Michigan’s Warning: The Antisemitic Takeover of the Democratic Left Is No Longer Theoretical

By Dan Feferman

AI-generated image of Abdul El-Sayed waving on stage under red and blue lights.

Something important happened in Michigan this summer, and American Jews should stop pretending it was just another Democratic primary.

Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official, narrowly defeated centrist Representative Haley Stevens to become the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in one of America’s most important swing states. He won by roughly one percentage point despite being massively outspent by Stevens and outside groups supporting her. The Associated Press described his victory as a major breakthrough for the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.

But El-Sayed did not arrive at the nomination merely advocating Medicare for All, higher taxes on the wealthy or a different approach to healthcare. He arrived there after repeatedly singling out Israel in language that should have set off alarm bells throughout the Democratic Party.

When CNN asked El-Sayed whether he believed the Israeli government was as evil as Hamas, he answered: “Yes.” Hamas is the terrorist organization that carried out the October 7 massacre. El-Sayed nevertheless placed the government of Israel—the elected government of a democratic American ally—on the same moral plane. He later escalated the language, calling Israel a “rogue state.” CNN documented both exchanges directly and his subsequent “rogue state” characterization.

Then came the question that should have been very easy. Does Israel have a right to exist? El-Sayed would not say yes. Asked directly by CNN whether Israel had a right to exist, he responded that Israel “exists” and complained about the question. When pressed again, he still declined to affirm that right. Another progressive Democrat, Congressman Ro Khanna, was subsequently asked the same question and had no difficulty answering it: Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish democratic state. The contrast is revealing.

That is not simply criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not opposition to settlements. It is not opposition to the Gaza war, Israeli military tactics or American aid. It is a refusal to affirm Jewish national self-determination. And this is where Democrats need to understand what is happening inside their party.

Criticizing Israel Is Not Antisemitic. This… Is Something Else.

There is nothing inherently antisemitic about criticizing Israel. Israelis do it every day. There is nothing antisemitic about opposing a particular Israeli government, supporting Palestinian statehood, questioning military aid or criticizing AIPAC. Democracies require precisely those arguments. But criticism of Israel and antisemitism are not separated by some magical firewall.

The line begins to disappear when Israel becomes the one country whose basic legitimacy must continually be litigated; when Jewish national self-determination is treated as inherently racist while Palestinian, Kurdish, Ukrainian or virtually every other form of national self-determination is treated as legitimate; when support for Israel is explained through sinister political money rather than ideology or strategic interest; and when attacks on American Jews are contextualized through events thousands of miles away involving a country those Jews do not govern.

El-Sayed has repeatedly wandered into precisely this territory. Following the March attack on Temple Israel in suburban Detroit, where a man drove a vehicle toward a synagogue complex that included a preschool, El-Sayed condemned antisemitism. But he then invoked the attacker’s family losses in an Israeli strike and explained that “hurt people hurt people.”

Think about what that means. An American synagogue was attacked. Jewish children were potentially in danger. And somehow Israel entered the explanation.

El-Sayed eventually apologized. On August 29, speaking to Michigan’s Jewish Democratic Caucus, he acknowledged: “I made a mistake.” He later said that, if given the opportunity, he would take the remarks back entirely. That apology should be acknowledged. Associated Press reported the apology and his explanation. JTA subsequently reported that El-Sayed said he wished he could retract the comments altogether.

But an apology does not erase what made the original instinct so revealing. Imagine an attack on a mosque followed by a politician explaining the perpetrator’s actions through something Saudi Arabia had done. Imagine an assault on an Asian-American community center being contextualized through Chinese government policy.

It would immediately be recognized as grotesque collective responsibility. American Jews deserve the same standard.

The New Antisemitism Has Learned a New Vocabulary

The new antisemitism rarely presents itself wearing a swastika. It arrives dressed as foreign-policy sophistication. It speaks constantly about “Zionist money,” “the lobby,” “foreign influence,” “genocide” and a uniquely illegitimate Jewish state. None of those individual terms automatically makes someone an antisemite. Some describe legitimate subjects of political debate. The problem is what happens when they are assembled into an old story: Jews possess unusual political power, manipulate governments through money, place another country ahead of America, and use that power to protect a state whose existence itself is morally suspect.

The vocabulary changed. The architecture of the accusation did not.

El-Sayed has made AIPAC central to his political identity. It is entirely legitimate to criticize AIPAC and its spending. Yet the political ecosystem surrounding him increasingly goes further: support for Israel is not simply a position with which it disagrees; it is portrayed as evidence of corruption, purchased loyalty or subservience to a foreign power. That should make Democrats deeply uncomfortable. Instead, much of the party is learning to live with it.

Hasan Piker Is Not a Distraction- He Symbolizes Something Much Worse

Consider Hasan Piker. Piker is often dismissed as an obnoxious internet personality who should not be confused with the Democratic Party. Fair enough. Except El-Sayed did not merely receive an endorsement from Piker. He campaigned with him. In April, El-Sayed held major rallies at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan alongside Piker, attracting more than 1,200 attendees according to El-Sayed’s own campaign. The campaign proudly promoted the rallies afterward.

