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Michigan’s Jewish AG Just Said What Democrats Won’t — Their Party Has an Antisemitism Problem

Updated: POLITICS

Dana Nessel has been Michigan’s Attorney General since 2019. She is the state’s first Jewish attorney general. She is a Democrat. And she just went on a podcast and said the thing her party’s leadership has spent months carefully avoiding.

“I began to perceive an enormous amount of anti-Semitism within the Democratic Party,” Nessel said in an interview with David Frum. The shift didn’t begin until October 7, 2023. Before that, she said the threats she received came from fringe elements on the far right. After Hamas massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians, something changed inside the party she belongs to: “It wasn’t just, basically, I would say mentally unstable people on the far right that were threatening me or other Jews, but now it became really a both-sides situation.”

Michigan’s attorney general saying that death threats against her as a Jewish official now come from elements of the left as well as the right — and that she perceives “an enormous amount of anti-Semitism” inside her own party.

She also called out the ignorance driving it. “What I am seeing from, again, people that I know in my party [is] a fundamental lack of knowledge about Judaism, about my religion, as well as about sort of the historical aspects of the state of Israel and also a complete ignorance about what ties Jews around the globe to Israel itself.”

And she named Michigan ‘Democrat’ U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed directly. When Temple Israel — a synagogue in her hometown — was attacked in March, she condemned it unequivocally. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s new Democratic Senate nominee, reportedly made excuses for what happened. Nessel said clearly: “You can’t make excuses for that kind of domestic terrorism.”

Her warning to the party was the most important part: “It’s a fundamental mistake for the Democratic Party to think that you can just push Jewish Democrats out and simply replace them with any other population.”

That warning is landing in a very specific context. El-Sayed is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan. His primary was backed by Hasan Piker — who celebrated Hamas after October 7. His donors overlap with people who gave money to a neo-Nazi congressional candidate. His own record on Israel is, to put it charitably, problematic. And Nessel is warning publicly that her party’s direction is creating a “both-sides” antisemitism problem she can no longer ignore.

This, coming from a party who called President Trump a “Nazi” and “fascist” while supporting an actual Nazi sympathizer and tattoo-wearer Graham Platner for the U.S. Senate in Maine – and while supporting some of the biggest anti-Semites currently in Congress.

Nessel ended with the line that should follow the Democratic establishment everywhere: “I was Jewish before I was ever a member of the Democratic Party, and if I have to, I’ll be Jewish afterwards, too.” That’s not a threat. That’s a warning. And the party backing El-Sayed should be paying very close attention to every word of it.