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Jewish Journal

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May 27, 2026

They Don’t Care About Gaza

Commentary, Opinion /

The release of the Democratic Party’s internal autopsy of the 2024 presidential campaign is causing controversy in the political world. But the most significant aspect of the report is what the authors left out: Gaza.

You know why? Because most voters don’t care about Gaza, and — despite all the alarmist predictions — the Gaza conflict had no impact on the presidential election.

The disputed report, which the Democratic National Committee released last week after months of stalling, analyzes the reasons that Kamala Harris was defeated in 2024.

It cited a number of factors:

• The Harris campaign “wrote off rural America,” instead of actively competing for votes there.

• Harris was damaged by her appointment as “border czar,” at a time when the Biden administration’s immigration policy was deeply unpopular.

• The Harris campaign “relied on Trump being unacceptable rather than building an affirmative case for Harris.”

• Harris put too much emphasis on issues that were not priorities for most Americans, such as transgender concerns.

The New York Times expressed surprise that the report “makes no mention of Israel or Gaza, an issue that has fractured the party.”

But that’s just it — while Gaza has fractured the party’s elite and the small core of its most passionate activists, most Americans don’t count it among their priorities.

Alarmist polls in recent months have asserted that significant numbers of Americans, especially younger Democrats, are turning against Israel. If you ask people in a poll for their opinion on almost any issue, they will have one. But that doesn’t mean it has any real impact on their voting.

This month’s Pew Research Center survey of the issues that Americans care about most named 13. Gaza was not one of them.

In March, a Gallup Poll ranked the 16 issues Americans are most concerned about. Once again, Gaza did not even make the list.

Even the Harvard Youth poll of 18-to-29-year-olds, taken in 2024 at the height of the campus protests over Gaza, found that “the conflict in the Middle East” ranked 15th of the 16 issues that young voters care about most.

The anti-Israel protests that rocked America’s campuses in early 2024 were noisy and colorful. About 3,000 students were arrested. That sounds like a lot — until you remember that there are 19.5 million college students in the United States. The number arrested amounted to three-tenths of 1% of the total.

The protest tents that attracted so much attention have long since disappeared. So have the marches, the takeovers of campus buildings and the invasions of classrooms.

The anti-Israel movement on America’s college campuses was a flash in the pan. A core of extremists were briefly joined by students who wanted to mimic “what the cool kids are doing.” Together they manufactured a tumult that sympathetic news media outlets amplified. But their impact beyond those brief headlines was minimal.

Israel-haters try to use those headlines and scary-sounding poll results to intimidate the American Jewish community and stampede politicians into criticizing the Jewish state.

But candidates for office and their campaign strategists would be wise not to pay too much attention to polls showing that many Americans dislike some Israeli policy or leader. And friends of Israel would be wise not to panic over those poll results.

Because at the end of the day — as Pew, Gallup and Harvard have discovered — most American voters just don’t care that much about Gaza. They didn’t care about it during the 19 years when Egypt occupied it, they didn’t care about it during the 12 years of totalitarian rule by the Palestinian Authority or the 17 years of Hamas rule and they don’t really care about it today.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.

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A Life in Fragments

Columnists /

My father died when I was 39; my mother when I was 49. Most of the time I spent walking my father through his cancer is a blur. For my mother’s funeral, she had to be brought from Florida to New Jersey. This might be the only time she was not afraid to fly.

When asked to identify her body, I asked my cousin to do it. He went over, looked in her coffin, and stood frozen for over a minute. Then he returned to me and said, “I think it’s her.” “You sure?” “Yeah, I think so.” It was very unsatisfying, but I never looked. I did not want what he saw as my last memory. The rest of the day is a blur.

Memories of my school years are as scattered as if you dropped an open bag of marbles on a wooden floor.

My wife and I raised three boys. I was there for all three deliveries. I saw everything. And I mean everything. Thank God that, too, is mostly a blur. We had their bar mitzvahs in Israel — blur, blur, blur. How many of us, even after two years, can remember much about our own weddings?

Recently, I wanted to look at our wedding album to see how many people had passed. After 36 years of marriage, the answer is 25 out of 85. It’s been so long since I last looked at the album, it was stuck to the shelf of the cabinet.

Watching our sons and their wives raise our grandkids while pinning them down like in a wrestling match or trying to strap them into the car seat or the kids screaming like they were just told you are going to cut their arm off with a corkscrew are creating their own fragments. I can’t even remember going through one of the thousands of moments. The frightening moments during the child-rearing years — gone quicker than lightning.

Even 45 years of live performances have disappeared like vapor from a humidifier. The ice cream has melted; at the bottom of the cup are only the hard chocolate chip fragments from the mint chip ice cream. Each chip is a mix of sweet and bitter.

In movies, it is when the main character gets amnesia and wanders aimlessly, trying to find anything to hold onto, and asking the big question: “Who am I?”

