Why Democrats could excuse Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—but not his alleged abuse of women

Arno Rosenfeld joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy to discuss. The post Why Democrats could excuse Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—but not his alleged abuse of women appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News .

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was, for a moment, a Democratic golden boy—an oyster farmer and Marine veteran whose rough-hewn authenticity thrilled progressive strategists. Then came the Reddit posts, the Nazi-linked chest tattoo he claimed not to understand, and finally the rape allegation that collapsed his campaign. But what does it say that a Nazi tattoo and edgelord posting weren’t disqualifying, while an accusation of sexual misconduct was?

Arno Rosenfeld, who covers antisemitism for the Forward (but is soon joining Haaretz as its Washington correspondent), joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy to unpack the strange dynamics of the Platner saga: how anti-Israel positioning became a permission slip to wave away scandal, why he became the target of two mutually exclusive antisemitic conspiracy theories at once, how “authenticity” got tangled up with a certain kind of white male gentileness, and what Platner’s rise and fall reveals about antisemitism’s shifting place in the Democratic Party—and whether it’s still disqualifying at all. Transcript Phoebe Maltz Bovy: You’re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from the Canadian Jewish News.

I’m your host, Phoebe Maltz Bovy. It will stun you to learn that I am both Jewish and a woman. As a woman, I should be relieved to see that Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, being credibly accused of rape, has demolished his political prospects, at least in this race, at least while running as a Democrat.

And I am, to a point. But as a Jew, I couldn’t help but notice that the man’s Nazi chest tattoo, since somewhat altered, and weird lies about it had not disqualified him. Indeed, it hadn’t stopped him from winning the Democratic primary to begin with.

It’s almost as if there are more women than Jews in the electorate. Could be. Studies have to investigate.

To help make sense of this strange moment, this strange candidate, a Democratic golden boy who wasn’t, I’m grateful to have back on Arno Rosenfeld. Arno is a reporter covering antisemitism for the Forward, who will soon be starting as Haaretz’s Washington correspondent. Arno, welcome back to The Jewish Angle.

Arno Rosenfeld: Thanks so much for having me. Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So let’s start with the Rorschach test, that is that Totenkopf or whatever. Let’s start with the Nazi chest tattoo thing.

Does anybody — or more to the point, does anybody reasonable — actually believe that this means he is or was a Nazi? Is that something people actually think? Because my social media is filled with people saying, of course he’s not a Nazi, it just means blah, blah, blah.

Arno Rosenfeld: Yeah, I haven’t seen much that suggests that he, or at least that his contemporary politics... So to go back, there are so many scandals with Platner, it’s a little bit tricky to keep track of.

But the Nazi tattoo came out some months ago, as did old Reddit posts from an account belonging to Platner, in which he made various sort of offensive comments toward minority groups, referring to rape allegations in the military, other things like that. But none of that content — which again, at the time he was posting it, would’ve been anonymous, online, edgy content — was of the neo-Nazi variety. So I don’t think that many people have looked at the tattoo and said, this means he is a neo-Nazi

and you’re electing a secret neo-Nazi to the Senate. I think the concern was much more, is that anyone who would think that it is okay to get a Nazi tattoo or to keep a Nazi tattoo — assuming that it’s true that maybe they didn’t realize when they first got it that that’s what it represented — that that judgment was so poor as to be disqualifying. I think there’s also a category of person who is not a Nazi or neo-Nazi, but who has some admiration for the Nazis.

You find this sometimes with generally white male military buffs, although not only. I mean, the Nazis have admirers around the world, where they say, well, of course, you have to recognize that they had these really fantastic tactics. And Hitler, obviously, I don’t agree with the stuff that he said, but he was such a powerful leader and he really helped the German people.

And so I think the concern was more that he was too sympathetic to or okay with Nazi iconography or Nazi symbolism, not that he himself was a Nazi per se. Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right.

It seems like these kind of, I guess, second-order things — like the significance of the Democratic Party overlooking a Nazi tattoo, the significance of Platner himself having seemingly lied about what he knew when he knew, like saying he didn’t know what he had on his chest and then accounts coming out saying that he absolutely did know this. That seemed to be what I saw as kind of the mark on his character. And then it’s this weird thing, like — I don’t know if you’ve seen this online — where a lot of people are saying, like, unlike those fools, I think this reasonable thing.

