Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish, told a private gathering of Jewish Democrats last weekend that they carry “a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest,” according to a report from Fox News.
Ms. Nessel made the remarks Sunday at a closed-press event in Birmingham, Michigan, hosted by the Michigan Democratic Party’s Jewish Caucus. Fox News reported that she invoked the biblical story of Queen Esther, urging attendees to sacrifice their people’s “comfort, safety and security” for the chance to “save the rest of humanity.”
The comments land amid a widening rift among Michigan Democrats over Israel, as the state heads toward a hotly contested Senate race. State Sen. Jeremy Moss and Ms. Nessel are among prominent Michigan Democrats who have withheld an endorsement of Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, a vocal critic of U.S. military aid to Israel, following his March comment tying an attack on a West Bloomfield synagogue to Israel’s actions in the Middle East.
Mr. El-Sayed attended the same Sunday event and again apologized to the Jewish Caucus, having already done so a day earlier at the Michigan Democratic Party’s nominating convention in Lansing. Ms. Nessel has said she will not back Republican Mike Rogers in the race, but has yet to endorse Mr. El-Sayed over his stance on Israel.
According to Fox News, Ms. Nessel also questioned the value of defending Israel’s existence if climate change goes unaddressed, and cast support for President Donald Trump as “an abdication of our responsibilities as Jews.”
The remarks drew swift criticism. Hen Mazzig, a senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, pushed back on Ms. Nessel’s use of the Esther narrative, noting that “Esther risked her own safety for the Jewish people’s survival” rather than setting it aside for a broader cause. George Mason University law professor David Bernstein went further, comparing the sentiment to “Jewish Stalinists who stayed with Stalin through the pact with Hitler.”
In a same-day opinion piece, Cornell Law School visiting professor Menachem Z. Rosensaft called the remarks a “new low in contemporary political discourse” and wrote that Jewish safety is not and can never be negotiable or sacrificed for any reason, arguing Ms. Nessel’s Esther comparison misreads the biblical story.
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