In her new book, Batya Ungar-Sargon speaks on why Jews need to rethink their alliances

If Batya Ungar-Sargon had written Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women after October 7, she might have included a section on why American Jews should support the working class, and how the working class is the biggest supporter of Jews and Israel.

But Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor of Newsweek and an outspoken Israel supporter, finished her book before the Hamas attack and focused her yearlong research on one of the most misunderstood segments of American society: the working class.

“The class divide has become the defining characteristic of American life in the 21st century. Yet the working class is a cipher in American politics and media,” she wrote.

How one defines “working class” is up for debate. Definitions usually focus on types of jobs (manual labor), income, home ownership, and education, but Ungar-Sargon relies on a metric of those who did not graduate college who have been locked out of the top 20% of the income distribution – $130,000 a year.

For Ungar-Sargon, labels like Republican and Democrat are irrelevant: that’s not how the country is divided – or how it votes, as in the case of the 2016 elections, which the media got utterly and completely wrong. And that’s because the media do not understand the working class. Although the members of the media used to come from that class, they now come from the same class as the politicians, the college-educated “elite.”

Ungar-Sargon explored all this in her first book, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.

“Bad News was focused on journalism, but for me, it provided a window into a larger class divide that has come to define the United States, a country we like to think of as a classless society,” she wrote in Second Class. “This class divide has become entrenched: having a college degree is predictive of how long you’ll live, how likely you are to own your own home, how healthy you are, and whether your children will be better off than you,” she wrote, citing research that “mortality itself is diverging by education.”

And that’s where her book applies to the Jews and Israel, especially post-October 7, when American Jews were stunned by the reaction of the country, especially among people they felt were their allies: the progressives.

“Too much of the institutional American Jewish community backed the wrong pony. It’s infuriating!” she told The Jerusalem Post. “These institutions backed the progressives, who are the people behind all this elitist antisemitism and the anti-working class sentiment,” she said. The main reason the majority of American Jews are progressive is that they attend universities, or “woke factories,” as she calls them.

“I think the whole woke ideology was inherently bad for Jews; it’s inherently racist,” she said, noting that it holds that black people have no agency, that whoever has less power is more virtuous – and that includes Hamas.

American Jews and our institutions supported the very people opposed to Israel, she said. “They hate America, they hate white people,” she said, noting that many American Jews were okay with this, were fine being in bed with the progressives, being part of this “intersectional coalition,” until after October 7, “when we were excluded.”

Ungar-Sargon said the intersectional Left is not antisemitic in its core, it’s just that “they hate Israel because they hate America and they hate white people.” (She said the Right is trying to get rid of the far-right antisemites in its midst). 

What are American Jewish liberals to do?

She’s seeing a lot of what she calls “Pick Me” Jews, Jews like Oscar-winner Jonathan Glazer claiming “we’re the good Jews, Israel’s bad,” hoping that the progressives will still like them, “begging the antisemites to pick them.”

Progressive American Jews, super invested in the progressive worldview, are demanding that DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) cater to the Jews, insisting that Jews, too, are an oppressed group and should be included in DEI definitions, Ungar-Sargon said.

“It’s embarrassing. It’s undignified,” she said.

If American Jews insist on belonging to the elite, insist on sending their children to those universities that wouldn’t unequivocally condemn calling for the genocide of the Jews, there will be pro-Hamas demonstrations, they won’t be popular with their peers (“It’s a good thing to be unpopular with sociopaths,”) they will have to learn to stand up for themselves.

“They’re not in danger. There’s no rising antisemitism in America,” she said, pointing out that it’s mostly happening on college campuses. “Raise children who can stand up for the Jewish people and stand up for the Jewish state,” she said.Or better yet, course correct. “The intersectional Left is a dead end.”

Going from liberal to populist

Ungar-Sargon should know. “I was very left when I started at The Forward. I was very woke. I had Trump Derangement Syndrome,” she said, referring to the unbridled hatred liberals have toward the former president.

As the opinion editor at The Forward, she saw it as her mandate to run opinion pieces from both the Right and the Left, but found the Left had “zero interest” in hearing from the Right. (This is also one of the reason’s Bari Weiss resigned from the opinion section of The New York Times, after editor James Bennett was forced to resign for publishing a right-wing senator’s editorial.)

“I became disgusted by the patronizing nature of woke ideology.”

She said a few things contributed to her awakening. When she read 2018 research that showed that white liberals dumbed down their speech when talking to blacks and Hispanics, “It implicated everyone in my worldview,” she said.

Then, in 2019, she came under fire from the Left for criticizing Rep. Ilhan Omar over some antisemitic tweets. And at the same time she learned that her rabbi, whom she considers a very moral person, supported Trump. She began to think she might be wrong about Trump, as well.

“I still feel like I’m on the Left,” she said, noting that she’s actually a populist. “To me Trump is the centrist. Once you no longer have Trump Derangement Syndrome, you see American politics more clearly,” she said, adding that Trump supports a lot of policies that the Democratic Party supported in the past, like unions and limiting immigration.

“The people who have the Trump Derangement Syndrome, it’s not based on policy – it’s based on character.”

And this is what she talks about in Second Class: that the working class, the people who support Trump, don’t have the luxury of judging a politician based on his character; they have to pick politicians based on their policies, because for them it can mean having a job or making rent.

That’s why she urges American Jews to reexamine their politics, and to at least be respectful toward the working class.

“It’s the working class that has our back. Who do you think is the bulwark of the ‘don’t you dare defund Israel’ movement? American Protestants.”

To turn on them, “you’re turning on the people who have our back on Israel and in America. It’s appalling.”

She said the working class represents most Americans. “We know that Jews, for our safety, rely on a strong democracy. 

And you cannot have a strong democracy when the vast majority of the people feel that they are not being heard and that their interests are being undermined.”

In Second Class, Ungar-Sargon talks with these very people whose voices are not being heard. She discovers that the country is not as polarized as politicians make it seem, and that both parties can help the working class.

She urges Jews to stop calling these people racist or a threat to democracy. “Recognize how important it is that they not only have their say, but that when they are the majority, that their wishes actually come to fruition – whether or not we agree with them – because that’s how we keep this country stable and safe for everybody, for all of our children, for everybody’s future, and for the safety of the Jews especially.”