And I have had trouble finding the fools, I have had trouble finding the people who actually think Platner’s tattoo made him a Nazi. I’ve just seen a lot of people saying I, unlike those other people, get that it doesn’t mean that. However, here’s where I’m going to be the fool.

The tattoo itself just seems like bad judgment, and the sort of lying stuff associated with it doesn’t seem great. When you put it, though, in conjunction with anti-Israel positions — which again, in and of themselves could mean any number of things — and edgelord posting and his kind of positioning as this real American, sort of scare quotes, in like the Sarah Palin sense, when you put all of these things together, does that change anything? Does it give it a different sort of valence?

Arno Rosenfeld: You know, I think that it was almost the — it’s not quite to say the reverse, but I think that the fact that he staked out these pro-Palestinian positions, these positions opposed to Israel on the campaign trail, almost reverse-engineered sympathy for his campaign among people who would otherwise be horrified by Nazi tattoos. Because it’s not as if the only people who are bothered by Nazi iconography are Jews. I mean, typically a lot of the left would be horrified and upset.

And there are Trump administration officials — there’s a Trump administration official who has Panzer, the German tank unit, tattooed on his arm that people were very upset about, and not frankly primarily Jews. I don’t know the exact breakdown, but that was something that a lot of people found alarming. And so I think that Platner sort of had a political platform that allowed him to curry sympathy with people who would otherwise find the edgelord posting, the Nazi tattoo, to be disqualifying.

And people convinced themselves that Platner’s critics who were mad about the Nazi tattoo were only mad because they didn’t like his positions on Israel. Obviously, this guy isn’t a Nazi, so if you have a problem with his Nazi tattoo, it must be because you’re a Zionist or because you’re taking AIPAC dollars to attack him or what have you. The interesting thing is that — and I saw some commentary about this in light of the poll that showed that Zohran Mamdani has significantly higher favorability ratings among American Jews than Benjamin Netanyahu does — people were saying the Jewish establishment poured so much more energy into demonizing Mamdani than they did into demonizing Platner.

And I think that was for a few reasons. The most generous explanation is that pro-Palestinian activism was really core to Mamdani’s entire political career and trajectory in a way that it wasn’t for Platner. For Platner, Gaza was not at the center of his campaign.

I mean, this was the guy who worked for Blackwater. Being a leftist, anti-Zionist was not part of Platner’s political history. It was one position he held among many.

And so yes, it’s true that pro-Israel Democrats were opposed to his candidacy. But I don’t think they were holding him out as the most extreme example of anti-Zionist Democratic candidates for office. And I even saw some criticism of him from the sort of hard left that was saying he was too sympathetic to Israel, or his condemnations of October 7th suggested that he was still buying into Israeli talking points or whatever.

So yeah, it’s a little more complicated than this idea of, well, he had a Nazi tattoo and he was anti-Israel, so therefore he’s really an antisemite. But those were the dynamics that I was kind of observing. Phoebe Maltz Bovy:

Yeah. Oh, I want to pick up on so many of those things, and I will do that one at a time. So first is that I think there is something where, as World War II sort of recedes in history, antisemitism can no longer be kind of just dismissed as weird, and Nazism itself.

Like, there used to be that you could just say of somebody who seemed to be a Nazi sympathizer, oh, they’re a loser, they’re weird, that’s strange. It has become less sort of objectively strange, which is why you can end up with things like — there have been these, in Canada, these Holocaust-denying yearbook quotes, and then that Cornell student who said he wouldn’t work for a Jew. There was a time, and I think until pretty recently, when you could just point to things like this and be like, what a loser, they’re gonna be shamed out of polite society.

And now demonstrably they will not be shamed out of polite society. So I think that’s one shift I’ve been thinking about with this. With Mamdani, I have also seen the post about this.

Joel Swanson, a professor who’s been on The Jewish Angle as well, has posted about this on Bluesky. I wonder how much of this is just, yeah, like you say, about who’s how associated with which cause. I think that probably makes sense.

But I really want to pick up though on what you were talking about with the conspiracy theories aspect of it, what you also posted about. Because what’s so weird with Platner is he seems to be the target of two different and mutually exclusive antisemitic conspiracy theories, which is something you don’t see every day. One is the one you mention — and I’m quoting from your post — the conspiracies, quote, “a pro-Israel conspiracy against a brave truth-teller.”