Hyperthymesia is a rare ability that allows people to remember nearly every event of their lives precisely. Hyperthymesia is a superior version of autobiographical memory (HSAM). As of 2021, 62 people worldwide have been diagnosed with the condition. How would you like to be married to one of those people? Believe me, my wife remembers way too much already.

For me, fragments are more than enough. They allow me to weave stories about my identity and prove that I’ve lived. Watch any husband or wife telling friends their life story; invariably, one of the partners disagrees with much of the version being told.

Memory is essential for our sense of self. We rekindle our experiences through our memories. Without memory, who are we, and how can we make sense of the world? Memory can help support our emotional well-being.

I had a bad fallout with a family member with whom I had not spoken to for years. When I contacted him and asked if we could work it out, neither of us remembered what caused the row. We are once again friends.

There is a comic I work with who brings his wife to many of his shows. She has Alzheimer’s. Once a force to help raise awareness for women worldwide to advance, she now sits with us and says very little. If you say hello, she smiles and says hello back. People in charge of the venue watch her when her husband is on stage. He said she has sometimes even forgotten who he is. Even the fragments are gone. They have no children, and if he outlives her, he will one day be left alone with half the fragments because so many of hers are also his and will be taken away.

Our bits and pieces of days gone by are to be cherished with all our hearts. They are you for now and forever.

Mark Schiff is a comedian, actor and writer and hosts, along with Danny Lobell, the “We Think It’s Funny” podcast. His new book is “Why Not? Lessons on Comedy, Courage and Chutzpah.”

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The Israel Challenge

Columnists, Featured /

The Democratic National Committee last week released and then immediately denounced their own belated and incomplete analysis of the 2024 presidential election. The autopsy they commissioned somehow avoided any mention of Israel and Gaza, which is the approximate equivalent of a report on the Los Angeles Lakers’ season not discussing LeBron James or free throws.

This notable omission did not appear to be the result of any specific ill intent toward either Jewish voters or the state of Israel. The report also managed to review the Trump-Harris contest without any meaningful reference to inflation, border policy or Joe Biden’s age. But it does suggest deep and justified worries by the party’s leaders about the growing divide among their members over the relationship between the U.S. and the Jewish State. No nonfarcical argument can be made that the war in Gaza was the only reason for the Democrats’ defeat, but the dramatic decline in turnout among self-described progressive voters provides credible evidence that it was an important contributing factor.

The lack of an examination of the Israel/Gaza question indicates not just an oversight but an understandable anxiety among Democratic strategists. Polling shows an immense decline in overall support for Israel among party voters, and the fact that Harris managed to win fewer votes among both Jews and Muslims than Biden had four years earlier makes it clear that impassioned ambiguity is not an acceptable response to either side. It has been reported that the report’s authors had determined that Harris had lost support due to the Biden administration’s approach to the Gaza war, but no such conclusion was included in the version released last week. Palestinian advocates have charged that it was left out to avoid angering Jewish Democrats.

But the “Israel challenge,” which is as painful a phrase to type as it is to read, will soon be posing an equally vexing question to both political parties. While Democrats’ divisions over Israel are more prominent at the moment, there has been an accumulation of polling data that also demonstrates a growing animosity among young Republicans to the Jewish State. While the opposition is not nearly as pronounced as among Democrats, a majority of GOP voters under the age of 50 now have an unfavorable opinion of Israel. What is now primarily a partisan frustration will soon become a broader societal one.

As the poet Robert Frost once said, “The best way out is always through.” Ignoring a problem only prolongs it, and while both political parties have a vested political interest in pretending that there are only a scattered few antisemites in their respective ranks, the Jewish community does not have the same luxury. Democrats and Republicans have both decided that the best way to avoid accusations of anti-Jewish conduct is to launch even louder accusations against the other party. Both sides are correct that antisemitism is not limited by partisan boundaries. But while two political parties can temporarily hide from the consequences of such hateful prejudice, we cannot.

As you saw in the opening paragraph of this essay, my natural inclination is to criticize – or mock – the inability or unwillingness of a political party to confront the unpleasant reality that some of their most reliable voters harbor strong animosities against Jews. But it’s the job of the political parties to win elections, not to protect our people against ugly hatred. That’s our own responsibility and we must come to terms with the realization that the formula that was mostly effective for us between 1948 and 2023 is no longer sufficient. We need to upgrade and update that strategy quickly, and we cannot afford to be distracted by the inadequacies and evasions of others.

It would be gratifying if one party (or both) were to decide that eradicating antisemitism should be one of their primary goals. But rather than waiting for that improbability, we must begin the less cathartic but more necessary task of doing it ourselves. Once we can remind them that standing up against haters will attract voters, then they may join us. But not before.

Dan Schnur is the U.S. Politics Editor for the Jewish Journal. He teaches courses in politics, communications, and leadership at UC Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine. He hosts the monthly webinar “The Dan Schnur Political Report” for the Los Angeles World Affairs Council & Town Hall. Follow Dan’s work at www.danschnurpolitics.com.

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