Shortly before he co-founded Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 1982, academic and leftist activist Michael Harrington attended a conference of the Socialist International in Paris. There he befriended many of the world’s leading socialists, including Israeli Knesset opposition leader Shimon Peres. Peres was among the coterie of leftist leaders with whom Harrington could sit down “over a beer and exchange stories,” as Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman put it.
Harrington would build support for Israel into the amalgamation of American socialist groups that formed DSA. Embracing Israel as the fulfillment of the Jewish right of self-determination, he wrote that Zionism is “the national liberation movement of a Jewish people.” The UN’s 1975 Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism, drained “the concept of racism of any serious meaning,” Harrington wrote. When asked what religion he was, the Catholic-born Harrington sometimes jokingly referred to himself as a “Labor Zionist.” (DSA’s co-founder Barbara Ehrenreich, who died in 2022, also was a veteran socialist and academic, as well as a prominent feminist and atheist.)
Would any of Mamdani’s Jewish critics have been more comfortable with a Democratic socialist mayor from an earlier era?
Now, 36 years after Harrington’s death from cancer at age 61, DSA’s support of Israel and that nation’s then-vigorous left-labor wing (led by Peres) has evaporated. In its place, the new generation of DSA leadership has embraced a stridently anti-Zionist point of view.
On October 7, 2023, in response to Hamas’s horrific attack, DSA issued a statement “unequivocally” condemning the killing of all civilians but also calling Hamas’s actions “not unprovoked” and “a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.” The following spring, members of its youth branch, Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), played a leading role in pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel campus demonstrations. In at least one instance, Jewish protesters were told to “go back to Poland.” Other demonstrators used imagery and slogans equating Zionism with Nazism. The slogan “From the River to the Sea,” often interpreted as a call for eliminating Israel, has sounded at DSA meetings. And at its 2025 national convention, DSA approved a resolution citing support of Israel’s right to defend itself or equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism as “expellable offenses.”
In many cases, DSA has been more anti-Israel than its own elected representatives. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) of New York, one of American socialism’s modern-day champions, drew arrows from DSA for, among other things, her support in 2024 for a resolution reaffirming Israel’s right to exist and labeling denial of that right as antisemitism. DSA also blasted AOC’s vote this past summer against Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to strip $500 million in U.S. funding for Israel’s “Iron Dome” defensive shield. (Greene’s resolution, she said, did nothing to address offensive aid.) Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the godfather of American socialism, also has raised DSA hackles for not demanding a permanent halt on U.S. weapons sales to Israel.
Arguably, none of this would be top of mind if New York’s leading mayoral candidate, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, had not been nurtured to political maturity through membership in DSA. While much of his campaign has revolved around issues such as free city buses, rent controls and expansion of affordable housing, Mamdani’s perceived embrace of DSA’s anti-Israel hardline, together with his Muslim identity, has evoked apprehension among many of New York City’s Jewish voters. In a sermon at the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue, a pillar of New York’s Jewish establishment, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove called Mamdani “a danger to the Jewish body politic.” More than 1,000 rabbis and cantors signed on to a letter quoting Cosgrove and stating, “We cannot remain silent in the face of rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization throughout our nation.”
Nevertheless, recent polls suggest a fair portion of New York’s Jewish electorate plan to vote for Mamdani. Why? The labor-socialist tradition certainly hasn’t been forgotten among older members of New York’s Jewish population, and many voters doubtless place higher value on Mamdani’s progressive plans for the city, and are either less focused on Israel or happen to share the candidate’s criticisms. (A Washington Post poll in early October found 61 percent of Jewish voters surveyed believe Israel has committed war crimes.) And Mamdani’s opponents in the race aren’t exactly attractive alternatives.
Still, it’s interesting to ponder: Would any of Mamdani’s Jewish critics have been more comfortable with a Democratic socialist mayor from an earlier era? From Michael Harrington’s DSA?
From Fools for Christ to Bernie Bros
Born in 1928, Harrington devoted his adult life to cultivating a humanitarian brand of socialism—what he termed “the left-wing of the possible.” He cut his political teeth in the early 1950s with the Catholic Worker movement and its eponymous publication, and he drew inspiration from its enigmatic founder Dorothy Day. Although most socialists and communists had no use for Catholicism and, indeed, the Catholic Church reviled atheistic leftists, Harrington flourished amid the synthesis of religion and radicalism, wherein he saw what he felt was the true meaning of Jesus’s teachings. He and his Catholic Worker comrades were “fools for Christ,” as Day herself put it. The Catholic Worker newspaper also gave him an opportunity to flex his journalistic and theoretical muscles. An article he wrote on poverty in the United States led to a book, The Other America, which went on to inspire President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty in the mid-1960s.
