Gilda Jacobs, president and CEO of the Michigan League for Public Policy, has been a Democrat her entire life, even once serving in the Michigan State Assembly. But in this year’s U.S. Senate race, pitting Democrat Abdul El-Sayed against Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers, she doesn’t know what to do.
“I am so upset and conflicted that I even have to make this choice. It truly keeps me up at night,” said Jacobs. “There’s no way I can vote for Mike Rogers. … I understand how important it is for Democrats to control the Senate.” But she is struggling to convince herself that she can vote for El-Sayed, who she says “scares” her and “whose anti-Zionist rhetoric is a real problem.”
Jacobs’ dilemma is evident across the Michigan Jewish community. As Terri Stearn, an art appraiser in Bloomfield Hills and lifelong Democrat, said to me, “All of my friends are like, ‘What the f— do we do?”
In the August Democratic Senate primary, predominantly Jewish districts largely backed Rep. Haley Stevens. With just a month until Election Day, these same voters are torn between their often lifelong support for the Democratic Party and their deep concerns about El-Sayed.
Those fears are twofold. First is his embrace of anti-Zionist rhetoric that, in the eyes of many Michigan Jews, strays into antisemitism. El-Sayed has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, has perpetrated tropes about Jews as puppet masters of the U.S. government and has appeared at campaign events with far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who has a long record of making antisemitic statements.
During the primary, El-Sayed incessantly attacked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, claiming that aid to Israel was taking money away from pressing priorities in the U.S. (Israel receives $3.8 billion a year in aid — all of which is spent in the U.S. — out of a $7.4 trillion federal budget). El-Sayed said AIPAC was “making sure that our foreign policy is driven by the interests of a foreign government” and even accused Stevens of being “more committed to the future of a foreign country [Israel]” than spending tax dollars “to provide schools and healthcare for you and your kids.”
The second issue is El-Sayed’s response to the March 12 terrorist attack on the Temple Israel synagogue, a focal point of Jewish life in suburban Detroit, where much of the state’s Jewish population resides. El-Sayed initially condemned the violence, which the FBI called an act of Hezbollah-inspired terrorism, but then tried to contextualize it by saying that “hurt people, hurt people.” El-Sayed later expressed regret for those words, but many of those I spoke to felt it made the situation worse because he seemed to be apologizing for the timing of his comments rather than the words themselves.
For Elise Otis, a teacher at Temple Israel, that attack has a simpler context: It was the day she thought she would die.
Otis was working as a teacher at Temple Israel when Ayman Ghazali drove a truck loaded with ammunition and fireworks through the synagogue’s doors.
Otis’ room was just a few feet away, and she and her fellow teacher grabbed iPads and Cheerios for the kids, then hid behind a diaper-changing table for 45 minutes, trying to keep them calm. Convinced that there were multiple gunmen outside and it was only a matter of time before they entered the room, she told herself, “I am going to die. But I was going to lie on my babies and hope that my body was enough to protect them.”
Thankfully, that moment never came. But for Otis, the attack was a wake-up moment. “I’d lived in Michigan my entire life and never felt any antisemitism until March 12.”
El-Sayed has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, has perpetrated tropes about Jews as puppet masters of the U.S. government and has appeared at campaign events with far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who has a long record of making antisemitic statements.
When I first spoke to her last month, she said she agreed with El-Sayed on most policy issues but still worried that he doesn’t care about Jewish safety. “He doesn’t stand for me and my family. … I’m an American, and I don’t feel safe in our country,” she said.
Since then, however, her views have hardened. “I am voting — very unhappily — for Rogers,” she told me last week.
“If we vote for [El-Sayed], then we are setting a precedent for how we vote in the future,” she said. “And if we are willing to accept blatant antisemitism, who will come out of the shadows in the future?”
Beyond that, she bemoaned his “lack of understanding” about Jewish fears and his seeming refusal to “even trying to learn about us.”
I heard similar concerns from my friend Jordan Acker, a regent at the University of Michigan. He has been subjected to years of antisemitic harassment since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, including having a jar of urine thrown through the window of his home and blood splattered on the front doors of his law office. This spring, Acker lost renomination at a raucous state Democratic convention in which Democratic candidates were subjected to heckling and abuse, almost exclusively focused on their positions regarding Israel.