So that one, where he’s this pure and noble leftist brought down by right-wing Zionists. But the other conspiracy theory I found when doing some reading about him on the internet was that he’s a communist supported by communist Jews, and that basically that’s what’s happening, that this is a Jewish conspiracy to bring about communism. Have you encountered that other one?

Arno Rosenfeld: Electing — by electing him. Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, that — well, just by boosting him, that he’s being boosted by, that it’s part of some sort of Jewish communist conspiracy to have such a left-wing candidate.

Arno Rosenfeld: You know, I have not encountered that directly. I don’t spend as much time on X/Twitter as I used to, and I think that that’s where some of the more classic... But I mean, that’s very classic, right?

Anytime you have an especially left-wing candidate, someone out there will be accusing Jewish Bolsheviks of being behind it. But no, I had not seen that as much as I had seen — and what I was referencing, that came about after the first... The New York Times wrote an article that was slightly — being a journalist and inside of the reporting process, you could sort of tell that they were kind of couching things, right?

Because the article that they published like a month or so ago was that women who knew him described alarming behavior, right? And you kind of, in general, with the headline, you try to go for as strong of an allegation as the reporting can substantiate. So it wasn’t that he had assaulted people physically, even though there was sort of an assault claim in the article.

It wasn’t sexual assault. It wasn’t explicitly sexual harassment. It was sort of like this troubling — I mean, it was accurate, right?

They were describing troubling examples of behavior. And then you had a left-wing response on social media that was trying to dig into the New York Times reporters behind it and saying that they or their family members had been to Israel, and basically that this was a Zionist plot. And then of course, one of his accusers was a conservative activist who had expressed, I guess, some support for Israel.

So that’s what I had seen. And in some respects, I think that’s a little bit more pernicious, because in my mind, it doesn’t surprise me that people on the far right would be accusing Jews of fomenting communism. That’s kind of old hat.

But this new notion that we can write off — it’s like a permission slip to write off any allegations. All you have to do is come out against Israel. And in some respects, the more vociferously that you come out against Israel, the stronger your defenses, because then you can act as though you’re just being martyred.

And it’s like, well, all of these allegations are only coming about because I dare to stand up to the Zionist lobby — which, again, Platner has not used this language explicitly, but many of his supporters have come very close to saying that this is all AIPAC-engineered. The danger there is if you’re on the left, if you’re a man on the left who maybe has a checkered history with women, mistreating them in one way or another, and you think that might come out when you run for office, all the better to stake yourself as far out to the left as you can and position yourself in opposition to the establishment, and then just write off all of the establishment’s opposition to you based on that rather than any substantive critique.

Because the question is, right, the Democratic establishment was absolutely opposed to Platner for a variety of reasons, in part because they wanted Janet Mills, the governor, to win the nomination. That’s all real. I mean, that’s not a conspiracy.

He was not their favorite candidate. And some people have focused on that. Some people have gotten mad at the DSCC and the official arms of the Democratic Party.

But that’s not quite as compelling as being upset about AIPAC or about Israel. Because I think that those institutions are so much more tied to these broader conspiracies that if you can act as though they are your enemies, that may gain more traction with supporters. And certainly in Platner’s case, it appears that that works.

So I think that’s why I keyed in more on one of these than the other. Phoebe Maltz Bovy: No, that makes sense. Just for the record, where do Platner’s views about Israel fall with respect to the current Democratic Party?

Because things have shifted quite a bit. Arno Rosenfeld: Yeah, I mean, I think his views are largely in line with the Democratic electorate — certainly the primary electorate, like consistent Democratic voters — but they remain far to the left of the party establishment.

And I think that’s one of the big problems that the Democrats are facing, which is that the conventional wisdom, right, is that voters don’t vote based on foreign policy. And that’s largely been borne out in elections; foreign policy is at the bottom of the list. When you had Vietnam, when you had the draft, or things that were impinging on domestic politics, it did impact that.

But nobody’s really voting based on trade policy, even though when you poll them, they might have strong feelings. So that was the conventional wisdom for a long time. And it was okay if Democratic leadership was to the right of their voters on Middle East stuff, because that didn’t determine elections.

But we saw — and there was polling after Mamdani won the primary in New York — that showed that Gaza had become a kind of litmus test for authenticity. And so it wasn’t necessarily that Gaza was at the top of people’s... I mean, people still say healthcare, the economy, healthcare, immigration to some extent.

