(Sept. 2, 2026 / JNS)
We can only pity the plight of Jewish Democrats these days. Their situation is one in which they find themselves betrayed by allies and forced to choose between standing up against open antisemitism and prioritizing the partisan loyalties and beliefs that are essential to their worldview.
Even as we sympathize with them, we should not heed the advice that they are getting from many of their leaders. And if any of them have a scrap of common sense or self-respect, not to mention a sense of obligation to other Jews or even to their own children, they should not merely reject the counsel they’ve just received from Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. Instead, they should regard with horror her belief that Jews should respond to the difficult choice faced by liberals by sacrificing their “own survival,” rather than rejecting a Democratic Party that’s been hijacked by antisemites.
A liberal moral collapse
Nessel’s comments to a gathering of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus this past week deserved to be remembered as a milestone in American Jewish history—not because of their wisdom but because they illustrate the moral collapse of liberal Jewry. With them, a heretofore relatively obscure state politician ensured that her name will live on in infamy. Her example will forever stand as a warning of what happens when one weighs partisan allegiance against the safety of a community, and somehow concludes that partisanship and liberal ideological myths rather than safety are what matter.
Nessel attained a modicum of notoriety in recent months because of what has been happening among Michigan Democrats. The success of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat has apparently cowed even those Jews in the party who know that his positions are incompatible with Jewish security.
El-Sayed isn’t just a garden-variety “progressive,” like so many others belonging to or allied to the Democratic Socialists of America. He is a virulent foe of the State of Israel and Zionism. He isn’t engaged in “criticism” of Israel but opposed to its existence. And he believes that anyone, Jewish or non-Jewish, who supports Zionism—the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and an integral element of Jewish identity and faith—is either a monstrous supporter of “genocide,” or bought and paid for by nefarious interests.
He campaigned with streamer Hasan Piker, a man who has trafficked in Jew-hatred throughout his career. But he recently gained notoriety by warning that if American Jews didn’t stop supporting the State of Israel, they would also be subjected to terrorism.
An antisemitic campaign
What’s more, the most prominent theme in his campaign was a vow to combat the influence of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which he claimed was trying to purchase Congress. In doing so, El-Sayed was not just singling out the group, but acting as if there was something immoral about Jews and supporters of the Jewish state organizing and using the tools of democracy to promote their cause. He did not apply the same standard to Arabs and Muslims who do the same—not to mention the billions that Qatar, the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, pours into an effort to influence American society and politics.
El-Sayed routinely uses the traditional tropes of Jew-hatred. He treats the overwhelming majority of Jews who care about Israel as agents of foreign influence, supposedly manipulating American policies against the national interests and using their wealth to buy the government. It was something alluded to in 2019 by Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar when she singled out Jewish financial influence in politics. El-Sayed just comes out and says it.
Not unreasonably, most American Jews worry about the rise of such a candidate. They also understand that his political positions, coupled with the attitudes and behavior he encourages, endanger them.
Despite all this, El-Sayed claims to care about Jews and oppose antisemitism. But his solicitude for Jews is limited. It only applies to those who disavow Israel and solidarity with the half of the global Jewish population that lives there.
Moreover, his reaction to a terrorist attack against a synagogue school earlier this year was to rationalize the crime by noting that “hurt people hurt people.” In that case, he was claiming that the terrorist was motivated by his sorrow for those killed in his native Lebanon by Israeli airstrikes against terror enclaves. But he failed to mention that one of the relatives he was mourning—a brother—was himself a Hezbollah commander.
This past week, as concerns grew within the Jewish community, El-Sayed attempted to walk back his comments about that incident of domestic terrorism. Six months later, it’s not clear if anyone is really buying his apology.
The fact that he was even allowed to deliver that apology at a gathering of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus wasn’t so much evidence of his sincerity as the tension felt by the group. Some Jewish Democrats in Michigan have shown that they are not prepared to put party over principle by refusing to support El-Sayed. But that’s something that groups and individuals who regard their partisan loyalties as their highest priorities find hard to do even when asked to support a candidate whose open antisemitism is not really in question.
A Jew under pressure
And that’s where Nessel comes in.
She made headlines after announcing last month that she would not attend her party’s state nominating convention, which was held on Aug. 29. The reason was obvious. After seeing what happened the last time her party gathered in April—when El-Sayed’s supporters shouted down pro-Israel speakers, including his leading primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.)—Nessel, who is Jewish, understandably decided she wasn’t going to expose herself to such abuse.
Unlike most national and local Democrats, including prominent Jews like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), she hadn’t endorsed El-Sayed in the general election, where he will face Republican Mike Rogers. So, the assumption was that Nessel’s boycott of the convention, which would be packed with left-wing Democratic activists who regard opposition to the existence of Israel and the embrace of blood libels against Jews about them committing “genocide,” as one of the organizing principles of their party in 2026, meant that she would be sticking to her principles throughout the fall.
