February 25, 2026

How conditional belonging pushed me out of spaces I once called home.

I am a registered Democrat since I first voted in 1988—the only non-Democratic candidate I ever voted for was Michael Bloomberg’s first mayoral campaign, when he ran as a Republican in name only. Three election cycles I voted absentee for Democrats—from Israel, where I lived in the 2010s.

A series of shocks, along with current events, in 2025 led me to detach from the Democratic Party. Although this is not a sponsored post, I am grateful to the #WalkAway Foundation for opening my mind to the fact that, through its policies hostile to Jewish Americans and Israel, the Democrats left me first.

Left-leaning communities and institutions where I once felt at home as my full authentic self—gay, Jewish, and sober—continue to demonstrate behavior ranging from hostility to indifference toward the Jewish aspect of my identity.

In 2018, I withdrew from the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus after it defended a double standard in how it responded to concerns raised by minorities. Over multiple holiday seasons, the chorus continued to sing a song asserting that Jesus was Palestinian, despite repeated objections from Jewish members, who raised concerns about historical erasure and erasive Jew-hatred. Yet when Asian members objected to a lyric about Japanese women, leadership moved swiftly to change it.

When black members objected to a white singer being given a solo in a gospel piece, leadership issued a chorus-wide apology email. But when Jews objected to being required to sing an ahistorical lyric about a Jewish figure, the recommendation from the chorus’s “Inclusion and Equity Initiative” was that Jewish singers could simply leave the stage for that number.

That was the solution: participate in the erasure of Jewish history by singing about a Jew using a post-colonial, anachronistic name for the land where he lived—or erase yourself instead. And this was presented as “inclusion and equity.” Nice.

I am clean and sober since 2000. Working the 12 steps inside multiple recovery fellowships—and carrying the message through service ever since—is the best thing I have ever done in my life. These fellowships have strict, founding guardrails against politics—every AA meeting, anywhere in the world, begins with a preamble stating: “A.A. is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes.”

And yet, in December 2024, in the Zoom version of a group I’d regularly attended for more than 24 years, I was forcibly muted for objecting to a speaker’s casual use of the word “Nazi” to describe his disciplinarian sponsor. While other Jews in attendance messaged me privately to thank me for speaking up, the group’s chairperson invented a speech policy on the fly to shut me down. My association with this group ended when its overall chair declined my request to clarify for members that the group does not tolerate even the appearance of a double standard against Jewish members. Painfully, I stepped away.

Because my personal survival depends on attendance at meetings, I found a replacement virtual group. And I kept up weekly attendance at my regular in-person meeting, a special-interest group for gay men, many of whom are my friends for decades—until it, too, became unwelcoming to my Jewish identity. One night, riffing off the main speaker, a theme overtook the room: civil rights. Shares from the floor invoked the struggles of the black and LGBTQ communities—while the dominant, present-day civil-rights attack on Jewish Americans went unmentioned, as if we did not belong in the category at all. Then someone shared his passionate commitment to volunteering with the Mamdani campaign. I support everyone’s right to share what they need to do to stay sober, one day at a time. But the group-think was suffocating. Once again, I felt the same choice closing in: recover elsewhere or amputate part of myself. I chose recovery—as my full self.

Left-leaning communities and institutions where I once felt at home as my full authentic self—gay, Jewish, and sober—continue to demonstrate behavior ranging from hostility to indifference toward the Jewish aspect of my identity.

I have not looked back—except to share, in a general way that preserves anonymity, these experiences on social media. In the crowded Jewish content creator space, I have carved myself a lane—voicing loneliness and grief, feeling pushed out of seemingly liberal spaces, where I once felt belonging.

Then it got worse. Every five years, Alcoholics Anonymous holds an international convention—a vibrant gathering of members from 123,000 groups across 181 countries. In 2025, I attended this inspiring event for the first time. I grew spiritually and gained new friendships from the experience—until I was once again gut-punched. In the souvenir book, I discovered Israel was the only country misidentified—labeled and pictured not as Israel, but “Jerusalem,” with a municipal flag in place of Israel’s. In effect, an institution as storied and impartial as AA had treated the world’s only Jewish state as if it should not exist. Whether intended or not, it landed as a political statement—and a severe, egregious violation of its own Tradition Ten.