Acker, who is still undecided on how he will vote in November, told me, “Nothing that’s happened since the primary has convinced me that he [El Sayed] cares about our concerns.” For Acker, the race creates an impossible dilemma. “If we vote for Rogers, we excuse the Trump-related corruption of our democracy,” he said. “A vote for El-Sayed means we have to give up our ability to define ourselves as a Jewish people and what that means to us as individuals and as a community.”
What seems to animate many Michigan Jews crossing the aisle for Rogers — few of whom seem enthusiastic about backing the Republican — is the sense that the party they’ve supported for generations no longer speaks for them.
For Hannan Lis, a businessman and entrepreneur who emigrated to the U.S. from Israel at 22, the choice is easy. Though he plans to vote for Democrat Jocelyn Benson in the state’s gubernatorial race and generally votes blue, he is backing Rogers. He cannot vote for “someone who uses antisemitic tropes as a campaign message and demonizes AIPAC as a sinister power,” he said. “The only lobby he really had an issue with is the pro-Israel lobby.”
To Lis, “that is clearly antisemitic.”
Lis’ views were echoed by Michigan State Rep. Noah Arbit, who in a recent interview with Jewish Insider said he was not endorsing El-Sayed because of his primary campaign rhetoric. “I think it’s very, very clear that the fulcrum of Abdul’s campaign was an antisemitic conspiracy about AIPAC being the No. 1 obstacle toward universal healthcare, better schools and better roads in Michigan and in America.”
When I asked Lis how he felt about his vote potentially keeping the Senate in Republican hands, he said he doesn’t want a majority with El-Sayed. “He doesn’t represent my values,” Lis said. “El-Sayed doesn’t know or care about who I am.”
But for other Democrats, the opportunity to potentially flip the Senate from red to blue is enough reason to vote for El-Sayed.
Charles Gaba, a healthcare analyst who has also raised $23 million for Democratic candidates over the past 12 years, says the risk of Trump appointing lifetime judges to the federal courts ultimately convinced him to vote for El-Sayed. Though he believes the Democratic nominee doesn’t understand the innate connection between Jews and Israel, flipping the Senate takes priority.
Gaba is hardly alone in backing the Democratic nominee. More than 600 Michigan Jews, including former Rep. Andy Levin, signed an open letter pledging their support for El-Sayed’s candidacy. He appeared at a campaign rally last week with Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, and the state’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, has endorsed him. Both are Jewish.
Blake Lipman, a lifelong Democrat who practices family law, told me he is enthusiastically supporting El-Sayed. In his view, “The smear campaign launched against him is bamboozling Jewish voters. I don’t think he’s an antisemite, and he thinks the charge of antisemitism has been used as a way to shut down dialogue.”
But for others, voting for El-Sayed is how they choose to draw the line.
According to Jeff Schluessel, an attorney actively involved in the Jewish community who generally votes for Democrats, if El-Sayed were a “one-off” and a candidate merely critical of Israel, it would be different. But he worries the Democratic Party is moving too far in the direction of antisemitism. “He’ll be the poster child for the party.”
What seems to animate many Michigan Jews crossing the aisle for Rogers — few of whom seem enthusiastic about backing the Republican — is the sense that the party they’ve supported for generations no longer speaks for them. It’s not just the Democratic Party. American Jews often live, work and socialize in liberal-dominated spaces (academia, the arts, the nonprofit world), which since Oct. 7 have become far less welcoming to American Jews.
A majority of American Jews have supported Democratic candidates for close to a century, and it’s hard to imagine that pattern will end any time soon. Those voting for Rogers are hardly enthusiastic about the option. If El-Sayed wasn’t the nominee, there’s little chance they’d support the Republican candidate.
Even those who don’t like El-Sayed find the current incarnation of the Republican Party similarly unpalatable. As Jacobs said to me, “Our community is so divided on this” election.
But Jewish voters are far from a monolith, and if the Michigan Senate election is any indication, they may be willing to abandon Democrats if they feel the party has abandoned them.
The soul-searching moment for Michigan Jews is that they are being put in this position at all. And the tragedy is that the party they’ve called home for most of their lives no longer feels so welcoming.
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