Events in recent days may well be marking a tipping point in the decline of the Democratic Party — at least when it comes to its treatment of Jews, on top of its growing hostility toward Israel.

The weekend ended with the news that Michigan Democratic delegates, at their statewide convention Sunday, nominated a Hezbollah supporter, Amir Makled, to the University of Michigan Board of Regents, choosing to oust a Jewish member, Jordan Acker, whose home and car were repeatedly vandalized with antisemitic graffiti and his family threatened.

Acker’s offenses? He backed efforts to hold anti-Israel campus protesters at the University of Michigan accountable for assaulting police and engaging in intimidation of Jewish students, among other instances of student misconduct. He declined to support efforts to divest university funds from Israel, along with other members of the Board of Regents, as a radical faction of students had demanded. 

Acker’s non-Jewish Democratic ticketmate, Paul Brown, who also supported discipline against anti-Israel students, wasn’t targeted and was renominated for election. But the Democratic delegates ousted Acker in exchange for Makled, who has posted on social media with comments praising Hezbollah’s leaders and retweeted antisemitic messages from the conspiracy-theorizing influencer Candace Owens. 

The results mark a new low for Michigan Democrats. Also over the weekend, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told CNN that he believes the Israeli government is just as evil as Hamas.

In the same interview, El-Sayed also said that Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) should replace Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as the Democratic leader in the upper chamber, citing Schumer’s continued support for U.S. aid to Israel. Van Hollen is among the most vocal critics of Israel in the Senate. 

Michigan is a closely watched bellwether of the direction of the Democratic Party, and the latest developments underscore that a more radical faction of the party appears to be growing. This, in the state where dozens of Jewish preschoolers were nearly killed in a terrorist attack last month by a Hezbollah sympathizer who targeted the state’s largest synagogue.

But it’s not just in Michigan where the weekend’s developments suggest an ominous turn in the Democratic Party’s evolution.

Today’s Daily Kickoff includes comments made by Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), one of the few pro-Israel Democratic stalwarts left, who blasted his party for tolerating antisemitism, calling out Democrats’ acceptance of Senate candidates with checkered histories, including Graham Platner in Maine and El-Sayed. 

In particular, Fetterman expressed shock that party leaders had nothing to say about revelations that Platner praised Hamas’ tactics in a 2014 Reddit forum that shared video of the terrorist group killing several Israeli soldiers.  

We cover the implications of the election results from New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, a moderate-minded, affluent suburb, where voters elected a far-left Israel critic who withheld criticism of Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks — except for the Jewish Democrats in the district, who swung decidedly to the right.

And we report on the pained comments from Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute (a liberal, pluralistic think tank dealing with issues affecting the Jewish community), who called on American Jews to “embrace political homelessness” as part of a pointed perspective on how badly things have gotten within the progressive movement, the longtime home for many American Jews.

“We’re stuck as an American Jewish community between an illiberal argument on the right, which is currently in power, and an illiberalism of the left,” he said.

Also notable from the weekend: Likely Democratic presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel, who is portraying himself as a bold, moderate truth teller against the left wing of his party, championed the fact on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” that he wants to cut off all U.S. military aid to Israel — in a clear political pander to the growing anti-Israel wing of his party. Truth-telling only goes so far when public opinion against Israel within the Democratic party has grown to such a high level.

It’s surely comforting to believe that Israel’s aggressive war against Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and Lebanon and tough tactics against Iran or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s haughty approach to his engagement with Washington are the main factors driving the Democratic Party towards its estrangement of Israel. Maybe then, after a possible change of Israeli leadership in the country’s October elections, Democratic public opinion would shift.

But if that was truly the case, you wouldn’t see the party tolerating candidates with neo-Nazi tattoos who “dig” Hamas’ terror tactics and ones who compare the mistakes of a democratic state with a terrorist group that seeks in its charter to eliminate all Jews. 

You wouldn’t see a Jewish regent of the University of Michigan and a Jewish Michigan attorney general being personally threatened for enforcing the law — with little protest from party leadership.

And you wouldn’t see Hasan Piker, an antisemitic social media figure with a laundry list of terror-justifying rhetoric, become the progressive movement’s trendy surrogate, in this fraught moment for American Jews.

Kurtzer is right that illiberalism is rising on all sides. But when the party that has long positioned itself as the bulwark against bigotry now tolerates terrorist apologists and antisemitic hate — while abandoning pro-Israel Jews who long called it home — it should be a wake-up call that something is broken.