#david bernstein

By: Haley Cohen

Published: Feb 9, 2026

Political activists seeking to push extremist perspectives into the classroom are behind a nationwide acceleration of antisemitic content in K-12 classrooms, with increasingly active movements targeting school boards, district leadership and teacher organizations, according to a report published Monday by the North American Values Institute.  

The group’s 58-page report, “When the Classroom Turns Hostile: A Strategic Response to Extremism and Antisemitism in K-12 Education,” shared exclusively with JI, found that in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, what it described as radical ideological frameworks have dominated key education institutions across the country. Ideologies such as “oppressor-oppressed” are common in schools of education, accreditation bodies, teacher unions and district bureaucracies, all of which shape classroom materials. 

The paper highlights teachers’ unions and activist nonprofits as major sources of embedding radical views and ready-made anti-American content into professional development, much of which is able to bypass traditional oversight. It also raises concerns about “substantial” foreign funding flowing into Western education institutions to influence ciriculums by the Qatar Foundation International and Confucius Institutes in China.  

The North American Values Institute, formerly the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, is a nonprofit that monitors antisemitism in K-12 schools. It was founded by David Bernstein, a longtime Jewish nonprofit official who led the Jewish Council for Public Affairs from 2016-2021.

“We’re very concerned about the ideological activists taking over union leadership,” NAVI’s chief program officer, Dana Stangel-Plowe, told JI. “While that may not seem new, we’re seeing the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] in particular taking a much more active role.” According to the report, DSA “urges members to enter the field in order to ‘transform our schools, our unions, and our society.’” 

The report warns that these dynamics contribute not only to rising antisemitism, but also to declining academic outcomes and increasing anti-American views. 

Attempts to combat this framework by promoting Holocaust or Jewish education have failed, the report’s authors argue.  

Rather, the writers offer several suggestions for reforming K-12 education, including changing teacher preparation programs and accreditation standards, confronting politicized teacher unions and advocacy networks, strengthening standards around curricula, addressing foreign funding and influence in education, empowering parents and school boards and building multi-ethnic coalitions. 

NAVI rebranded in February 2025 in an effort to detach from its Jewish roots to expand partnerships in fighting antisemitism with other ethnic communities.

At the time of the rebrand, Bernstein told JI that the Jewish community “has been reluctant to fight at the ideological level.”  

A year later, Stangel-Plowe said that while there is still room for improvement, NAVI has increasingly been partnering with leading Jewish organizations.

The report comes two months after the House Committee on Education and the Workforce opened investigations into public school systems in Fairfax County, Va.; Berkeley, Calif.; and Philadelphia over alleged failures to address antisemitic incidents. 

Federal investigations are “a good start but certainly not enough,” said Stangel-Plowe. “School districts are used to functioning without much accountability. We need more federal and state oversight.”

Still, she emphasized a need to address the root cause, rather than responding after incidents occur. 

“K-12 education is being treated as a vehicle for social change and an oppressor-oppressed framework is dangerous to Jewish students, Jewish teachers, and teaches hostility towards Israel and more broadly Western values,” Stangel-Plowe continued. 

We’re seeing active networks, [including] in New York City and Philadelphia,” she added. “We’re seeing radical political actors taking over union leadership and that has an influence on teachers unions which influences school board elections. The problem is embedded not just in the unions but the entire education system from teacher training, licensing and programs.” 

“We can’t fix an institutional problem with more lessons or programs,” she said. “As important as education about the Holocaust and Jewish life is, institutional problems persist unless we have a real allocation of investments in a comprehensive solution across the ecosystem. 

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“When the Classroom Turns Hostile” is meant to serve as a practical reference for confronting a challenge that is too complex for any single intervention or organization.

Rising extremism and antisemitism in K–12 education are the result of the systemic ideological capture of America’s schools and institutions. Most efforts to address antisemitism in schools focus on symptoms rather than causes, as a result, extremism and antisemitism persist, learning declines, and civic norms erode. The problem is institutional and political, so restoring educational integrity requires comprehensive action across the entire K–12 ecosystem.