These are still the issues that top voters’ concerns. It’s not Israel. But it was almost viewed as a litmus test that if you still express the sort of standard pro-Israel Democratic talking points, you were viewed as inauthentic on all of these other sort of things.

And so if you’re a pro-Israel Democrat and you have a stump speech about making healthcare more affordable, people are going to say, well, I’m not sure if you’re really credible on healthcare, because you’re feeding me all this BS about Israel. Whereas it opened a lane for people like Platner to come in and say, well, I’m gonna tell you the truth about Israel, and you know it’s the truth. I’m repeating things back to you that you already believe — that Israel’s committing genocide, that we need to have an anti-war foreign policy, whatever the case may be.

And so when I tell you about healthcare, you’re now gonna believe that I’m credible on that. And then you add this extra layer of defense that, because I’ve established my credibility with you, I’m gonna get a pass on these various scandals that if you were coming from a corporate or mainstream Democrat would be obviously disqualifying. And we’ve seen this happen.

A few years ago, Cal Cunningham, who was running as a mainstream kind of moderate Democrat in North Carolina, had — I believe it was an infidelity scandal, something along those lines — and he was basically forced out of the race, I believe. I forget the exact conclusion to that race, but that was viewed as disqualifying for a moderate Democrat, whereas for someone who’s positioned themselves as the truth-teller, you get a pass. So I think that he is aligned with the voting base, but to the left of party leadership, if that makes sense.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, it does. I think the authenticity thing is so fascinating and concerning, in that there really does seem to be this thing where authenticity and gentileness — or a certain type of white male gentileness, at least — get very linked up.

Which kind of brings me to my next question, which is more of a me being galaxy-brained than a question, possibly, so bear with me. But Morris Katz, a progressive political strategist, and Bernie Sanders have been among Platner’s big boosters. So it’s not that Platner himself has had no Jewish supporters, right?

I have a kind of weird theory about this, or maybe it’s not so weird, that it has a Jewish angle — and I think it has a Jewish angle. I’m not sure exactly how to sort this through. I’m writing about it and I’ve written about it, but I’m still thinking it through, where I feel like he just represents — he’s not so much an avatar of the white working class as he is somebody cast in that role by people at something of a remove from that.

So Morris Katz is somebody — I read a profile of him in the New York Times — who grew up in Tribeca in a kind of very well-connected artsy world, was into playwriting even as a teenager, and has sort of cast — this is how Jonathan Chait describes it — sort of cast Platner in this role. And there is something where there’s something phony about the authenticity. I don’t know if I’m making any sense of any of this.

Anyway, it just seems like this worked to a point, and people were kind of buying it, and it was good enough. And then of course, once it turns out that he’s credibly accused of rape, it doesn’t work out so well. But yeah, I don’t know.

I’m trying to make sense of this thing where he both is this kind of avatar for this very non-Jewish-coded type, but also selected, at least in part, by people who are themselves Jewish. And I’m just trying to make sense of all that. Arno Rosenfeld:

Yeah, I mean, I think that Jews are — and I don’t want to say over-represented, because I think if you controlled for education and geography and other things, the differences might disappear — but there are many Jews active in American politics, and more so in the Democratic Party. Overwhelmingly so in the Democratic Party, and across the spectrum. So it makes sense that, unless you’re truly one of these people who’s completely beyond the pale...

There was that woman running for Congress in Texas who wanted to put all the Zionists in camps, and she said, well, I’m not antisemitic because Palestinians are the real Semites, and I only want to put the American Jews in camps and they aren’t real Jews. So she’s not running with Jewish support. But — and I don’t want to fuel any of these antisemitic conspiracy theories — Rahm Emanuel, when he was in charge of recruiting Democratic candidates some 20-odd years ago, had this strategy of looking for...

There was this notion during the Bush administration that what Democrats needed were Democratic veterans. So it was sort of like white male veteran candidates, and that’s what was gonna work in purple districts. And so — I’m not referring to Emanuel specifically, but for the people recruiting these candidates — it’s like, well, I’m not a veteran living in rural Ohio, but we’re going to find a veteran in rural Ohio and that’ll get all those country voters to come around our side.

