Dana Nessel is the attorney general of Michigan, a lifelong reliably progressive Democrat and a Jew. This month, she said during an antisemitism roundtable that she will not attend the state’s Democratic Party convention.
Her exact words were: “I don’t feel safe going. 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. And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
A sitting state official saying this about her own party ought to stop every one of us in our tracks. As Seth Mandel wrote in Commentary magazine: This is “a five-alarm fire.”
Sadly, Nessel will most likely be another silent casualty of antisemitic trends in the party that was home to the majority of American Jews for decades. Moreover, the party has already ventured down a dangerous path toward socialism that will only lead to more hate. Today, they hate the Jews; tomorrow, it will be others as well.
As attorney general, Nessel filed charges against activists at the University of Michigan who, according to reporting on the case, became violent with police officers trying to clear a serious fire hazard.
Rather than a dispute over facts and law, what followed was a public campaign led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) accusing Nessel of bias Nessel of bias against Palestinians. Tlaib’s campaign succeeded in pressuring Nessel to drop the charges once the case had been turned, as one account put it, into a circus and a referendum on her Jewishness.
Then came April, when hecklers shouted down Jewish candidates at the Michigan Democratic Party’s own endorsement convention, a display that everyone recognized immediately for what it was: a warning to Jewish officials about what happens if and when they show up to participate.
Halie Soifer, who leads the Jewish Democratic Council of America, an organization built specifically to keep Jews engaged with the party, has confirmed that Nessel is not alone. Other Jewish Democrats have described the same discomfort at party gatherings. Such gatherings, they said, may be leaning toward antisemitic sentiment. In other words, the organization whose entire purpose is to reassure Jewish Democrats that the party remains their home is now cataloging officials who no longer feel safe inside it. Clearly, the time for reassurance is over.
Today, they hate the Jews; tomorrow, it will be others as well.
I want to state something plainly because softer language has let too many people avoid it: Nessel enforced the law as her office required. The campaign against her was built entirely around who she is rather than anything she actually did. This is the distinction between persecuting a people and criticizing a particular government.
Now, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed enters the story. El-Sayed has just won the Michigan Democratic primary election for a Senate seat. While Gov. Gretchen Whitmer backed moderate Democrat Haley Stevens, both Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) campaigned for El-Sayed. He rode the same wave that pushed Nessel out of her own convention.
His campaign rhetoric returned again and again to the supposed Jewish money that was being spent to defeat him and support Stevens. He also appeared alongside figures known for antisemitic statements, especially left-wing political commentator and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait described exactly how toxic El-Sayed is for the Democratic Party and its future, and how violently El-Sayed opposes the U.S.-Israel alliance.
El-Sayed has gone further than criticizing the alliance, however, publicly asserting that Jews and Judaism are not synonymous with AIPAC or the State of Israel. This was a clear attempt to separate a crucial aspect of Jewish faith from the broader Jewish community. Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people is part of the Bible and Jewish prayers, and has been for thousands of years. We all wish to return home to the land that the Almighty gave us. That is the definition of Zionism.
In his claims to “love Jews and Judaism” while hating Israel and everything it represents, El-Sayed wants to convince Jews to divest their own faith of one of its most essential tenets. It is no wonder that AIPAC rightfully took a strong stand against him and donated significant amounts to his more moderate opponent.
I have come to believe that the Democratic Party has become a socialist party in large parts of the United States. I say this as someone who spent years in local Democratic politics and still wants to believe otherwise. Yet the writing is on the wall. The Jewish people have always been history’s canaries in the coal mine, and the hate that begins with us has never stopped with us.
Whatever the outcome of the upcoming midterms for the Democrats, the response to this new socialism that rides the wave of antisemitism is ours to build.
This means that Jewish political power should answer to no single coalition. Jewish education must teach our children the history and sense of identity required to recognize hate the moment it starts, along with the fortitude to deal with it.
We, as individuals and as a society, must unequivocally reject the notion that people like Dana Nessel, who bravely speak the truth in public and risk their own well-being in doing so, can be silenced or intimidated within their own political party. We must fight alongside her and others battling bigotry and even fear. Jobs in government and politics should not come with a personal safety warning.