By: Fern Oppenheim, David Bernstein and Eran Shayshon

Published: Jun 14, 2024

While the Jewish world was reeling from the inhumanity of the Oct. 7 massacre, an immediate aftershock came in the form of the anti-Israel rallies on college campuses and on the streets of major cities. Since that time, the protests have only intensified. Opposing Israel has become fashionable in some circles. Campus activists feel imbued with a sense of historic mission, perceiving themselves as the modern embodiment of the protest movements of the 1960s. Many Jewish professionals and lay leaders remain overwhelmed and unclear as to how to proceed. Years of investment in countering various forms of antisemitism have been proven inadequate. It should be clear by now that we need a new strategic approach and a comprehensive plan to enact it.

The post-Oct. 7 reality dictates a strategy that counters underlying ideological currents, places Jewish concerns in the context of broader American interests and upholds American and Western values. The current focus on antisemitism makes it appear that the strife on and off campus is a Jewish problem rather than an American problem. Antisemitism is low on the relevance scale for most Americans, but the health of American society is central. Based on our assessment of what went wrong, current survey data and key trends, we believe that the Jewish security is inextricably linked to firming up larger support for American values and a renewed commitment to the U.S.’s key geopolitical interests. We further argue that American Jewish organizations should prioritize work with new partners in civil society who share this mission and who should take center stage in effecting a larger cultural shift. In short, we believe the best defense against antisemitism is restoring the commitment of Americans to the nation’s founding principles under which American Jews and other minorities have thrived.

What went wrong?

The anti-Israel narrative — Israel as an apartheid, colonialist enterprise — gained limited support on college campuses over the past few decades. Yet trends in survey data indicate that while the anti-Israel narrative caused a slow erosion of support for Israel, the overwhelming majority of college students remained neutral and attitudes towards Jews were largely unaffected. In fact, the data through 2016 indicates that, even in the face of hostile campus rhetoric, most college students and most Americans cared little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The issue was just not relevant to them and they remained in the “middle” — neither “core supporters” nor the “unreachable.” Likewise, antisemitism among college students remained low. Research indicated that the large group in the middle represented an opportunity as it could be swayed towards Israel once it was shown the broader face and humanity of the Israeli people.

So if the same anti-Israel narrative has been around for decades, what explains the dramatic increase in its acceptance now? Simply put, anti-Israel forces have found a way to make their cause relevant to a growing swath of Americans by linking it to the significant cultural and ideological shifts over the past ten years.

With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 and changes in the social media landscape, a binary ideology that divides society into oppressors and oppressed, skyrocketed in popularity on campuses. Anti-Israel groups successfully aligned themselves with activist groups representing marginalized communities, thereby significantly expanding the cohort of young Americans sympathetic to their cause. For the first time, Jewish students found themselves excluded from student social justice activities due to their sympathies towards Israel.

In the heated aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, this binary, oppressor-oppressed ideology found new audiences outside campuses. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, which frequently enshrined the oppressor-oppressed ideology, gained broad-scale penetration into numerous mainstream institutions including business, government, media, science, medicine, culture, K-12 schools, etc. So while the State of Israel and, now, Jews are seen by many as white, privileged oppressors in a broad swath of institutions, Hamas is increasingly seen as a legitimate resistance movement representing the marginalized.

It is important to note that notwithstanding the titular expression of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, protests against Israel on U.S. campuses are about far more than the Jewish state. Instead, they are often part of a larger agenda that aims to reshape the power structure, dismantle the larger social order, defund the police, undermine the very notion of meritocracy and undo the market economy and concept of private property. Many protesters on campus explicitly cite this larger worldview as a motivation for their campus activism. 

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that in the wake of Oct. 7, most surveys of young people show high levels of support for Palestinians/Hamas and declining support for Israel. The majority are no longer in the swayable middle. Moreover, for the first time since the Anti-Defamation League began measuring such trends, young Americans are more likely to believe antisemitic tropes than older Americans. In short, by aligning with cultural shifts occurring among the progressive left, anti-Israel forces — many representing extreme Islamist perspectives — have successfully made their narrative relevant to many young Americans.

While the Jewish community was busy maintaining support for Israel in the political arena, ideologues sought to and succeeded in changing the culture. We are now experiencing the downstream effects of our collective failure to counter dangerous cultural trends.