And so, to some extent, I think you also have — and that was from the more moderate wing of the party that included many Jewish strategists and whatnot — and so yeah, the progressive wing of the party also has many Jewish strategists, and they’re also looking for who’s a candidate that’s going to resonate with our audience. The reality is there just aren’t very many Jews in the United States, period. And so when you’re looking for candidates who fit a certain mold, I don’t know that you’re necessarily looking for, like, we need a Gentile candidate.

I mean, Jon Ossoff in Georgia is a Jewish guy and was viewed as — and he’s sort of appealed to both the moderate and more progressive wings of the Democratic Party — and was Jewish. And so I don’t think it’s like we need to go find non-Jews to represent some ideal version of who we think that we can win. But I do think that there is — it’s like this idea of the lack of authenticity, both sides throw these accusations around.

And I think the reality is everyone’s looking for a candidate whose message they think will resonate. And there’s a lot of typecasting involved in that. Part of what I find odd is I’ve seen people say, like — Platner wasn’t a community organizer or political activist.

It’s like, if all you were looking for was an oyster farmer in Maine who had a folksy charm to him, there are many of these people. Obviously, arguably the vetting should be easier. I was thinking about this a little bit when the allegations all broke about Cesar Chavez, the Hispanic union labor organizer in the US.

I grew up in California, and Cesar Chavez’s birthday was a holiday. There are statues of him everywhere. I could see — not at all excusable, but I understand — in the context of some people who may have been aware of these allegations contemporaneously being like, well, this guy’s built this huge movement, it would completely destroy our movement if any of this came out, we have to protect this guy.

Platner had no movement. If you vetted him at the beginning of the process and it was like, oh, it turns out he has this sketchy past with women — move on to the next oyster farmer, find another working-class avatar in Maine. So I don’t understand why that didn’t happen, but I don’t find trying to find a folksy guy to be nefarious or unusual.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, what I find a bit nefarious and unusual — or just at least unusual — is that this is a folksy guy who went to Hotchkiss, right? Like, this is a preppy folksy guy from a wealthy family who is more accurately described socioeconomically as downwardly mobile than as working class.

And I do think that — the reason that interests me, and the Jewish angle I see on it, and this is where it does get pretty galaxy-brained, I realize — is, think about how much people have talked about Lena Dunham’s privilege, right? Do you know what I’m talking about? Imagine if somebody like Platner were Jewish.

You would be hearing about his rich parents in a different way, I think, than you are. And I think he has been able to kind of pass as a different socioeconomic background than he has because of that. And it’s not like — I completely take the point that most people aren’t Jewish.

I mean, even though I work at the Canadian Jewish News, most people aren’t even Canadian in the world. But I think that in terms of the whole authenticity thing, it’s not just that he has the sketchy and perhaps more than sketchy past with women. It’s also that he has the phoniness angle.

And I think that that might be — I think that’s relevant. Arno Rosenfeld: I mean, I think it’s also like — imagine if Platner was a woman. Or if he was running in New York City.

If he was in Brooklyn, if he was in Williamsburg running, if he was challenging Dan Goldman instead of Brad Lander, you might have people — it’s like he would fit into a different trope in people’s minds. And yeah, it’s hard to separate Jewishness or lack thereof from that. Part of the thing is — and this is actually prior to the latest scandal breaking — what I was really chewing on with Platner is that I think a lot of Democratic voters looked at the rise of Donald Trump and the rise of other Republicans who by all measures are phony and inauthentic.

I mean, the idea of Donald Trump as a successful businessman, despite repeatedly declaring bankruptcy and refusing to pay vendors and having all these failed ventures and enterprises and these fraud claims and all of this stuff, right? So I think early on, Democrats looked at that and were like, this guy’s a phony. And what they realized was voters didn’t seem to care about that.

None of those messages stuck, because at the end of the day, they’d seen him on The Apprentice or wherever else in the tabloids, and they were like, he’s a rich, successful guy, what are you talking about? And I think that there became a point — because you have to remember too, a lot of these allegations came out before the primary and he still won the primary handily. Mills dropped out right before the primary, but a few days before.

And so I think there’s almost this gleefulness among Democrats of, you know what, screw it. We’ve tried to do things by the book, we’ve tried to abide by all the things you’re saying, yeah, we shouldn’t pretend like a guy who went to a fancy boarding school or prep school is whatever, whatever — but hey, it’s working for them and we have to fight fire with fire. So we can’t be scared off by this guy’s tattoo, or by someone said he did something to them years ago, or oh, he posted this stuff online.

