The Speech That Betrayed the Jews

jewishpress.com/the-speech-that-betrayed-the-jews/

Michigan AG Nessel at an event at the Michigan Capitol in Lansing, on April 5, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Roth/Sipa USA/ Alamy Live News)

A “proud Zionist” giving a speech at a “Summer Simcha” sounds wonderful.

The one in question was given on August 30 by Dana Nessel, the first Jewish attorney general in Michigan’s history, and after hearing it my jaw dropped. As someone who has written about antisemitism for 25 years, I had been proud of her courage in July when she said she would not appear at the Democratic committee meeting.

Why not?

“I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome,” she said then. “I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying. And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”

To openly say something like that means Nessel has been betrayed by her party for being Jewish, and there was nothing she could say to assure herself that she’d be safe. Perhaps this was a cry for help. And it may have been answered with a call to show her usefulness by delivering an absurd speech that no gentile would ever dare give. Not even antisemite Nick Fuentes.

Nessel uttered what may be the most bizarre sentence I have heard in my life, somehow speaking of Israel and climate change.

“What good is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist if the planet is no longer inhabitable?” she asked.

Had Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said something similar, it would be a far bigger scandal than anything he has faced so far – including his response to a March terrorist attack against Temple Israel, which he initially condemned but then contextualized by referring to the attacker’s family members killed in Israeli strikes, before apologizing only recently; and having antisemite Hasan Piker campaign with him.

Nessel had the audacity to say El-Sayed reminds us of “tikkun olam” – the phrase that really means correcting the ills of the world to make it a better place, but which for years has been used to gaslight Jews into thinking that social justice for others means we should ignore our own safety concerns and traditions. This propaganda is often effective with people unaware that tikkun olam doesn’t mean suicide, which Judaism forbids.

I did a double take watching a video of Nessel say: “As Democrats, we now face a stark choice that involves the potential of voting for members of our own party who seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and place the Jewish Diaspora in jeopardy…”

Which candidate is she referring to? El-Sayed? I don’t recall him saying Israel should be destroyed, only that he wouldn’t say it should exist. Does she know something we don’t?

If this was not bad enough, Nessel attempted to pit Jews against Christian Zionists.

“Now it feels to many of us [that] we must choose between our faith and our party,” she said. “And we are being told by non-Jews who never stepped inside a shul or even watched the Charlton Heston version of The Ten Commandments what our religion, biblical and historical ties to Israel should and shouldn’t be.”

I’ve watched The Ten Commandments more than 50 times. I urge Nessel to go to the two-hour, 59-minute mark to watch Dathan (Edward G. Robinson) betray his people as his concern is for his individual power. He says: “That rabble may follow Moses into the desert today, but when their eyes are seared red by the sun, when their cracked lips bleed for thirst, when their stomachs cramp with hunger, they will curse the name of Moses and his G-d, and I, Dathan, will lead them back to Pharaoh.”

Dathan asks everyone to give him their jewelry to make a golden calf and go back to Egypt. The real biblical Dathan is later swallowed up by the ground – not because of climate change.

I hope no person gets swallowed by the ground. But the lesson is that it is easy for any person to get swallowed up by a desire for power.

Nessel, who either has never read Megillat Esther or at least has no understanding of it, cited Queen Esther “for offering to sacrifice her own comfort and safety, and her very life, in order to save the Jewish people. It is perhaps up to us to follow in her path and to sacrifice the comfort, safety, security, and even the future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity…”

Esther got the Jews out of danger; she did not put them in it. A second grader understands this.

One of the few correct things Nessel said is that there is antisemitism in both parties. To those who clapped for Vice President JD Vance at the Republican Jewish Coalition, I would say he doesn’t deserve any Jew to put their hands together until, at minimum, he apologizes for the antisemitic tropes he used on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

And we must investigate why President Trump thought it wise to take a $400 million plane from Qatar and to what extent the country may be influenced by Qatar and to what extent it is influencing both parties.

But Nessel has made a tragic Faustian bargain. As we saw with soon-to-be Democratic Congressman Brad Lander, as long as one identifies as a Zionist and a Jew, the mob will come after them. There is no satisfying those who hate. Anyone who studies Jewish history knows this.

I suspect the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, would also have strongly objected to the way his name was invoked in this speech.

If Nessel cares about Michigan or America, she should listen to Rabbi Sacks’s 2016 address to the European Parliament, “The Mutating Virus: Understanding Antisemitism.” Sacks warned that antisemitism is not merely a threat to Jews, but to society as a whole. “The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews,” he said. “The appearance of antisemitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown.”

Sacks also explained that antisemitism changes its form over time. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion; in the 19th and early 20th centuries, because of their race; and in our time, because of their nation-state, Israel. He was careful to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from denying the Jewish people’s right to exist collectively as Jews. “Anti-Zionism is the antisemitism of our time,” he said.

In a separate 2016 Newsweek article, also titled “Anti-Zionism Is the New Antisemitism,” Sacks made the same argument in even more direct terms. He wrote that antisemitism is a “virus that survives by mutating,” and argued that the justification for antisemitism had shifted over the centuries – from religion, to race, to human rights. The target, he argued, was now increasingly the Jewish state itself.

Then, speaking about the rise of antisemitism in Europe, Sacks asked a question that seems particularly relevant today: “Whether you are Jewish, or Christian or Muslim, would you stay in a country, where your children needed armed police to protect you while you prayed?” He went on to ask whether people would remain in a country where their children needed armed guards at school, where displaying their faith could lead to abuse or attack, or where young people were intimidated at university because of events happening in another part of the world.

Someone online said it best: Nessel’s speech was “not a summer simcha, it was a summer shanda.”