Why Adam Milstein calls out antisemitism in both parties

In February 2026, Adam Milstein published an op-ed in the New York Post warning that anti-Israel factions were radicalizing the Democratic Party. Weeks later he was back in The Jerusalem Post aiming at a different target: the isolationist voices, many of them on the political right, recycling the arguments of the 1930s to oppose confronting Iran. Two op-eds in quick succession, two different audiences, two different parties under the microscope, one identical standard. The choice of venues was itself part of the argument. The New York Post critique of the Democratic coalition ran in a paper read heavily by conservatives, and the warning about isolationist drift appeared where right-leaning supporters of Israel would encounter it directly. Milstein does not publish criticism of each camp only where its opponents can applaud it. He delivers the uncomfortable half of the message to the audience that needs to sit with it. That evenhandedness is rarer than it should be. Most commentary on antisemitism in American politics picks a tribe first and finds its evidence second. Partisans of the right catalogue every excess of campus progressivism while waving away the conspiracy culture metastasizing in their own coalition. Partisans of the left do the reverse, documenting extremist rhetoric on the right while explaining away the hostility marching through their own activist wing. Milstein’s writing refuses the assignment. He audits both parties, publishes the findings wherever the audience needs to hear them, and accepts that the result will satisfy no faction completely. For a writer whose subject is Jewish security rather than partisan advantage, that is not a flaw in the method. It is the method. He laid out the strategic logic in a December 2024 Jerusalem Post column titled “Neither your honey nor your sting?” The American Jewish community, he wrote, spent decades concentrating its political capital almost exclusively on one side of the aisle, a strategy born of an era when political engagement was a matter of preference rather than necessity. That era is over. “While historically expedient, this strategy is now shortsighted,” he argued. “The current moment requires heightened realism and political pragmatism.” Realism, in his usage, means investing in relationships across the entire political spectrum, because a community wholly identified with one party becomes invisible to the other and expendable to both. The 2026 op-eds show what that pragmatism looks like in practice. The New York Post piece named the radicalization happening inside the Democratic coalition plainly, without softening the diagnosis to preserve old alliances. The Jerusalem Post piece was just as direct about the other flank: “Once again, the United States faces an enemy openly committed to its destruction. And once again, some American leaders respond with isolationism, partisanship, and moral confusion.” Readers looking for a partisan cheerleader leave both pieces disappointed. Behind the columns sits a structural argument about how antisemitism actually behaves. It migrates. It moves between ideologies, borrows whichever vocabulary is fashionable, and exploits whichever coalition is willing to look away. On the left it arrives dressed as anti-Zionism and social justice. On the right it arrives dressed as nationalism and suspicion of global elites. The costume changes; the target does not. A Jewish community that treats antisemitism as the other party’s problem builds a defense with a blind spot exactly half the horizon wide. Milstein’s answer is to make support for Jewish security a bipartisan asset, cultivated on both sides, owed by neither, and hostage to no single election result. There is a personal cost to this approach, and Adam Milstein has clearly priced it in. Auditing both parties means guaranteeing that someone is always angry with you. Donors who fund only comfortable messages get warmer receptions. But the discomfort is the point. A threat assessed through the lens of party registration is a threat misassessed, and in his accounting, misassessment is the one error Jewish history does not forgive. The two op-eds of early 2026 will eventually be dated, their news pegs forgotten, their headlines replaced by whatever the next cycle brings. The standard behind them will not be. Antisemitism does not check voter rolls before it spreads, and Milstein has built a public voice on the conviction that those who fight it cannot afford to either. 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