, that was very unfortunate but there was nothing to be done. Democrats could have said that they agreed that the situation in the West Bank was very bad but you cannot protest outside of a synagogue no matter how vehemently you disagree with what’s going on inside that synagogue, because that violates the civil rights of Jewish people. But instead it became a referendum of the free speech rights of the protesters, with no thought to the rights of the people trying to access their house of worship. We’re leaving because we’re constantly being told that our rights do not matter. And if there’s one thing Jews have learned over the past 2000 years, it’s how to know when it’s time to leave.