The day in the late 1980s when he was told his cancer was inoperable, Harrington began his final work, Socialism: Past and Future. In it he sketched out his ideas about what socialist movements historically had done right and wrong. The “wrong” side of the ledger was unsurprisingly dominated by the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet Union’s “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which ultimately rejected building ideal socialism in favor of outright dictatorship. Transformation to true non-coercive socialism, he wrote, requires “nothing less than a conscious political and democratic reshaping of the system from within the system.”
Capitalism, Harrington wrote, depends on top-down control, with workers having little say in the decisions that affect their lives. Under socialism, by contrast, production is built around “democratic control from below by the people and their communities.” He applauded worker membership on corporate boards, stock options and worker-owned cooperatives as positive first steps. Harrington did not believe any of this would happen overnight. But he was clear that working “within the system” was the way to go.
The post-Harrington DSA still works “within the system” to get candidates like Mamdani elected. But its old guard laments how DSA strayed from Harrington’s big-tent vision of socialism that was friendly to religion and to Israel in favor of a decidedly anti-Israel, left-sectarian organization.
In 2015, DSA had about 5,000 members and the average age was 60-plus. That changed in the wake of the powerfully grassroots but ultimately unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. Though not a DSA member, Sanders was a veteran socialist, and Democratic Socialists of America proved to be the main beneficiary of a surge in youthful energy and attraction to Sanders’ political ideology. “The average age dropped from somewhere in the 60s to somewhere in the high 20s, because it was the place to go,” says DSA national co-chair Megan Romers. “If you were activated by the Bernie campaign and wanted to become an activist for democratic socialism, [DSA] was kind of the landing pad.” The momentum created by the Bernie campaign continued with the 2018 elections of AOC and Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, both DSA members. Today, membership hovers around 80,000.
Mamdani himself arrived at the DSA riding the Bernie-2016 wave. “I saw all of these beliefs and these values that I held so dear, espoused by a man who proudly called himself a socialist as a result of those beliefs,” Mamdani said in an interview with Jacobin magazine. Mamdani was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020 and re-elected in 2022 and 2024.
The admonition of older DSA membership came at a price, as a good measure of historical memory was lost. For example, Pete Seeger and the soon-to-be-blacklisted Weavers singing in 1951 the spirited “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” which bass singer Lee Hays described as coming “to us from the new land of Israel.” While many on the American left in the 1960s decried Israel over the Palestinian’s plight, in the 1980s Harrington and the DSA membership remembered an Israel where labor was strong and Kibbutznik social consciousness was widespread. They also recalled an America where the socialist-oriented Workmen’s Circle and Jewish Labor Bund (Der Yidisher Arbeter-Bund) were important organizations among Jewish immigrants before and after World War I.
Harrington’s name “is now a dirty word in DSA,” says Isserman, Harrington biographer and a historian at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Himself a longtime DSA member, Isserman left the organization just days after the Hamas attack in 2023. Explaining his decision in The Nation, he wrote: “An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on, has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist.” Isserman tells me that while he finds much to criticize in Israel’s reaction to the Hamas attack, he finds DSA’s intransigent reaction “appalling…the absolute opposite of the humanitarian values that always underlined my understanding of democratic socialism.”
DSA stipulates its 25-member National Political Committee cannot be more than 50 percent male, and at least 20 percent of committee slots are reserved for people of color.
Of course, DSA’s morph further left did not take place in a vacuum. Israel’s comparable gyration to the right inadvertently may have put wind in DSA’s sails, attracting adherents through its portrayal of Israel as an oppressor of the Palestinians.
Israel went from the promise of the Oslo Accords and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1993 to Benjamin Netanyahu and the right-wing Likud Party taking power in 1996—the year after Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli right-wing extremist. The bloody Second Intifada between 2000 and 2005 set the stage for Netanyahu and his allies to undercut peacemaking efforts and talk of a two-state solution.
Younger members of DSA had no historical memory of collectivist Israel. What they did know, however, was an increasingly right-wing Israeli government engaged in a lethal tit for tat with equally intransigent Palestinian enemies, especially Hamas in Gaza.
