In the United States, November 3 was Election Day. The results were seismic.
The repudiation of President Trump and his party was unmistakable. For Democrats, victory brought exultation, but also fresh questions about the party’s direction and the growing influence of its far-left wing. For Republicans, defeat unleashed recriminations about their leadership, their message, and their future.
And the Jewish community was directly affected. How could it not be when Jews, Zionism, Israel, the US-Israel partnership, and antisemitism were frequent subjects of discussion and debate?
Ground zero was Michigan, where the Senate race between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers drew intense national attention.
El-Sayed never hid his unbridled hostility towards Israel. His objections went beyond its current leaders and their policies. He has repeatedly refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He is against any US military aid or arms transfers to Israel. And he campaigned with Hasan Piker, whose hostility towards both Israel and the United States included the notorious declaration that “America deserved 9/11”.
His response to the terrorist attack on Michigan’s Temple Israel, where children were attending its preschool, was also disturbing.
El-Sayed initially condemned the attack. But, in a subsequent video, he invoked the phrase “hurt people hurt people”, linking the terrorist’s actions to the reported deaths of family members in Lebanon in an Israeli strike.
He later attempted an apology. Yet the question remained: why had an attack on a synagogue and its children prompted him to contextualise the attacker’s grievance in the first place?
Questions also arose about alleged family connections to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. According to reporting by the Associated Press, his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, had written in 2012 that “my family has long been MB” and described her mother’s involvement in the movement. El-Sayed denied personal or family ties. Yet his half-sister’s own account raises questions that his glib denial does not resolve. Those questions deserve clear answers.
The divisions became so deep that Congresswoman Haley Stevens, his defeated Democratic primary rival, took the extraordinary step of endorsing Rogers, a former Republican congressman, FBI agent, and longstanding friend of Israel.
The response from Michigan Democratic Party chairman Curtis Hertel was blunt: Stevens was “not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future”. So much for room for dissent.
Yet polling indicated that a majority of Jewish early voters surveyed in Michigan backed El-Sayed. Why?
One explanation came from Dana Nessel, Michigan’s elected attorney general, who ultimately announced her support for El-Sayed despite earlier reservations.
Invoking Queen Esther in remarks before the election, she suggested that Jews might need to “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”.
She also asserted “a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival”.
Her argument cited wider dangers, including climate change, to explain the stakes of the election. Those dangers do not make her language about Jewish survival any less shocking.
And her invocation of Esther turns the biblical story on its head. Esther risked her own life to save the Jewish people. She did not offer up the Jewish people to save everyone else.
The suggestion that Jews should subordinate their own survival to a supposedly greater good carries a disturbing historical echo.
In August 1934, The New York Times reported a declaration by the Association of National German Jews, whose members said they had “always, in war or peace, placed the good of the German people and the German Fatherland above our own good”.
The declaration continued:
“Accordingly, we greeted the national uprising of January 1933, although it brought rigours for us, for we saw it as the only means to clear away the damage done in fourteen unhappy years by un-German elements.”
The “national uprising” was Hitler’s accession to power. What those Jews described as “rigours” would be followed by the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, and, ultimately, the Holocaust.
The circumstances are profoundly different. The warning concerns the reasoning: Jewish safety must never become expendable in pursuit of a supposedly higher political good.
Jewish voters who supported El-Sayed doubtless had various reasons. Some may have shared Nessel’s thinking; others may have dismissed concerns about him or considered Republican control of the Senate the greater danger. For some, an attenuated Jewish identity, expressed chiefly through universal ideals rather than attachment to Jewish peoplehood or Zionism, may also have played a part.
Universal concern is admirable. But when attachment to Jewish particularity becomes a source of discomfort, and Jewish self-preservation is viewed as an obstacle to the greater good, something has gone profoundly wrong.
Nessel’s words raise a question that reaches well beyond Michigan: when did concern for Jewish survival become a form of self-interest that Jews should be prepared to surrender?
There is nothing narrow or shameful about Jews defending their own safety, continuity, and right to exist. And no political party or individual is entitled to ask them to sacrifice any of those things.
A world that cannot make room for roughly 16 million Jews has a profound moral problem. Jewish contributions to ethics, science, medicine, and culture are extraordinary. But Jews should not have to present a catalogue of achievements to justify their existence.
Nor should tiny Israel, roughly one per cent the size of Saudi Arabia, have to prove its usefulness to earn the right to exist. Its manifold contributions to meeting humanity’s challenges deserve recognition. Its people’s right to live in peace and security, however, does not depend on them.
Michigan was not the only warning. After the Republican shellacking, Vice President JD Vance included “change our relationship to Israel” among four priorities he cited for winning back voters who had deserted his party.
The vice president of the United States was making the relationship with the Jewish state part of the explanation for his party’s electoral humiliation. He is also widely expected to seek the presidency in 2028. The pattern is all too familiar: when things go wrong, find a Jewish address for the blame. This time, the address is Israel, the lone Jewish-majority state.
Coming from someone a heartbeat away from the presidency, those words demand far more than a passing expression of concern.
Increasingly, the place of Jews in America is being called into question – a prospect many previously considered unimaginable.
Concerned Jews and Jewish groups must face these realities unflinchingly, show far greater unity of purpose, demonstrate courage and spine, develop innovative strategies, strengthen young Jews’ understanding of their history and identity, and build strong alliances.
If this is not the moment to wake up, then when is?
David Harris is executive vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) and author of ‘Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know’ (Oxford University Press)
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