The pressure on Nessel and other Jewish Democrats to fall in line behind an antisemite to make it more likely that their party would win control of the Senate has become overwhelming. That was made obvious by her remarks to the same Jewish Democratic summit, where El-Sayed was allowed to modify his remarks about terrorist attacks on American Jews.
Partisanship over survival
Her speech was remarkable because she didn’t attempt to deny El-Sayed’s toxic attitudes toward Jews or the fact that he and his supporters wish to destroy Israel. Instead, she argued that gaining another vote in the Senate for the liberal Democratic agenda and efforts to thwart the policies of President Donald Trump is more important than not just a key U.S. ally’s interests, but its existence and even that of the Jewish people.
To put it bluntly, she thinks that Jewish safety and survival ought to be secondary to concerns about the president’s policies. In her view, the GOP’s enforcement of immigration laws and opposition to the claims of environmental extremists, as well as the belief that biological males shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports, is worse than buying into the big lie that Israel is a “genocidal” and “apartheid” state that deserves to be eradicated.
According to Nessel, “What good 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?”
It is true that Israel’s existence won’t matter if the planet is uninhabitable. But does anyone, even Michigan’s attorney general, believe the preposterous proposition that adding one more Democrat to the Senate will ensure the planet’s survival? And do people believe that an open-borders policy and unlimited illegal immigration—something that makes the lives of working-class Americans far worse—rank as higher moral values than the basic safety of the Jewish community in a state that has a rather significant one?
Michigan Jewish Democrats may detest Trump and all he does, but do they really think that he is worse than Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other Islamists that El-Sayed would clearly like to empower and allow to prevail in their jihad against the one Jewish state on the planet?
Trump derangement
In a country where politics now plays the role that religion used to play in the lives of most Americans, perhaps they do. In a culture where hyper-partisanship has validated the absurd yet prevalent idea that anyone who disagrees with you is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, it’s clear that many Americans feel that way about Trump.
Trump is a flawed individual, and many valid criticisms can be made against him. And many are clearly willing to ignore the fact that he has also been the most pro-Israel president in history and, especially with respect to academia, done the most to combat antisemitism. Indeed, Jewish Democrats may be convinced of the righteousness of the party’s various positions on a host of issues and the iniquity of those of the Republicans.
Still, are they really so immersed in Trump-hatred and convinced that loyalty to a political party is so important that it requires them to vote for a hater of Jews, as long as he calls himself a Democrat?
Maybe.
But even if they do, they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it by wrapping it, as Nessel attempted, in the trappings of morality or the lessons of Judaism.
Misunderstanding Queen Esther
Taking it one step further, Nessel had the chutzpah to invoke the lessons of Purim and the heroism of Queen Esther to back up her assertion that Jews must sacrifice their security to advance the Democratic Party.
“It is perhaps up to us now to follow in her path,” she said, “and sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”
In point of fact, in a demonstration of her utter ignorance of Judaism and Jewish tradition, Esther did nothing of the kind. Her goal wasn’t the abstract saving of humanity. She risked her own life to save the Jewish people in the Persian Empire, who were under an immediate threat of genocide from the henchman Haman. What Nessel wants Jews to do is the opposite of Esther’s successful effort to rescue Jewish existence.
No matter what one thinks about Trump, global warming, illegal immigration or the right of biological males to play sports against females, the idea that Jews should, as Nessel urges, sacrifice not just their interests but their collective existence for these notions isn’t, contrary to her vile claim, an expression of “Jewish values.” It’s insane and deeply immoral.
If there is any lesson to be learned from Jewish history, it is that those who seek the destruction of the Jews—as those in the alliance of Marxists and Islamists El-Sayed represents—aren’t doing so to right a wrong or as a result of alleged Jewish misbehavior. It’s a function of their lust for power and a desire to use the scapegoating of Jews to achieve it. And when societies allow Jews to be targeted in this manner, the objective isn’t a better world but a far worse one, in which other groups, sooner or later, will meet a similar fate.
Let’s be clear: Jews have no obligation to sacrifice themselves for liberal myths about any issue. Real Jewish values are not a suicide pact whose purpose is to empower antisemites.
Anyone who urges them to do so isn’t advancing a higher cause. Rather, those individuals are aiding and abetting the oldest hatred in the world and taking the side of genocidal Islamists against a democratic Jewish state. To support El-Sayed because you share his intolerance and hatred for the rights of the Jewish people is awful. But to do so merely because you have drunk the partisan Kool-Aid and think the Democratic Party is the “ultimate good” and the Republicans are the “ultimate bad” is indefensible.
In staking her political career on this proposition, it’s doubtful that Nessel can save herself from the same treatment accorded other liberal Jewish Democrats rejected by a party that is drunk on woke ideology. But she has ensured one thing: She will always be remembered for betraying her own people.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
