El-Sayed’s candidacy split Michigan Jews, and the community is reeling

DETROIT, Michigan — A small majority of Jews in Michigan backed the Democratic Party’s winning candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, over Republican Mike Rogers in Tuesday’s Senate race, but members of the swing state’s minority community across the political spectrum were nevertheless reeling on Wednesday morning.

El-Sayed has been one of the most outspoken critics of Israel this election season, with eliminating aid to Israel being one of his most central campaign messages.

Fifty-seven percent of Michigan Jews still backed him — though, tellingly, 78% of them supported the Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, according to an exit poll of early voters.

El-Sayed’s was likely lifted by less affiliated Jewish voters, who make up about half of the community’s 110,000 members, according to Jordan Acker, a Democratic elected official in the state.

It was the affiliated Jewish community members who were more divided, and who may have even swung in favor of Rogers, Acker speculated in an interview from his law office outside of Detroit shortly before the polls closed on Tuesday.

He predicted that the majority-Jewish population in his nearby hometown of Huntington Woods would split its votes evenly between El-Sayed and Rogers after backing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris over Republican Donald Trump by a roughly nine-to-one margin just two years ago.

The unforgivability of ‘Hurt people hurt people’

Acker, a Democratic representative on the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents, was undecided on whom to vote for in the Michigan Senate race until less than a week before the election, which was initially thought to be key to his party retaking full control of Congress (Tuesday night’s results quickly showed that the Republican defeat was more decisive than expected).

Acker ended up reaching a decision, but declined to share whom he voted for on Tuesday, not wanting to be a cause of further division in the community.

But he — like almost every Jewish Michigander who spoke to The Times of Israel on election day — stressed that what made the decision so difficult was El-Sayed’s response to a terror attack in March targeting a Reform synagogue outside Detroit.

There was also El-Sayed’s campaigning with far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of employing antisemitic rhetoric against Jews along with his uncle Cenk Uygur, whose political action committee funded an ad in support of the Democratic candidate that blamed the high cost of groceries on US aid to Israel.

But it was El-Sayed’s own comments after the Temple Israel attack that most upset many Jews in the state.

The Democratic candidate stressed that there was no justification for the attack, in which a Hezbollah-inspired extremist rammed his explosive-laden truck into the building of the synagogue, where preschool classes were still in session, and exchanged gunfire with security guards before taking his own life.

But El-Sayed went on to highlight the assailant Ayman Ghazali’s grief and anger over several family members being killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon shortly before he rammed his vehicle into Temple Israel.

“Hurt people hurt people,” El-Sayed said, in remarks the day after the attack.

“For a lot of Jewish Michiganders… [that] was an unforgivable way to talk about us,” Acker said.

And yet, voting for Rogers presented its own steep challenges for the state’s Democratic-leaning Jews, given the Republican candidate’s perceived close ties to Trump.

Acker linked the rise of the Democratic Party’s anti-Israel and sometimes-antisemitic far-left flank with its far-right counterpart on the Republican side, and argued that Rogers would have contributed to those trends.

“When Joe Biden was president, the Squad (of progressive Democrats) shrank. When Donald Trump has been president, it has grown both times. That’s not a coincidence,” Acker said. “Right-wing extremism leads to left-wing extremism, and those of us in the middle — who are most Jews in this community — are left politically homeless.”

‘I can’t look at Jewish Abdul voters the same way’

Some Jews have found a home in the Rogers campaign, however, and argue that he is far more moderate than his critics claim, pointing to his relatively independent voting record when he was last in Congress over a decade ago.

“He’s a conservative Republican. On a scale of one to 10, with MAGA being 10 and Abdul being one, I’m a four and a half or five. Rogers is a six and a half. I can live with a six and a half,” said Benji Rosenzweig.

The 44-year-old real estate broker was one of roughly half a dozen Jewish Michiganders who helped set up a makeshift campaign war room at a boutique law firm in Southfield, Michigan, in order to whip the community’s vote for Rogers.

He was joined by Israeli-American entrepreneur Shimon Levy, who sounded less forgiving of his fellow community members voting for El-Sayed on Tuesday.

