In the space of one month, Dana Nessel, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, has issued two extraordinary statements with profound implications for Jewish life in America.
On July 30, she said she would not be attending the Michigan Democratic Party’s nominating convention in August because she feared for her safety as a Jew. “I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” she admitted candidly.
Nessel, a progressive, rightly won a great deal of applause from within the Jewish community for identifying an ugly truth about antisemitism in the current iteration of the Democratic Party that is still too painful for many of her fellow Jews to acknowledge. Her words left no doubt that what the party’s pro-Palestinian factions sell as a political critique of Zionism and Israel is actually a sledgehammer that slams into all Jews, regardless of their beliefs or affiliation.
In a subsequent interview with David Frum of The Atlantic, Nessel emphasized that the hostility she is dealing with has been incubated over the past three years. “Things changed in so many different ways after Oct. 7,” she said. “And then it wasn’t just, basically, I would say mentally unstable people on the far right that were threatening me or other Jews, but now it became really a both-sides situation, and I began to perceive an enormous amount of antisemitism within the Democratic Party.”
Actually, the problem among the Democratic Party’s progressive and socialist factions long predates the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, as a careful survey of the last 20 years would demonstrate. But leave that aside for the moment, since the latest twist in the Nessel saga should focus American Jews squarely on the future and not on the past that got us here.
Speaking to Jewish Democrats on the last weekend in August at an event in support of the antisemitic Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Nessel did not back down from her previous condemnation of the tide of Jew-hatred in her party. What she did was far worse; she held up a white flag to the antisemites by arguing that if there is a tension between Jewish survival and the survival of humanity overall, then human survival comes first.
“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” she declared. She then asked: “What is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist, if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?”
The first observation to be made about this argument is simply that it is deeply stupid. The choice that Nessel is articulating—either Jewish survival or human survival—exists only in her head. And it fails to address the key point: If she is somehow correct that Jews may have to accede to their own sacrifice in order to save humanity, then what has humanity become? Why should preventing environmental devastation require Jews to surrender who we are, or worse, our very physical existence?
Moreover, what are we supposed to conclude? That antisemitism, which history has proved time and again is innately genocidal, is a minor irritant when compared to our collective carbon footprint?
Nessel is also seemingly unaware that her argument can be taken in the diametrically opposite direction. If sacrificing Judaism and Jewishness is a necessary compromise to secure the survival of the human race, then aren’t we Jews entitled to ask whether humanity is worth preserving if it cannot tolerate the existence of one single, small Jewish state? Why are Jews obliged to care about a world that, yet again, spits on us and our aspirations? Why, in such conditions, should we be forced to embrace a universalist ideology? Why, frankly, should we not react in tribal terms?
At the same time, Nessel inadvertently touched on something very valuable. By insisting that Jews face this stark choice, she was perhaps channeling the logic of the anti-Zionist mutation of antisemitism, which holds that the Jewish state must be destroyed and that Jews outside must be “de-Zionized.”
Some supporters of the Palestinian cause in the West, particularly Jewish ones, might protest that this outcome is not what they want, and that those who say otherwise are an unrepresentative fringe. This is wishful thinking; the fringe is now the mainstream.
When individuals like Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian children’s author, describe Jews in Nazi terms as “parasites” and “monsters,” as she frequently does, or when Rahmeh Aladwan, a Palestinian doctor based in the United Kingdom, denounces the “Amidah” prayer Jews recite in every service as evidence of their genocidal intentions, we should make no mistake, they are speaking for the entire movement. Their goal is to eliminate Jews, Judaism and Israel. The only question Jews should be asking themselves is whether we will let them.
Nessel’s answer to that is clearly “yes.” It’s possible that she believes by saying so, she will dilute the hatred of people who fantasize about incarcerating her and every other Jew—male and female, young and old, black, brown and white—in a “re-education” camp where they will “unlearn” their Zionism.
As I’ve argued in this column on many occasions, these tendencies will only become more widespread should the conflict in Gaza reignite. Israel has arrived at a key moment: Either Hamas will disarm voluntarily, as required by U.N. Security Council Resolution 2803, or the Israel Defense Forces will be compelled to make them. On this point, there can be no compromise.
For my part, I refuse to bow to the demands made of Jews by antisemitic non-Jews and their Jewish collaborators to commit suicide or else. I will defy them by any means necessary. Because when we said “Never Again” after the Shoah, we meant it. Didn’t we?