A strategic pivot

If Israel is to retain American support down the road and if Jews are to be safe in this country, then action must be taken to reverse these cultural shifts. For the most part, the Jewish community has responded to the post-Oct. 7th onslaught with well-funded efforts to counter antisemitism and anti-Zionism. It is not doing enough to make its case more relevant to Americans than it was years ago, unlike the anti-Israel camp, which broadened its appeal in the intersectional arena.

Yet there is good news amid the bad. In this highly charged environment, Israel and its allies have lost support among college students, but not among most Americans. Raucous anti-Israel protests on campuses have alarmed many Americans, who are concerned that these anarchists pose a clear and present danger to the U.S. The Jewish communal world needs to take a page from its enemies’ playbook and make its cause more broadly relevant by aligning with the significant percentage of Americans who believe in the American dream, oppose chaos and support the principled use of American power in the world. Jews represent only 2% of the American population; we cannot win this battle on our own.

The Jewish community needs to work with those who are already fighting back on various fronts and to catalyze the energies of those who may be concerned but are not yet taking action. The focus of such coalitional efforts must be on strengthening the American narrative and values, not on antisemitism or Israel. And these efforts need to be led by diverse American voices rather than Jewish groups, as they will be seen as more believable and less likely to have an agenda. In short, the Jewish community needs to lead from behind.

By: David Bernstein

Published: 16 Oct, 2023

Before the blood had even dried on the pavement of the Nova music festival in southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists ruthlessly murdered 260 young people on 7 October 2023, the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies (CLES) began posting Instagram memes in support of “Palestinian Liberation.” The CLES is a collection of educational organizations that design curricula for US high schools. They aim to teach students about “critical consciousness” and “intersectional forms of oppression.” One of the memes they posted advertised an upcoming “Long Live Palestinian Resistance” event and another gave a shout out to “The People’s Forum,” which organizes events in New York under the banner “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” The academic activists of CLES are not first-generation immigrants from the Gaza Strip or the West Bank; they are largely home-grown ideologues who teach ethnic and gender studies at American universities and are now seeking to disseminate their ideas in US primary and secondary schools.

Even I—the jaded author of the book Woke Antisemitism and founder of a Jewish organization dedicated to countering this growing variant of the world’s oldest hatred—was stunned by their rhetoric. I would have thought that they would say that the murder of civilians was awful, but that Israel had it coming. But there was not even a token condemnation of Hamas’ violence on 7 October. Instead, the decolonizers publicly justified the bloodletting.

And then came the protests. Before a single Israeli bomb dropped in Gaza, the organizer of a gathering in New York’s Times Square celebrated the violent rampages in front of a cheering crowd. Alluding to the murdered festival-goers, he joked, “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party. They were having a great time and then the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”

At a massive rally on the steps of the Sydney Opera House three days after the massacre, protesters chanted “Gas the Jews.” And—among other calumnies on campuses across North America—thirty-one Harvard student groups issued a statement of solidarity with Hamas, pronouncing Israel “entirely responsible” for the terrorist group’s slaughter.

There are two distinct but overlapping camps of the social justice left. The radical decolonization camp is made up of extremist academics, anarchists, and Black Lives Matter activists. It is anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic to its core. It would be easy to dismiss these people as ideological quacks—if it were not for their outsized role in US educational institutions.

By “decolonization,” they don’t mean a colonial power extricating itself from a former colony; they mean the process of freeing institutions and spheres of activity from the cultural or social influences of what they perceive as the dominant white Western class. One early leader of the liberated ethnic studies movement, R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, has denounced the United States as a “Eurocentric, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, hetero-patriarchal, and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” Influenced by decades of anti-Zionist Soviet propaganda, the decolonizers reserve special ire for the “settler-colonial state” of Israel, and call for the “liberation of Palestine,” by which they mean the displacement of the interloper Jews from their homeland. Witnessing the decolonisers’ zeal for obliterating the Jewish state, political scientist Wilfred Reilly quipped, “De-colonization is just ethnic cleansing, but woke.”

Those of us fighting the decolonizers have a golden opportunity to discredit them and undercut their influence in the days ahead. In their rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis, they’ve outed themselves as the extremists they are. School superintendents who might have seen them as credible educational partners in the new “diversity” initiatives will now have a hard time justifying their role to school boards and community members.