Piker had already generated outrage over rhetoric about Israel and Israelis and once said Hamas was “a thousand times better than Israel,” comments later highlighted during national scrutiny of El-Sayed’s campaign. CNN examined the relationship and Piker’s rhetoric during the primary. El-Sayed has since tried to create some distance from Piker, while resisting demands that he simply disavow him. That matters. Axios reported the tension after El-Sayed began courting Jewish Democrats following the primary.

But the larger point is not whether Hasan Piker personally controls Democratic politics. Of course he does not. The point is that people who once would have been politically radioactive are increasingly becoming useful validators, fundraisers, mobilizers and cultural figures for a new progressive coalition.

They are not outside the tent yelling anymore. They are appearing at campaign rallies.

This Is Bigger Than El-Sayed

And Michigan itself provides the most disturbing evidence that this is no longer simply an argument about one candidate. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is Jewish, Democratic and hardly some right-wing Republican operative. Yet before the state Democratic convention, she said she did not feel safe attending because she feared harassment over Israel. Jewish Democratic leaders supported her concerns, and roughly 200 Michigan rabbis and Jewish figures subsequently called on the state party to ensure the safety of Jewish delegates. Jewish Democrats discussed Nessel’s decision publicly. The petition from Michigan Jewish leaders reflected the same fear.

Nessel later described the problem with remarkable clarity. She spoke of “members of our own party who seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and place the Jewish diaspora in jeopardy.” That is not a Republican accusation; it came from Michigan’s Jewish Democratic attorney general.

Democrats should listen to her. Because this is what an attempted ideological takeover looks like. Not every Democrat suddenly becoming antisemitic. Not Chuck Schumer waking up tomorrow and embracing Hamas. That is a caricature.

Political takeovers occur when an organized faction successfully changes what a party considers morally acceptable. Ten years ago, a Democratic Senate candidate in a swing state repeatedly refusing to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, campaigning with Hasan Piker and equating Israel’s government with Hamas would have been considered politically toxic.

Today he is the nominee. 

The Infrastructure Is Already There

Nor did this emerge from nowhere. The Democratic Socialists of America has moved dramatically on Israel. Its electoral apparatus now cites a resolution requiring DSA candidates to support BDS, avoid affiliation with Israeli government bodies or “Zionist lobby groups,” oppose measures providing resources to Israel and support legislation advancing what the organization calls “Palestinian liberation.” DSA’s own National Electoral Commission describes these anti-Zionist requirements.

The organization’s national statements have gone further, calling for the replacement of Israel’s existing political order with a single “democratic secular state, from the river to the sea.” That language comes directly from DSA itself.

As Mideast Journal has previously documented in tracing the DSA’s evolution from a movement that included socialist Zionists into an explicitly anti-Zionist organization, this transformation took place over years. What was once one ideological faction is now building candidates, media ecosystems, activist networks and electoral machinery. El-Sayed himself is not a DSA member. That distinction matters. But he is running in the political current that this infrastructure helped create. That is why Michigan matters so much.

And Yes, There Is a Version on the Right

None of this excuses what is happening on parts of the American right.

Tucker Carlson has increasingly framed American policy toward Israel through language of manipulation and foreign control. In his recent ten-point political manifesto, Carlson reportedly alleged that Israel pushed America into the Iran war through “bribery or threat or both.” He has also pledged to help build a third political party centered partly around his rejection of the existing Republican foreign-policy establishment. Axios reported Carlson’s manifesto and the third-party movement forming around him.

That rhetoric should be confronted too. If someone on the right says Israel controls America through bribery, Jews should not excuse it because he votes Republican. If someone on the left implies American support for Israel is fundamentally a product of corrupt Zionist money, Jews should not excuse it because he supports Medicare for All.

The antisemitism test cannot depend on party registration. But there is an important difference. Republican politics still contains a large and powerful constituency prepared to push back against anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric. On the Democratic left, the people pushing the rhetoric are increasingly winning primaries. Michigan is the warning.

What Michigan Really Means

El-Sayed insists that he will defend Jewish Americans from antisemitism. I hope he means it.

But Jewish safety cannot mean protecting Jews while delegitimizing Jewish nationhood. It cannot mean condemning a synagogue attack while immediately searching for its explanation in Israeli behavior. And it cannot mean declaring affection for Judaism while refusing to answer a straightforward question about whether the world's only Jewish state has the same right to exist that progressives readily extend to others.

That is why this debate is bigger than Abdul El-Sayed. The Democratic Party is being asked to decide whether Zionists—that is, the overwhelming majority of Jews who believe there should continue to be a Jewish state—remain fully welcome in its coalition, or whether Jewish participation increasingly requires Jews to check one central part of their identity at the door.

The anti-Zionist left is trying to make that choice for them. Michigan showed that it can win.

This does not mean the Democratic Party has become antisemitic. It means an organized faction with deeply troubling ideas about Israel, Zionism and Jewish political power is attempting to redefine the boundaries of acceptable Democratic politics—and the institutional immune system that should reject those ideas is weakening. That should concern Democrats most of all. Because history rarely announces that an old hatred is returning. It changes its vocabulary first.

Dan Feferman is the editor of MidEast.Journal and co-editor of MiddleEast24. He served as an IDF policy analyst and as a fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute.