"I Thought We Were Fighting for the Same Things."

"I've always laughed because I haven't actually changed at all."

It's the sentence Dr. Logan Levkoff returns to throughout our conversation, and perhaps the simplest way to understand why she no longer feels at home in the political movement she spent decades helping to build.

For more than thirty years, Levkoff has been one of the country's most recognizable voices on sexuality, relationships, and comprehensive sex education. She marched for reproductive rights, advocated for LGBTQ equality, and built a career fighting for people whose dignity she believed deserved protection. She proudly recalls taking her daughter to her first pro-choice march when she was just eighteen months old.

So when critics accuse her of moving to the political right, she rejects the premise.

"I haven't actually changed at all."

What changed, she says, was her understanding of the people she believed were standing beside her.

"There is nothing more demoralizing than the sense of betrayal," she said. "I spent my life fighting for queer rights, fighting for trans rights, fighting for sex education, fighting for reproductive justice... then to find out that the spaces I had been working in for so long were so quick to flip the David and Goliath paradigm on Hamas and on Israel."

That betrayal—not political disagreement—is the defining event of her story.

For years, Levkoff believed she and her colleagues were united by universal principles: defending vulnerable communities, opposing hatred, and extending empathy consistently. A couple of years before October 7, she came to the realization that to her peers, many of those principles suddenly had exceptions.

Logan Levkoff always knew exactly who she was.

"So much of being Jewish for me was based in peoplehood and less faith," she told me. Born and raised in New York, her family has always been deeply connected to Israel and the American Zionist movement. She says, "Jewish peoplehood was what I was raised with, and that's always who I knew I was."

That identity has shaped one of her deepest concerns. She worries that many young Jews have inherited Judaism primarily as a religion—or simply as a commitment to social justice—without first understanding the history, culture, and peoplehood that bind Jews together. "Our own organizations... have woefully dropped the ball on Jewish peoplehood," she said.

The values she spent a lifetime defending—protecting marginalized communities, standing against hatred, and advocating for human dignity—never felt at odds with her Jewish identity. When colleagues and institutions that championed those ideals no longer seemed willing to extend the same empathy to Jews, it wasn't simply a political disagreement. It was the painful realization that, as she put it, "we weren't in it for the same reasons."

That realization fundamentally reordered her priorities.

For most of her life, Levkoff assumed issues like reproductive rights would define her politics. She never imagined that openly identifying as a Jewish woman would become the issue she felt most compelled to defend.

"I grew up as a myopic pro-choice voter," she said. "It never would have occurred to me that my existence as a Jewish person... was going to have to be the political priority. But guess what? That's what it is."

Her concern isn't that progressives disagreed with her about Israel. It's that values she believed were universal suddenly seemed conditional.

It shouldn't be controversial, she argues, to condemn terrorism.

It shouldn't be controversial to oppose antisemitism with the same moral clarity used to confront every other form of hatred.

It shouldn't be controversial to believe Jewish lives deserve the same compassion afforded to every other minority.

And it shouldn't be controversial to amplify voices willing to challenge their own political tribe. That's why Levkoff points to transgender activist Brianna Wu, who publicly warned that antisemitism was damaging progressive movements. "I support bold voices," Levkoff said. "This idea that there is only one way of thinking is absolutely absurd to me."

That same willingness to question her own side shapes how she thinks about politics more broadly. Although still registered as a Democrat, she rejects blind party loyalty.

It's also why she believes movements like the Democratic Socialists of America became such an important warning sign—not because labels matter most to her, but because she watched rhetoric and ideas she once considered fringe become increasingly normalized within institutions and activist spaces she had long trusted. For Levkoff, that shift exposed a deeper problem: a growing reluctance to hold one's own side accountable.

The cost of living by that principle has been real. Friendships have ended. Professional relationships have disappeared. Communities that once felt like home no longer do.

Yet Levkoff refuses to end her story there.

One of the experiences she speaks about most proudly is Caravan for Democracy, a leadership program that brings politically diverse student leaders to Israel. After one trip, a Democrat and a Republican told her they had arrived believing they could never truly be friends. They left realizing they shared the same values—they simply disagreed about policy.

"I was teary-eyed," Levkoff recalled. "Political purity tests and measurements of goodness or badness are so unhealthy for our country."

For Logan Levkoff, being politically homeless isn't about searching for a new tribe.

It's about refusing to abandon the principles she has spent a lifetime defending.