Peter Beinart recently offered his followers on X a “translation” of a letter signed by Jewish leaders in Michigan, leaders who are asking their community to think carefully before supporting the Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed for Senate. According to Beinart, what these leaders are really saying, once you strip away their actual words, is that they care more about weapons flowing to Israel than they do about American democracy surviving the presidency of Donald Trump.
It’s a clever line. It is also a profound act of erasure and says far more about Beinart’s assumptions than it does about the people he claims to be translating.
Is Beinart’s memory really that short-lived?
Back in March, Michigan suffered a terror attack at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, one of the largest synagogues in the United States. According to federal investigators, it was inspired by Hezbollah. Only a combination of luck, coupled with the courage of security personnel and law enforcement, prevented it from ending in the murder of Jewish men, women and especially children; 100 preschoolers were there that day.
Beinart is now suggesting that the Jewish leaders from this community, by questioning whether to support a senatorial candidate who tied the Temple Israel attack itself to the State of Israel’s actions in Lebanon, are “prioritizing the unconditional flow of weapons to Israel over safeguarding American democracy from Donald Trump.”
I think Beinart needs to explain why this community’s very real concerns about a Senate candidate’s whitewashing of a terror attack against his own constituents might have less to do with weapons policy in Israel and more to do with their own safety and the safety of their children.
Michigan Jews have listened to El-Sayed himself. They have heard the way he speaks about Israel and about terrorism, and they have watched his hostility toward the Jewish state expressed not once but repeatedly. They have drawn a conclusion—one that they are entitled to draw: They don’t trust him.
That conclusion is theirs. It emerged from their own experience, their own listening and their own reasoning.
The Jews of Michigan don’t need Beinart to translate anything for them. Beinart needs to respect that Jewish leaders in Michigan arrived at their decision to publish their letter honestly, even if he disagrees with where they landed.
There is something galling about Beinart’s actions. Watching a community that endured a terrorist attack on its own synagogue being told—by a journalist, Jewish or otherwise, sitting comfortably outside that community—that its fears are politically inconvenient and dismissing them, while reframing them as something more in line with his own politics, is repulsive.
Beinart is free to disagree with the Jewish leaders of Michigan who issued the letter. But erasing their very real fear and then condescendingly informing them what they actually meant to say is something else entirely and goes beyond the pale of good journalism.
Turning around and vilifying the Jewish community when antisemitic attacks continue to reach record numbers and then watching candidates running under socialist banners treat hostility to Israel—a U.S. ally—as a credential rather than a liability seems to be something Beinart is OK with. But Jews of other opinions are paying attention. The safety of Jews in America depends on it.
The question in Michigan—and everywhere else—is not simply how much military aid should flow overseas. It’s whether Jewish Americans can walk into their own synagogues, send their children to Jewish preschools and attend a political convention without fear.
Michigan’s own attorney general, Dana Nessel, the first Jewish person ever elected to that office, announced that she would not attend her own party’s nominating convention this month because she does not feel safe doing so. When a sitting attorney general feels unsafe attending a convention within her own party over concerns tied to antisemitism, concern over a Senate candidate’s rhetoric toward Israel and concern over Jewish safety in America turn out to be the same concern.
Beinart’s “translation” assumes that Jewish Michiganders cannot be trusted to articulate their own motivations and that their stated concerns are cover for something else. Michigan Jews don’t need anyone speaking on their behalf. They lived through the attack on Temple Israel. They listened to El-Sayed’s own words. They understand—better than any New York-based columnist writing from a distance—what threatens their community.
They don’t need a translation. They need, and deserve, to be heard.