Then there’s the reformist, DEI camp, populated by people who have been deeply influenced by the same forms of neo-Manichaean postmodern thought, but who seek not to overthrow the capitalist system, but to reshuffle the deck of power. Unlike the decolonisers, their antisemitism tends to be latent. They insist that Jews are white, place them in white racial “affinity groups” and frequently downplay the validity of antisemitic claims as distractions from the important task of combating anti-blackness. They include mealy-mouthed university presidents and school superintendents, who see Muslims as a marginalized community and thus susceptible to “harm,” whereas Jews are a privileged minority and thus immune from such harm. These administrators are often held captive by the commitments and hires they made in the summer of 2020 during the great American racial reckoning. Some of them see Western cultural norms, such as being on time to work, as forms of white supremacy. They issue endless statements about racial justice and rightly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they found themselves tongue-tied when Israelis were victims of a slaughter, and their Jewish students were in obvious pain. Suddenly, they rediscovered the merits of academic neutrality and free speech. They, too, stand to lose cultural clout in the intensifying anti-woke backlash.

Two and a half years ago, I left my job as CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), the prestigious 75-year-old umbrella body of national and local Jewish advocacy organizations across the US. As a liberal lefty myself, I worried that a radical, illiberal ideology was gaining ground in my own ideological backyard, a phenomenon I first wrote about more than twenty years ago, in a 2003 article for Washington Jewish Week entitled “Consistent Moral Message Missing.” In the wake of the George Floyd murder, I watched with dismay as Jewish organizations in my field fell in line with anti-racist pieties, desperate to remain aligned with their civil rights partners, many of whom had long ditched their liberal principles. While still employed at the JCPA, I wrote articles for Areo Magazine and other publications, expressing my concern. As soon as my departure was official, I wrote a widely circulated article “My Cheshbon Hanefesh (accounting of the soul in Hebrew) for Cowardice in the Face of Wokeness,” which sparked much debate in the Jewish community.

In May 2021, I founded the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values to fight for viewpoint diversity and against the encroachment of radical social justice ideology in the Jewish world. That very month fighting broke out in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, and some of the responses to that conflict foretold our current reality. Media coverage of the ongoing conflict since it first broke out in June 2008, and of each subsequent conflict—in December 2008, November 2012, June 2014, and May 2018, and right up until May 2021—unfolded in a predictable pattern. The stories and editorials first acknowledged that Israel must have leeway to defend itself against Hamas rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians. Then, as casualties mounted, the coverage turned against Israel, and, within a few days, the same outlets lambasted the Jewish state for using “disproportionate force.” In May 2021—when the last round occurred—Israel was not given the usual benefit of the doubt. In even the earliest stages of the conflict, Israel was demonized as the oppressor in some quarters. “If you've been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency,” Batya Ungar-Sargon pointed out in a Newsweek editorial. I knew then that the fight against wokeness was not just about preserving free thought, but about combating a variant of antisemitism that grows out of the same ideological conditions that stifle free thought.

I have never been entirely at ease making the case for the growth of “woke antisemitism” in liberal humanist circles. Liberal humanists like me are highly suspicious of promiscuous accusations of racism and bigotry, and oppose dogmatic declarations that only marginalized groups with “lived experience” of oppression are entitled to an opinion on social issues. Such political attitudes are the essence of cancel culture. Yet here I was arguing that the very ideology that produced cancel culture also fueled a new variant of antisemitism that sees Jews as white and privileged. In highlighting the threat of antisemitism, I was concerned that I might be engaging in the same tactics as the people I critique.

From the outset, however, I made it clear that I didn’t regard my analysis of antisemitism as beyond scrutiny. I reject the now oft-repeated claim among some Jews, who, echoing the assertions of minority political activists in other communities, argue that only Jews get to define antisemitism. I sought to discuss antisemitism in liberal, not postmodern terms, encouraging multiple viewpoints about the extent and nature of contemporary Jew hatred. But in the eyes of some fellow liberal humanists, I was still partaking in the identity politics of the day.