Thankfully, the organization took the exceptional step a few weeks later of issuing a worldwide apology and reaffirming its no-opinion policy. But, for many sober Jews and allies, the damage was done. We sunk, destabilized and disheartened. The rooms that once felt like home had begun quietly revoking that welcome from us and calling it “neutrality.”

Even my marriage is not safe from progressive pressure. Because I’d become a single-issue voter—safety for the Jewish community—my husband accused me of abandoning other minorities in the name of self-centeredness. He would cite Niemöller’s “First They Came…” poem to me—arguing that because I no longer prioritized the rights of LGBTQs, women, and immigrants, I’d become no better than those who stood by as Jews were ostracized and marked for death before World War II.

I answered that, in normal times, I would be first to advocate for these groups. But normal times these ain’t. With righteous, rare exceptions, the minorities we repeatedly stood with have ghosted Jews during the anti-Zionist hate movement’s surge. And with “pick me!” peer pressure and “#AsaJew” arrogance tempting our own tribe, we don’t even have all the Jews supporting us. With support for the Jewish community so scarce, and my own energy finite, I am clear about where my advocacy belongs. Besides, how many minorities can I support if an anti-Zionist bashes my head in with a baseball bat? 

As liberal blocs within American society intensified their anti-Zionist libels—settler-colonizer, apartheid, genocide, oppressor, ethnic cleansing—during the 2020s, I continued voting Democratic. I held my breath during the party’s nominating conventions, fearing these libels would be repeated from the stage to a national audience and echoed throughout the media. Yet I still volunteered as a canvasser for Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile, I quit a years-long CNN habit when its anti-Israel bias became undeniable during the 2021 war with Hamas. And I ended my New York Times subscription after the paper published a Swastika-shaped crossword puzzle on the first day of Chanukah in 2022.

Once again, I felt the same choice closing in: recover elsewhere or amputate part of myself. I chose recovery—as my full self.

By the middle of 2025, I could no longer pretend the party’s most anti-Zionist elements hadn’t infected its moderates. The pattern became unmistakable:

By the time Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeated the genocide libel against Israel from the Munich stage this February, the pattern I had seen for years felt confirmed.

Each headline seemed a more taunting tell that the Democratic Party did not care about nor want my vote anymore. This went far beyond the Squad and its patrons, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Former milquetoast “moderates” like Senators Tim Kaine, Chris Van Hollen, Dick Durban, and Chris Murphy seem increasingly open about their hatred for Israel.

On February 3, I voted for my first Republican-platform candidate—and it felt great. Charlotte Friedman ran against (and lost to) Democratic candidate—and my former City Council member—Erik Bottcher, in a special election for the New York State Senate. I’ve met Senator Bottcher several times, and his former office helped me tremendously on some hyper-local issues when I contacted them.

Despite my political evolution, I kept an open mind. The candidates’ websites made my decision for me. Ms. Friedman had three issues featured prominently on her homepage: anti-Semitism, fighting socialism, and safety. Senator Bottcher’s had a photo of him standing with people holding signs reading “Fascist” (or “Fascism”—it’s not clear) and “Fox Lies, Democracy Dies.” Reductive and hysterical slogans like these only foment division, in my opinion. That’s not a compelling platform. I searched Bottcher’s website for mention of anti-Semitism, because I know he has spoken out against it and that he also has visited Israel. Neither issue was mentioned. Simply put, I preferred Ms. Friedman’s priorities.

For years, I was told Jews were safest inside progressive coalitions. My experience proved otherwise: I found that Jewish identity is welcome only when it is quiet, conditional, or apologetic. The same pattern appeared in spaces—from gay choir to recovery meetings to electoral politics—where I once felt at home. When it became clear I could not remain there as myself, I began looking for belonging elsewhere.

Loyalty is sustained by trust. My trust in those communities eroded slowly, then all at once. When I could no longer reconcile my Jewish identity with the environments that once felt like home, I understood that loyalty can mean leaving—when staying requires denying part of who you are.