Jesse Arm is the vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute.
Amid concerns over rising antisemitism on the left, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently told her fellow Jewish Democrats that they may have to “sacrifice the comfort, safety, security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.” In a bizarre inversion of the story of Queen Esther, who risked her own life to save the Jews, Nessel invoked the biblical heroine to suggest that Jews should risk their own survival to save everyone else.
I grew up in West Bloomfield, Michigan, a center of Jewish life in the state. Many of the town’s residents are declining Nessel’s invitation.
It’s easy to see why. In March, a Hezbollah-inspired attacker from Dearborn Heights, Michigan, rammed a truck loaded with gasoline, fireworks, guns and ammunition into the preschool of Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue in West Bloomfield, while more than 100 children were inside. The attempted massacre failed. But Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate, responded by invoking relatives of the attacker who had been killed in an Israeli strike in Lebanon. “Hurt people hurt people,” he explained. (El-Sayed later apologized for his remarks, saying, “What I was trying to do is offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context.”)
Now members of one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies are breaking with its nominee because he rationalized the attempted killing of their neighbors, including preschool-aged children, on the basis of a conflict on the other side of the planet.
Many members of West Bloomfield’s Jewish community are progressive. The idea of voting Republican turns their stomachs. But even for these stalwart Democrats, Mike Rogers may be preferable to a Democrat with alleged family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (El-Sayed has denied any link) and who elevated Hasan Piker — notorious for saying “America deserved 9/11” — as a campaign surrogate (El-Sayed has since distanced himself from Piker).
El-Sayed’s record includes support for defunding the police, shutting down fossil fuel pipelines and replacing private health insurance with a government-run alternative. But these aren’t the issues driving Jewish voters away from his candidacy. Progressive Jews may agree with El-Sayed on nearly everything else. But they still have to think about their community’s safety.
Reform Judaism has a long history of addressing the tension between universal concern and communal self-preservation. Its 1885 Pittsburgh Platform rejected Jewish nationhood. The movement later embraced Zionism, but the aims of its political arm are functionally indistinguishable from the Democratic Party’s policy platform. Sermons can sound like a progressive school’s counseling session, a workplace diversity, equity and inclusion seminar or a Democratic stump speech. This close identification leaves these institutions poorly prepared for a left that treats Jewish self-assertion as harmful.
Not all particular attachments are anathema in progressive politics. “Habibi City,” New York magazine’s recent article on Southwest Asian and North African culture, documented the way communal pride, Palestinian activism and progressive politics have been combined to create a fashionable cultural identity.
Jewish particularism receives no equivalent indulgence. In influential parts of today’s left, acceptance of Jews is conditional. Jewish leftists can remain welcome if they disavow Israel and reject communal obligations that interfere with the progressive omnicause. A Jewish surname is perfectly acceptable. An insistence on Jewish national continuity is not.
Demographic weight may explain part of this difference. Jews make up roughly 1.3 percent of Michigan’s population, compared with 3.1 percent for Arab Americans. In the case of the recent Democratic primary, the electoral sway of Arab American voters was increased by the group’s high levels of support for El-Sayed. Data scientist Zachary Donnini estimated that El-Sayed won 94.1 percent of Arab voters in Michigan’s Democratic primary, overcoming mainstream Democrat Haley Stevens’s advantage among non-Arab voters.
Jewish voters are not as unified. Indeed, the Reform Judaism practiced at Temple Israel is giving way to forms of Judaism that place a stronger stress on communal identity. A 2020 Pew survey found that 98 percent of married Orthodox Jews had Jewish spouses, compared with 58 percent of married Reform Jews. Orthodox adults reported more than twice as many children as non-Orthodox adults, on average, and became parents about five years earlier. Among married parents, those with Jewish spouses were much more likely to say they were raising their children Jewish by religion.
The Jews most committed to religious continuity are also, on average, more attached to Israel and more politically conservative. Three-quarters of Orthodox Jews identified as Republican or Republican-leaning in that survey. If these patterns persist, an increasingly influential portion of American Jewry will be more religious, more pro-Israel and further right.
The pull of these communities extends beyond the fully observant. I grew up attending non-Orthodox synagogues, but today, when I go to services, I choose an Orthodox one. Though I am less ritually observant than my parents, these are the spaces where I find peers who take Jewish practice and communal continuity seriously, without needing to translate either into progressive politics. Others I know have made similar choices. The attraction is a confident Jewish identity and a community committed to passing it on.
For these reasons, the Jewish future may depart from the progressive political culture that has long found a home in places like Temple Israel. Indeed, some members of that congregation are already reconsidering what that culture demands of them. They are discovering that concern for humanity need not require indifference to the survival of their people.
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