“A lot of this is just determined by the fact that when DSA was being founded [in 1982], the situation in the Middle East was very different,” says Bhaskar Sunkara, a former DSA vice-chair who founded the radical-oriented journal Jacobin in 2010 and now serves as president in charge of publishing and business strategy for The Nation.
Younger members, a fair number of them Jewish, don’t believe Israel has a “tenuous existence,” says Sunkara (who is not Jewish). Rather, he says, they see Israel as “kind of a force of destabilization.”
For DSA’s young membership, “the thing that seems to be in question [is] whether or not Palestinians have the right of self-determination,” Sunkara adds. “And I think that context colors a lot of the shift within DSA.”
Nonetheless, Sunkara thinks that some of the defenses of the Hamas attack by DSA were over the top. “I disagree with some of the rhetoric, but overall I see DSA essentially fulfilling some of the promise I thought it had when I joined the organization in 2007.”
The DSA Today: From Green Snails to Radical Red Stars
The dustbin of radical-left history is overflowing with energetic groups that flamed out because of factionalism, dogmatic sloganeering and the overall inability to win over what they might have affectionately referred to as “the masses.” But after 43 years of existence, DSA has not only survived but flourished (especially over the past decade). Mamdani is just one of a cadre of DSA members elected to state and local offices nationwide, some in unlikely places such as Indianapolis, IN, St. Petersburg, FL, and Louisville, KY. Four of twelve city council members in Portland, OR, are DSA members.
Such achievements are all the more remarkable given the Trump administration’s war on anything “woke” or “left.” Trump himself venomously invokes the term “radical left” whether he’s talking about its true believers or just plain garden-variety liberal Democrats.
“I’m very happy that we’re able to be a landing place for people and provide them some hope,” DSA co-chair Romer says. And if a member strays too far on the question of Israel and its future? “The big tent is ‘big,’ but it’s not infinite,” she says.
So what’s it like under that tent today?
DSA stipulates its 25-member National Political Committee cannot be more than 50 percent male, and at least 20 percent of committee slots are reserved for people of color. Delegates to the group’s biennial national convention “broadly” define “major political and organizational goals.”
Mostly there is no top-down party line. Rather, much of DSA’s direction comes from its numerous open factions. They range across the political spectrum, a dizzying array that includes left, center-left, center, center-right, right—and everything in between. Some, like the Socialist Majority Caucus, advocate strong participation in the Democratic Party and reliance upon candidates like Mamdani as “the only viable strategy” to elect socialists and defeat the “growing fascist threat” represented by the Trump presidency. Other DSA factions employ clever names like Caracol (Spanish for “snail”), which focuses on the Green New Deal. And much further to the left is the Red Star caucus, which sees itself as offering a political home for people radicalized in reaction to both the Trump administration and what the caucus sees as the failures of the Democratic Party. Its view of Israel and the Gaza war is uncompromising. “We Do Not Condemn Hamas, and Neither Should You,” was the headline of a May 2024 post on Red Star’s website.
As a whole, “we do believe that the Palestinian people deserve a state,” says Romer, who won Red Star’s endorsement to become a DSA co-chair at the organization’s last convention in August. “What that looks like, I think, is still an open topic of debate.” She observes that the newer generation of DSA members is more likely to be explicitly Marxist. “And when you are explicitly Marxist, there is a bunch of theory that comes with that.” Opposition to “settler colonialism” is part of that.
New York (city and state) is clearly the main incubator of DSA’s electoral strategy, the main ingredient of which is running candidates in Democratic primaries rather than as spoilers à la the Green Party. As a result, DSA has succeeded in getting eight of its members to the state legislature, including Mamdani (who represents the Astoria neighborhood in Queens). Three DSA members are on the New York City Council.
DSA members in New York insist this didn’t happen by accident. The highly organized New York chapter has built itself around subject matter (environment, housing, transit, etc.) and also by neighborhood or region. Much of its activism is directed at local and state issues, such as pressuring the New York Power Authority to adopt a heightened use of renewables.
Still, DSA’s success has come at the cost of alienating a constituency that always was fertile ground for socialism: pro-Israel Jews. And it raises the question of whether those who believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state have a future in socialism.
“DSA doesn’t get to define who is and who isn’t a socialist,” says the historian and former DSA member Isserman. “The relationship between Jews and socialism, which has a long and complicated, and often inspiring history, is still unfolding.”
Top image: DSA at Occupy Wall Streetm 2011, Credit: David Shankbone (CC BY 3.0)
