Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani reacts after winning the 2025 New York City Mayoral race, at an election night rally in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, US, Nov. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

There is a disconcerting erasure phenomenon currently occurring in North America, across educational, political, and government institutions. Jewish and minority history is being erased and rewritten along ideological lines to exclude different ethnic groups. This is occurring on both the political right and left, resulting in a startling political horseshoe effect — and it’s leaving many American Jews politically homeless.

This distortion of history seeks to propel ideological narratives forward amid various political motivations. In America, the far right is attempting to erase the historical contributions of Black and Brown people, as well as women from the American story. This is most visible in the removal of America’s National Park displays. Historical information plaques and museum displays about slavery and women’s contributions are being systemically taken down.

At the same time, many “progressives” on the left are simultaneously erasing and whitewashing Jewish history within education and the media. Even as progressives are protesting the removal of minorities from history by the far right, they are themselves normalizing anti-Zionist discourse, also a form of erasure.

This one-sided narrative of anti-Zionist revisionist history seeks to erase Jewish historical presence in the land of Israel, recast the Jewish people as “white settler colonialists,” and is being pushed across political and educational institutions in America with the alarming precision of a branding campaign.

For far-left progressive candidates, an anti-Israel stance is now a candidate litmus test, and many Democratic Socialists are taking over from within the main Democratic Party. Candidates who make grave antisemitic statements which should be disqualifying, are instead being elevated in recent American elections.

Yet, if American Jews don’t believe in distorting and erasing the history of American slavery, the historical record of women’s contributions, and other policies — they are can no longer ally with the left against this historical injustice because the left is now trying to erase them.

American Jews are increasingly feeling politically homeless due to the surging antisemitism that is now present in public spoken discourse on both sides of the political horseshoe.

This far left historical revision about Jews and Israel is not limited to the United States. For example, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ recent exhibit on human rights, chose to display  a one-sided Nakba story, leaving out the expulsion of 800,000 Jews from Arab countries, among other key contextual details. Deliberately leaving out the rest of the context is part of an intentional rewriting of historical events in order to transmit misinformation and reframe what happened to the next generation.

Another example of the ideological war from activists is Wikipedia, which has been stealthily deleting Jewish history over the last several years and replacing it with one sided  anti-Israel biased narratives.

Compounding the problem is that these one-sided, distorted historical versions are being cited by AI, making them spread faster.

This distortion of Jewish history is also occurring within the K-12 American school curriculum. It is snuck into well meaning educators’ classrooms, as an approved curriculum purporting to “Teach Palestine” under the ethnic studies umbrella. In California, it has become so pervasive that the California legislature has twice now had to pass antisemitism laws to keep anti-Israel bias out of classrooms. The feeling of political homelessness for many liberal American Jews is inescapable as these instances of antisemitism keep coming from political candidates, officials, and even their own children’s public schools.

This rewriting of historical records regarding Jews is the long game, planned decades ago and funded by many actors, like Qatar, and is now spreading within the Democratic Party and many segments of society.  If this continues with no pushback, America’s next generation of leaders will have been taught a falsified, completely whitewashed version of Jewish history. It may become a revised historical record that the Jewish people are “colonizers” — and that’s dangerous news for everyone.

In a sane world, nobody’s history should be erased. But that’s what is happening now on the left and the right. Everyone has a responsibility to fight against historical revisionism.  If we do nothing, the results will be grimmer than the already rising tide of anti-Zionism and antisemitism worldwide, and the violence that is now following.

Alix Kahn is a writer of stories,  essays, poetry, as well as a visual artist. BA Digital Media.