No Kristallnacht in the USA

On November 8, 2026—the eve of the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht—pro-Palestinian activists in Philadelphia organized a “boycott ride” targeting Jewish-owned or Israel-linked restaurants in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. Organized by the group Philly Bike On Your Left (in collaboration with groups including Boycott CookNSolo and others), the action explicitly demanded “No business for Zionists! These Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!” and called on participants to show the owners “for the disgusting humans they are.”⁠

In other words, they are disgusting because they are Jews. 

The timing fell on the anniversary of the Nazi-orchestrated pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, in which German mobs destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses, 1,400 burned or damaged synagogues, over 1,000 Jews were murdered, and they arrested tens of thousands of Jews.⁠

This boycott in today's America is clear and dangerous antisemitism. It is coming from the political left, not the right. 

The Center for Human Equality holds that every human being possesses equal individual dignity and rights, not collective guilt or collective innocence based on group identity. Judging and punishing people—or their businesses—because they are Jewish, or because they are presumed to support the existence of the Jewish state, is a textbook form of group judgmentalism. It is the same logic that produced Kristallnacht: economic isolation of Jews as a category, followed by violence.

Calling it “anti-Zionism” does not erase the pattern. The pro-Palestinian movement has long contained, and frequently elevated, explicit antisemitic elements—from the Hamas charter’s historic language, to chants that erase Jewish peoplehood or call for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, to the targeting of Jewish individuals and institutions far removed from any Israeli policy.

The Philadelphia action simply made the pattern impossible to deny.

When the Palestinian flag is repeatedly flown in the immediate context of boycotts of Jewish businesses, vandalism of Jewish institutions, or assaults on Jews in American cities, it acquires a concrete association with antisemitism for the people living under that threat. American Jews in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere have every reason to experience the display of that flag, in these settings, as a signal of hostility.

We state that, when the flag is used to mark Jewish-owned businesses for exclusion on the anniversary of a Nazi pogrom, it functions in the same way: as a public marker of collective threat against a minority. That creates real fear. Fear is not a political talking point; it is the predictable result of organized economic targeting based on ethnicity and religion just as the Nazis did. 

This action did not emerge from the political wilderness. It was advanced by activists operating within the left wing of the Democratic Party’s, including elements of the Democratic Socialists of America. While some Democratic officials correctly condemned it, the broader party has for years tolerated, platformed, and sometimes elevated a pro-Palestinian movement whose leadership and rank-and-file have repeatedly failed to draw a clear line against hate - in fact they have promoted antisemitism. 

The same political coalition has increasingly embraced strands of Islamism—an ideological tradition whose foundational texts and major organizations have historically and currently treated Jewish sovereignty and Jewish peoplehood as illegitimate. When a major American political party normalizes alliances with movements that treat Jews as a collective enemy, it is no longer merely “criticizing Israeli policy.”

It is placing itself on the wrong side of the American commitment to equal individual rights. Antisemitism is not an American value. The Center for Human Equality states clearly that antisemitism is morally equivalent to racism: both treat human beings as interchangeable members of a condemned group rather than as individuals entitled to equal respect and equal protection.

A call to Democrats

The Center for Human Equality calls on every Democrat - elected official, activist, and voter - to repudiate this action and the antisemitism that produced it. Name it for what it is: a regression in human equality and rights, promoted by a political movement in 21st-century America.

Reject the idea that Jewish businesses can be driven out of American cities because their owners are Jewish or support Israel’s existence.

Reject the notion that the anniversary of Kristallnacht is an acceptable date for such a campaign against American Jews. 

Reject leftist antisemitism which is growing in the USA and Democratic Party. 

Ethical Individualism requires that we judge people by their individual actions and character, not by the group to which they belong. The Philadelphia boycott did the opposite. It must be rejected without equivocation if the Democratic Party wishes to remain consistent with the American founding principle that all are created equal.