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For most of her life, Laura Beatrix Newmark knew exactly where she belonged politically.
Growing up Jewish in Cincinnati, she often found herself in the minority. Growing up a Democrat, she sometimes felt like one there too. While many of her classmates embraced Reagan-era conservatism, Newmark gravitated toward liberal politics from an early age. She still remembers being a child at school, surrounded by students cheering for Reagan while she proudly rooted for Walter Mondale.
"I always felt like being Jewish was important to me. Being a Democrat was important to me."
When she arrived in New York in 1994, it felt like coming home. She found a city filled with the kind of people she had been looking for her entire life. She campaigned for Democratic candidates, knocked on doors for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and built a life around values she believed the party embodied: pluralism, tolerance, compassion, and open debate.
"I'm not prone to extremes, so I've always been most comfortable when things have been in the middle,” Laura Beatrix Newmark told me.
Those values shaped her professional life as well. After working in Israel advocacy, Newmark built a career in comedy, managing comedians and producing shows in New York. She was a regular in the East Village comedy scene when she was starting out as a manager, where a generation of comics who would later become household names first came into the comedy scene. In 2017, she created Nasty Women: A Night of Female Resistance Comedy at the 14th Street Y, a comedy series inspired by the Women's March and dedicated to elevating female voices. Political comedy, satire, and progressive activism weren't just interests—they were communities she genuinely loved being part of.
For decades, her Jewish identity and her political identity fit comfortably together.
Today, for the first time, she isn't so sure.
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What troubles Newmark most isn't simply the rise in antisemitism after October 7. It's what she sees as a broader shift within parts of the progressive movement—a growing tendency toward ideological conformity, litmus tests, and a worldview that leaves little room for nuance.
For Newmark, Israel became the issue that exposed a larger problem.
As someone with deep personal and family ties to Israel, she was stunned by the reaction she saw from some progressive activists, institutions, and friends after October 7. What disturbed her wasn't disagreement. It was the feeling that certain conversations could no longer happen at all.
"I can have more nuanced conversations and more interesting conversations with people on the right than I can with people on the left, and I find that really troublesome."
The realization has been especially painful because she still considers herself politically moderate. Raised with what she describes as a Midwestern sensibility, she has never been drawn to extremes.
"I'm not prone to extremes, so I've always been most comfortable when things have been in the middle."
That instinct leaves her increasingly uneasy with both political poles. She remains deeply critical of Donald Trump and rejects becoming a single-issue voter. At the same time, she worries about the growing influence of figures like Zohran Mamdani and what she views as ideological rigidity within parts of the Democratic coalition.
What alarms her is not simply the politics themselves, but the underlying mindset.
"I think they're basically just fascists on a different side," she says. "You have to agree with them, there's only one narrative."
For someone who spent decades believing that liberalism meant openness, debate, and intellectual curiosity, that realization has been deeply unsettling. The shift has been especially jarring because so much of her adult life was spent inside creative and progressive communities. Some comedians she once admired have handled the post–October 7 moment thoughtfully, she says. Others left her disappointed enough that she stopped following them altogether. What frustrates her most is the sense that many people adopted slogans and positions without understanding the complexity of the conflict itself—a dynamic she believes extends far beyond the comedy world.
Yet despite her frustrations, Newmark hasn't abandoned the values that first drew her to the Democratic Party. If anything, she believes she's defending them.
"The values that I ascribe to the Democratic Party, I think they're still there, but I think that so many other things have been added."
What keeps her grounded is the same thing that anchored her long before politics entered the picture: her sense of Jewish peoplehood.
"Being Jewish is so much more than a religion to me."
In a political moment increasingly defined by certainty and tribal loyalty, Newmark remains committed to something less fashionable: moderation, nuance, and the belief that disagreement should never require conformity.
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