He’s here now and he’s telling voters what they want to hear, and we just need to get behind that. And I think that’s very dangerous for Jews specifically.

And that’s what I was thinking about, because I think that people fighting antisemitism — exactly a point you made earlier — antisemitism used to be viewed as disqualifying. I mean, there was a narrow period in which it was viewed as disqualifying, but it was like, it’s not okay to say in polite society, and if someone says that, they’re a weirdo or they’re a loser, and we’re just all gonna agree they don’t belong here. And that ceased to be true first in the Republican Party.

Donald Trump was running around in 2016 saying these kind of backhanded — like when he would address the Republican Jewish groups, he’d say, oh, I’m in a room of — you guys are all such shrewd deal makers. And it was like, well, that’s not an okay thing to say, but apparently it was, right, because he won. And so I think that now, if we’re reaching a point where antisemitism is not disqualifying in the Democratic Party — and I don’t want to overstate it, I think it can still be disqualifying in certain areas — but this idea that we shouldn’t have to abide by the rules of polite society anymore either, because look where it’s gotten us, is a very perilous place for a minority group like Jews, who are not viewed as fully within the left-wing coalition, who are also not really accepted by — there’s this sort of conditional alliance on the right.

And so that’s what I find to be the biggest red flag about Platner: that, as you say, the red flags around antisemitism, around the Nazi tattoo, all those sort of things were not viewed as disqualifying. It wasn’t until this other scandal broke that he really lost all of his mainstream support. Phoebe Maltz Bovy:

Yeah. So to bring Canada a little bit into this, but also to sort of continue on this theme — the political structure here is different. Different whole party system, different whole system of government entirely.

Canadian Jews are not typically voting for the furthest left candidate, whereas in a contest between a Democrat and a Republican, that would be different, right? So I’m wondering whether, in light of all these changes in the US — Mamdani to some extent, although I think this is a little more complicated because he seems like a competent or more than competent person — and then this whole thing that happened with Scott Wiener getting chased out of a trans pride parade by seemingly a straight man, which I wrote a column on because it’s just so wild of a story, for being — not even for being too far to the right on Gaza, which apparently he isn’t actually to the right on Gaza, but it’s more that basically it seems like this guy was looking to pick a fight.

But that was a very upsetting whole scene. Are American Jews, do you think, going to stop being as solidly Democratic as has been the case? Obviously there are individual Jews and whole demographics within American Jewry voting Republican for a long time.

But I’m saying, do you think that American Jews are going to move away from the Democrats? Or conversely, with surveys showing that many American Jews are less pro-Israel than one might expect, do you think that American Jews will just kind of go where the Democrats go? Arno Rosenfeld:

Yeah, I think there are a few pieces to that. The first is, we’ve been kind of hearing that this is on the verge of happening for a long time, and it hasn’t materialized. At least not — you might see a three-to-six-point swing election to election, but you know, we’re still roughly split 70-30.

I think you might also see this in a specific election where there is, say, an especially left-wing candidate who has a bad relationship with the Jewish community running against a more moderate Republican who has appealed to the Jews. But I think that there are a few reasons why we aren’t gonna see a significant shift. And a big part of it is that, for a long time, the pitch for Jews to vote from Jewish conservatives — or from non-Jewish Republicans to win over Jewish voters — was that basically Jews should vote first and foremost for Israel, or for the US-Israel relationship, however you want to term that.

So you might disagree with me on tax policy and on healthcare and on immigration, but I, as the Republican, am the more stalwart supporter of Israel than the Democratic Party, and that is an existential issue for Jews, and so Jews should vote for the Republican. But what we’ve seen in the past few years is that you have right-wing anti-Zionism also rearing its head. So now the furthest-right fringe is not anti-every-minority-except-for-Jews and isolationist-except-for-Israel.

They are more explicitly antisemitic, and they are also more explicitly, if not anti-Zionist, at least in favor of cutting off ties with Israel, and in some cases explicitly anti-Zionist. And then you have Trump, who theoretically was Israel’s greatest friend, et cetera, et cetera, seeming to leave Israel out to dry in regards to Iran. And who knows where the cards are all going to fall on that.

But now the pitch is much murkier, because it’s not even clear that the Republican Party are stalwart supporters of Israel, at least not like they once were. And so where do Jewish voters, even pro-Israel Jewish voters in the US, go with that? I think that you see it show up in primary contests, and that’s part of the reason why AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel have invested a lot in Democratic primaries.