Now, in the aftermath of the massacre, I sense a shift. Awakened by the outpouring of Jew hatred in the wake of the massacre in Israel, many liberal humanist friends have expressed their shock. This magazine’s editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann has stated, “I don't think I ever really understood anti-Semitism until now. And it is frightening.” Skeptic Magazine editor Michael Shermer was exasperated by the hypocrisy of many:

When I left my perch at JCPA, I was immediately regarded as a heretic by a number of former colleagues. Some actively tried to prevent me from giving speeches about the topic in their Jewish communities. But, on this front, too, I sense movement. This past week, I received a surprise email from one of my chief antagonists on Twitter, Paul Hackner, a South African-born Jewish leftist who earlier excoriated me for using the term “woke” which, he insisted, “is about compassion and awareness AND you weaponized to express a fragile need to be comfortable when addressing racism.” After the massacre, he told me: “It's clear there is a revanchist left in North America that is allying with Hamas. The firestorm of hatred is raging. Hamas is a death cult. Sad to say you were right. Thanks for engaging with me. It helped me find moral clarity.”

Even among Israel’s most ardent Jewish critics, such as Joshua Leifer, a leftist writer and editor for Dissent Magazine, there’s indignation about moral callousness on the left. “There's also a deep sense that the left abroad has lost the values it was supposed to stand for,” he has stated:

I thought we were leftists because we wanted a world without war, torture, the killing of families and children in their beds I thought we were leftists because we abhor cruelty, detest violence, and believe in the inherent, even divine, worth of all human life. I thought we were leftists because our struggle was for all people to be able to live with freedom and dignity.

Leifer’s discontent might portend greater willingness among American Jews to take on their own political camp.

A local Jewish advocacy organization in my area, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington (JCRCGW), tore into the area school superintendent who originally failed to issue a statement of support for Israel and the Jewish community and later released only a tepid one. Much to my chagrin, the JCRCGW had previously actively participated in the school system’s yearlong “anti-racism audit” and subsequent implementation of DEI training and pedagogy. But when their partnership on anti-racism failed to elicit support for Jewish students in the schools in their time of need, the normally restrained JCRCGW lashed out:

We reserve our greatest anger and disappointment for Montgomery County Public Schools … [which has] consistently ignored our agencies’ urgent appeals over the last three days to respond appropriately and sensitively … if our schools can’t call out the brutal murder of Jews right before our eyes, of what use is the Holocaust education and cultural competency that we have worked together to advance?

I believe that this dogmatic version of “cultural competence,” which rigidly ties identity to privilege or oppression, is the source of the school system’s indifference to Jewish life in the first place. But given recent events, it seems unimaginable that mainstream Jewish leaders will continue to deny or ignore the role of ideology in the callousness toward the murder of Jews and the disregard for Jewish concerns. I, for one, will do everything in my power to place the topic on their agenda.

What could really turn the tide is if Jewish donors and trustees at major universities finally use the power of the purse. Marc Rowan, the chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management and the chair of the Board of Overseers of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has taken his own university to task. “While Hamas terrorists were slaughtering Israeli Jews, university administrators were figuring out how to spin it,” he writes in The Free Press:

The responsibility also rests with many of our alumni leaders and trustees, myself included, who have sat by quietly as the pursuit of truth—the ostensible mission of our elite institutions—was traded for a poorly organized pursuit of social justice and political correctness.

“It’s long past time,” he argues, “for donors to take notice.”

It’s long past time for all of us to take notice. Let us hope that the horrors of the moment will not only be a turning point in the battle against antisemitism, but in the larger fight against radicalism and illiberalism in the West.

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This was the world's easiest moral question: celebrate or condemn far-right religious terrorists who dismembered babies alive? And they got the answer wrong.

Atheists who defend Hamas lose the right to criticize the god of the bible.

Exodus 12:29-30

And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

Numbers 31:17-19

Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. And do ye abide without the camp seven days: whosoever hath killed any person, and whosoever hath touched any slain, purify both yourselves and your captives on the third day, and on the seventh day.

Psalm 137:8-9

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4709465-liberals-have-lost-their-patriotism/

Liberals have lost their patriotism  

By: David Bernstein

Published: Jun 9, 2024

I came of age in the 1980s and 1990s in a Democratic Party and a social milieu that was unabashedly patriotic. To be sure, political liberals back then could be critical of America’s past and present, but most saw our country as an imperfect nation aspiring toward but often falling short in living up to its own high ideals. The dominant zeitgeist of the political right was dangerously nativist and insufficiently self-reflective.  

