Jews in Michigan, and across America, would do well to reframe the terms on which they are weighing the choice posed by Abdul El-Sayed’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Such a reframe is in order, however individuals align with the candidate’s antagonism to the Israeli government’s policies toward Palestinians. There is work to be done. There is no mission more vital than unstitching Trumpism from our nation’s civic fabric, and El-Sayed stands to be a major player in that task.
The decision between El-Sayed and his MAGA-embracing opponent, Mike Rogers, should not be understood, as Michigan’s Jewish Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel, cast it—as a painful balancing act that presumes a “tension” between “the needs of the world” (that is to say, liberal policy preferences) and “our own self-interest ... sacrificing 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.” Nor is it, as several hundred prominent liberal Jews wrote on September 17 in an endorsement of El-Sayed, merely a “strategic chess move” to ensure “a seat at the table.” To the contrary: Supporting a liberal Democrat like El-Sayed in and of itself strongly enhances the security of American Jews, especially if El-Sayed wins and helps Democrats take control of the Senate.
There are two related reasons, overlooked in the current fraught debate, why electing El-Sayed to Michigan’s open Senate seat advances, rather than conflicts with, the Jewish community’s long-term, fundamental security interests. First, the unique “comfort, safety, and security” that American Jews have enjoyed for the past 250 years are anchored by our system of constitutional democracy. This system is built on the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the original 1789 Constitution, as strengthened by the Bill of Rights amendments of the 1790s, the Reconstruction-era Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and the democratizing Progressive-era Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments (prescribing, respectively, a national income tax to finance the modern welfare state, popular election of senators, and equal ballot access for women), and by kindred state constitutions nationwide.
Naturally, antisemitism and anti-Jewish discrimination were not eliminated at the nation’s founding. Quite the contrary: Gaining equal political, economic, educational, and social opportunity and acceptance has been an ongoing struggle throughout the nation’s history, continuing today. But American Jews have been able to wage that struggle on firm ground, and over time gain unprecedented results, because they could vindicate their civil rights thanks to our nation’s constitutional architecture.
The template was set in 1790, when Moses Seixas, the lay leader of what is now the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote to President George Washington, “Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free citizens,” he and his congregants sought affirmation that “we now … behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People … which to bigotry gives no sanction … but afford[s] to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship.”
Washington famously replied, “May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” When Washington wrote that assurance, the First Amendment codifying its precepts had passed both houses of Congress and was under review by the 13 states—the requisite three-quarters of which ratified it a little over a year later, in December 1791.
At that time, the Constitution’s guarantees applied only to the federal government, and no state permitted non-Christians to vote or hold state office until the Reconstruction amendments were adopted in the late 1860s. But again, the strategies of Jews and other minorities seeking equality and security have always centered the constitutional strictures invoked by Moses Seixas in 1790. The payoffs have been well beyond the expectations Seixas may have harbored at the time. Currently, 10 of the nation’s 100 senators are Jews, nearly five times Jews’ percentage of the national population, representing states from every section of the country. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro posts unheard-of 60 percent approval ratings in swing-state Pennsylvania, and is on short lists of potential 2028 presidential nominees. The Jewishness of these political leaders is rarely if ever a discernible issue.
Of course, these facts are well known, and the societal acceptance they reflect is often taken for granted. It should not be. That nationwide consensus now faces an existential threat—different from and more dire than most Jews, indeed, most liberals appreciate. That danger is not just the erratic megalomaniac occupying the White House. It is the robust movement behind Trump, with a substantial if minority popular base and, much less noticed, a leadership cadre committed to overthrowing the Enlightenment-based constitutional order on which security for Jews—and other at-risk sectors of American society—depends. This is the second reason for Jews to reset their calculus for assessing their Michigan Senate conundrum.
As I wrote earlier this year, the New Right may represent a distinct minority of the electorate, but its antidemocratic fervor is driven by deeply rooted economic, cultural, and technological trends, and its messaging is scripted by well-versed and politically connected savants. By 2022, New Right protagonists had embraced overtly theocratic, authoritarian grand designs to displace liberal political and cultural domination. As one New Right publicist, American Israeli Oram Hazony, wrote that year, “The only thing that is strong enough to stop the religion of woke neo-Marxism is the religion of biblical Christianity. This was a Christian nation, historically and according to its laws, and it’s going to be a Christian nation again.”
The “movement’s high priest” is Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, so labeled by historian Laura Field. By his own testimony, Vermeule touts “a Christian Strategy … which view[s] political commitments [otherwise known as ‘laws’] … as tactical tools to be handled in whatever way best serves the cause of Christ.… [The] true identity of liberalism is aligned with Satan.”
However eyebrow-furrowing, these views are hardly inconsequential. Vermeule, Hazony, and their kindred would-be Constitution-bashing ideologues have weighty political disciples, the most fervent of whom is vice president and Republican-leader heir apparent JD Vance. Vance deploys patent falsehoods to displace “terrorist sympathizers”—that is, liberals and Democrats. Perhaps most revealing, he has shredded protocol by intervening in domestic politics of an allied nation, to champion Germany’s neo-Nazi-friendly Alternative for Germany. Funding Vance and numerous other far-right agents and causes is Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who has written that he does not “believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
The core interest of American Jews in the 2026 midterm elections is to facilitate a decisive repudiation of this subversive movement bent on shredding the Constitution, and the election of a two-house congressional platform to crush its Christian nationalist authoritarian agenda. By all accounts, election of a Democratic senator in bluish-purple Michigan is critical to secure that prospect. Understandably, some American Jews distrust El-Sayed’s record of ties with antisemitic demagoguery and his views on Israeli policy toward Palestinians—though many Jewish liberals align closer to El-Sayed on that latter front. But the larger interest of American Jews—indeed, of Jews globally—requires preservation of the constitutional order on which their security rests.
On October 5, at a joint MS NOW interview with Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, herself a Jew, El-Sayed said, “The thing that neither Senator Slotkin nor I will ever budge on is that you ought to be safe in your place of worship—whether you’re Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, or Sikh … and we want to fight to protect that.” Slotkin observed, “People want to see a Jewish woman and a Muslim man being able to get along, debate, push and pull on each other, and move the state forward. Frankly, I think it’s good for Michigan, I think it’s good for the country to see that.” American Jews should trust Slotkin’s counsel.