Because yes, you do see Jewish voters gravitate — or at least Jewish voters who care a lot about Israel and supporting Israel gravitate — toward the more moderate Democratic candidates in primaries, because they want a Democratic Party that is more supportive of Israel. So I think that trend may continue. But yes, then to your point, the numbers now — I think you’re approaching 50% of non-Orthodox young Jews, meaning under 35, so this includes people who will not be that young for that long, want to replace Israel with a binational state.

And so for those people, I still don’t think that they’re going to gravitate toward the furthest left in the Democratic Party, where you get into a lot of dehumanization of anyone who supports Israel and of Israelis and all of that. Because I think that even if they want a binational state, they still have a more nuanced understanding of the conflict. But those people certainly aren’t going to abandon the Democratic Party because they want to condition aid to Israel.

So I don’t anticipate a big swing in Jewish voting patterns in the US. And as you mentioned, right now — I think that maybe the closest parallel, where Canada has three major political parties, you see the equivalent of the liberal-NDP split in the Democratic primary voting process, as opposed to in the general elections. Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That makes sense.

I have many things I want to ask, but in the interest of time, I’ll ask you only one more, which is: what do you think is next for Platner himself? Because he seems like somebody who could go in any number of directions, and I’m curious which direction you would predict. Arno Rosenfeld: You know, I try to be careful about making predictions about the future.

And I also — I’ve followed the specific scandals we’ve talked about quite closely, I haven’t followed all of the contours of the race as closely as some political reporters have. So the short answer is, I don’t know. I mean, I will say, or reiterate what I said, that Israel was not a central plank of his campaign, but sometimes when people feel like they are pushed out of mainstream politics, they gravitate toward more fringe positions.

And so there’s certainly a threat of that happening here, where you really lean into, like, well, what did — my defenders, the people who were ride-or-die for me at the very end were the ones accusing all of these women of being AIPAC plants, and so I’m just going to lean into “the Jews did me dirty.” So that’s possible. But it’s also entirely possible that he wouldn’t — I wouldn’t say that he’s given an indication that that’s the direction he would go, it’s just something that we’ve seen happen in the past.

He may just recede from the political landscape. I will say, I did see a lot of his quasi-defenders — going back to, again, the fact that he was a Blackwater mercenary in Iraq, the fact that he’d posted this stuff on Reddit, the Nazi tattoo — there were a lot of people who were not all that gung-ho for him. It was sort of conditional in their support.

They were like, well, we like his platform, at the end of the day that’s what matters, they’re running a very old moderate Democrat against him, we think he has a better shot of beating Collins. But I think there may be a sense of relief from some people on the left that, like, yeah, I was willing to defend this guy in the context of the campaign, but I don’t want to help him come back and make another run for the Senate, make a run for governor — or, it’s like, what political comebacks normally look like, or a House seat.

People would just be glad to be done with him. So he may just fade out. Maine is also obviously just not a center of national politics in the US.

And so unlike someone who’s hanging around in New York or LA or Chicago, there are fewer opportunities for him to plug in. It may hinge a little bit on how durable the allegations are against him. There have been people who’ve been trying to poke holes in the allegations.

So if a consensus emerges six months from now that actually he was unfairly smeared, that might pave the way for a little bit of rehabilitation. So it’s really hard to say. But I think part of the reason it’s hard to say is because he didn’t have any resume to this point.

It’s not like he had been mayor of somewhere, or that he’d been in the House and they tried to elevate him. So I don’t know how much of a constituency he will have if he tries to carry on with a public profile. He may also, depending on the circumstances of leaving the race, want to be done with this.

I mean, I’m sure it’s very stressful — even if you don’t have any sympathy for him, this is a stressful thing to be doing. And so if this was your best shot at it and you fell on your face, maybe he’ll just go back to oyster farming or whatever else.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, we will see. We will see.

Arno Rosenfeld, thank you so much for coming back on The Jewish Angle. Arno Rosenfeld: Thanks for having me. Show Notes Credits Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy Producer and editor:

Michael Fraiman Music: ” Gypsy Waltz ” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective Support our show Subscribe to The CJN newsletter Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt) Subscribe to The Jewish Angle The post Why Democrats could excuse Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—but not his alleged abuse of women appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News .