Jon Ossoff is Georgia’s first Jewish senator. And the Jews of the Peach State are doing something remarkable: refusing to be taken for granted.

Though this drama is playing out behind the scenes, it represents a watershed in American Jewish politics.

The New York Times has obtained a letter sent privately in December to Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, urging him to run for Senate against Ossoff. The twist: The signatories of the letter included prominent Jewish Democrats.

“I took great pride to see a young Jewish man find the successes that he has,” Isaac Frank, one of the signatories, told the Times. “I just feel like he’s somewhat disconnected from where our community is, given post-Oct. 7.”

The letter to Kemp, as quoted by the Times, says: “As a bipartisan group of leaders in the metropolitan Atlanta Jewish community, we humbly ask you to consider running for the United States Senate in 2026… Should you decide to run in the 2026 election, you would find no better friends, more loyal allies or stronger supporters than us and our community.”

The signatories, especially the Jewish Democrats among them, have done their community a great act of service by insisting that being Jewish does not chain one to either party, that a vote has to be earned, and that a last name alone does not amount to true representation.

What’s their beef with Ossoff? The senator’s vote to withhold U.S. weapons transfers to Israel seems to have been the trigger. This was made worse by watching Ossoff preen on the Senate floor in an eight-minute rekindling of ugly Hamas propaganda in support of withholding those weapons.

Ossoff started off with an ahistorical—but popular—comparison to when President Reagan’s relationship with Prime Minister Menachem Begin was strained by the 1982 war in Lebanon. Contra Ossoff, the moral of that story, when viewed in context, was that Reagan’s anger was based on false reporting and Begin corrected the record with the president. Reagan’s open-minded response to Begin’s insistence that he was being fed a false picture of the conflict contrasts with the Biden administration’s refusal to correct its own misinterpretation of the reality on the ground. Ossoff, too, falls into this category: Unlike Reagan, Ossoff believes the worst conspiracy theories pushed by Hamas and its supporters about the Jewish state and closes his ears to Israel’s counterarguments.

Ossoff spends the first couple minutes of his speech attacking straw men, lazily swatting away nonexistent arguments rather than engaging the actual criticism of his words and actions, both of which were based on false information.

But eventually Ossoff lets loose on the Jewish state. He accuses Israel of “policies that are gratuitously brutal.” Then he jumps into the child-killer blood libel with both feet: “The American people are rightly horrified by the lack of sufficient concern for innocent Palestinian life, that has left so many children unnecessarily dead in Gaza, without limbs or riddled with shrapnel.”

He returned again to the child-killer narrative: “We are talking about precious, innocent children and other innocent civilians who might otherwise be alive or without grievous wounds today.”

He called Israel’s war conduct “horrific” and then, with a false mawkishness unworthy of the United States Senate, implored Israel to “have mercy for the innocent.”

Ossoff’s speech was in November, and it was an agonizingly grotesque spectacle. It was delivered amidst a shocking rise in anti-Semitism, displaying Ossoff’s penchant for rumormongering at a time of genuine danger for American Jews.

Esther Panitch, a Democrat who is Georgia’s only Jewish state legislator, has insisted on holding her party’s feet to the fire on anti-Semitism. What she told the Times about the Kemp-vs.-Ossoff question sums up the awakening of American Jewish resolve and self-respect since Oct. 7, 2023: “Kemp has done things that I am fighting against every day. But it is a different level of betrayal that Ossoff has committed.”

In her memoirs, Golda Meir recounts how, with the war looming in 1948, the sheer amount of arms and ammunition needed by Israel’s defenders required the kind of immediate financial support that could only be provided by American Jews. “The Egyptian government can vote a budget to aid our antagonists,” Meir told a gathering of prospective Jewish donors in Chicago. “The Syrian government can do the same. We have no governments. But we have millions of Jews in the Diaspora, and exactly as I have faith in our youngsters in Palestine so I have faith in the Jews of the United States.”

Her faith was rewarded; the Jews of America came through. They did so after Meir made a statement that has echoed especially loudly ever since Hamas pierced Israel’s sense of security and ignited in the world an overt campaign to wipe the Jewish state off the map.

“You cannot decide whether we should fight or not. We will. The Jewish community in Palestine will raise no white flag for the mufti,” Meir said, referring to the leader of Palestinian Arab nationalism, Amin al-Husseini, who served as a Nazi official in Berlin during the war. “That decision is taken. Nobody can change it. You can only decide one thing: whether we shall be victorious in this fight or whether the mufti will be victorious.”

The Jewish state did not ask for its current fight with Hamas, but its brave soldiers will raise no white flag. And the Jews of Georgia won’t ask them to. Nor will they ask the young American Jews on college campuses to raise a white flag to their own pursuers. The attempt to banish American Jews from public life is ongoing and in some ways intensifying. The American Jewish community must be awake to the threat, even if Jon Ossoff isn’t.