“I do not think I can look at Jewish Abdul voters the same way after these elections — win or lose — as I did before,” Levy said.

“I’ve had tremendous hardship in communicating with people who are part of my life that have been blatantly supporting Abdul online. I have a hard time talking to them. What am I going to talk to them about? The weather? My kids?” the 41-year-old asked.

He subsequently softened his tone and stressed the importance of finding a way to unify the community after the election.

The small group assembled in the conference room did not fit the typical mold of campaign volunteers. They were in their 30s and 40s with established careers — not retirees or college students. They also all supported Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary to defeat Rogers.

Levy said that his group was paying a steep price for their political activism.

“Do you think everybody becomes your friend once you put your opinion out there and start advocating?” he asked.

“I’m losing time, business and money, but this is truly one of those cases where if you’re not going to do it, nobody else will,” Levy said.

It’s not about Israel policy

The alarm raised by Levy wasn’t radically different from that expressed earlier in the day by Steve Gold outside of a polling station in the nearby suburb of Huntington Woods.

The difference was that Gold was campaigning on behalf of El-Sayed, warning of the dangers that a Rogers victory would pose for Jews and the broader American electorate.

He held up a sign that sarcastically read, “Vote MAGA Mike. Because Fascists do protect Jews,” and featured the pictures of Trump and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The 79-year-old Gold acknowledged that his views may be less common among older Jews, while insisting that an overwhelming majority of younger Jews back the progressive Democrat.

“Their parents and grandparents are closer to the Holocaust and have grown up with Israel and are having a real hard time separating Zionism — which was an unquestioned good for their entire lives — from Judaism itself,” he said.

“It’s a demographic split, and it’s a split in willingness to think outside the ‘Israel at all costs’ box,” added Gold, who co-founded the campaign-linked Jews for Abdul.

For his part, Acker suggested that the differences between El-Sayed and Michigan Jews at large on Israel policy are not actually that wide.

Both are uncomfortable with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, the perceived extremism of Israel’s outgoing government and unchecked settler violence in the West Bank.

“The majority of Jews aren’t concerned necessarily about (restricting) defensive weapons versus offensive weapons for Israel. The majority of the community’s concern about Abdul is that he and his allies seem to desire severing the link that the vast majority of Jews have to the Land of Israel,” Acker said.

The University of Michigan regent pointed to a line El-Sayed has used to demonstrate that he takes Jewish safety seriously.

“He constantly says, ‘I don’t want anyone discriminated against for how they pray,'” Acker said.

“I don’t have security guards outside Yom Kippur services because of the direction that I pray. It’s because we do a prayer for the State of Israel,” he maintained, adding that this is what El-Sayed had a harder time accepting.

‘We can’t blame each other for this election’

Back at the polling station at the Huntington Woods Lutheran Church, Gold argued that Jewish safety is more tied to the strength of American democracy than to issues pertaining to Israel.

He touted remarks by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who told fellow Jewish Michiganders they had a “moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.”

The message will certainly fail to land with the still-sizable minority of Jewish voters who couldn’t get behind El-Sayed on Tuesday.

They were likely further discouraged when El-Sayed stuck to his anti-Israel messaging in his victory speech early Wednesday morning.

“We don’t want our money sent to do apartheid, or genocide, or war,” he said.

Still, El-Sayed said his message was not one of division.

“They try to call you hateful if you believe Palestinian kids should grow up in the land of their forefathers without being murdered by our tax dollars. If you believe in equal rights to dignity and self-determination, that’s not hate, that’s love,” said the soon-to-be first Muslim member of the US Senate.

With the divisive race now over, Acker urged the community’s opposing political camps to show grace toward one another.

“Members of the Jewish community who alienate each other over this election are actually helping the people who hate us because Jewish communities suffer when there is division,” he said.

“We can’t blame each other for this election. We didn’t choose these candidates,” Acker said, noting the vast majority of Jews who supported candidates other than El-Sayed in the Democratic primary.

“But we have to wake up tomorrow committed to doing the work to get us out of (this period of division), because it’s going to be a long road back, and we have to get there,” he added.