The rise of a left-wing politics of contempt

The evening of Sept. 11, 2001, I remember standing in a sea of stupefied university students clutching candles on the Yale campus. I was there with my roommates, one an erstwhile and still lifelong New Yorker. We were all trying to make sense of the unimaginable that had happened to her city, to America, to us, only hours earlier.

Twenty-five years later, in New York and across the country, a new cohort of candidates who express deep hostility toward Israel, fierce criticism of and contempt for the United States, and, in some cases, troubling associations with terrorism are running for office...