President Bill Clinton, on whose campaign I worked in 1992, famously pronounced at his first inaugural speech, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” Young liberals in those days were animated by a form of American exceptionalism that elevated the idea of pluralism. In my twenties I wore a T-shirt broadcasting the American motto e pluribus unum—”out of many, one.” This was liberal patriotism. 

Yet this center-left, glass-half-full narrative of our national experiment has increasingly yielded to a withering appraisal of American life, one that is rapidly becoming a self-fulling prophecy.

Today’s liberals rarely express patriotic sentiment in public, abandoning their civic voice to a far left that holds America in contempt, which in turn generates a politics that is both defeatist in tone and alienating to ordinary Americans. A nation that thinks less of itself will become less of itself. Mainstream liberals badly need to rediscover their patriotic spirit.  

When beloved actress Betty White died at the age of 99, my wife began rewatching old episodes of The Golden Girls, a mid-1980s sitcom about four aging women who lived together and experienced the highs and lows of their golden years. In one episode, the strong-willed Dorothy lectured her Italian-born mother, Sophia, on the meaning of America. 

“When I was a little girl,” Dorothy stated, “you told me how much it meant to you when you came here to America for the first time. Do you remember what you thought of when you first saw the Statue of Liberty holding up her torch of freedom? … Ma, you taught me to love this country. … You were the first one who put an American flag in my hand.” 

I was instantly struck at how quaint this monologue was in today’s cultural context, especially coming from a show that was on the vanguard of such social issues as gay rights and sexual harassment. Sadly, this kind of flagrant patriotic sentiment would be considered cringe in today’s liberal circles. 

A 2023 Gallup poll found that national pride on the left has precipitously declined in the past two decades. In 2003, 65 percent of Americans identifying as Democrats felt “extreme pride” in their country; by 2023 it was 29 percent. Only 18 percent of those aged 18 to 34 indicated that they were “extremely” patriotic, a steep decline from 85 percent in 2013. “Party identification remains the greatest demographic differentiator in expressions of national pride,” stated Gallup, “and Republicans have been consistently more likely than Democrats and independents to express pride in being American.” 

On a recent drive in West Virginia, I noticed American flags outside many homes — even on those in economically depressed coal-mining towns, where people could be forgiven for feeling their country had abandoned them. When we returned to our neighborhood in North Potomac, Md., an economically thriving, politically blue area, I counted one American flag in four blocks, unsurprisingly mounted on the doorway of an Eastern European refugee who fled a repressive Soviet republic.  

So inured had I become to the lack of patriotic sentiment in my neck of the woods that I found it positively inspiring in May of this year when fraternity brothers at UNC Chapel Hill rehoisted the American flag on the campus quad after radical activists had replaced Old Glory with a Palestinian flag. The young men locked arms and refused to budge as protestors reportedly hurled bottles, rocks and insults. 

Why have liberals become less patriotic?  

Some blame an American public that elected Donald Trump and social factors such as persistent economic inequality. Others cite social media echo chambers that extol, for example, a letter from Osama Bin Laden justifying terrorism against the U.S. Others point to the rise of an oppressed-oppressor ideology that sees America as pervasively racist. Indeed, when universities adopt policies that deem such comments as “America is the land of opportunity” and “Everyone can succeed in this society” as “microaggressions,” it should surprise no one that many students adopt negative attitudes toward their own country. 

A few Democrats understand that a politics of self-loathing will never win the day. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, both Democrats elected in 2022, successfully ran on liberal policy agendas that emphasized freedom and American exceptionalism. President Biden himself may still represent the old flag-waving sensibility, but the larger progressive political class that accompanied him to power exudes little passion and, judging by the president’s recent demoralizing speech at Morehouse College, has brought the president down with them. 

Come November, we shouldn’t be surprised if many ordinary citizens opt for churlish nativism over a politics devoid of love of country. Liberals desperately need to get it back. 

David Bernstein is the founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and author of “Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews.” 

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Accountability to your heart and health … February is American Heart Month. When I share information about heart disease, I feel compelled to address both sides of the same coin. One side has to do with the progress medical science has made in my lifetime, substantially reducing the number of deaths due to coronary heart disease. The other side of the coin is that even while cutting cardiac…