Michigan AG Doesn’t ‘Feel Safe’ Attending State Democratic Party Convention Thanks to Antisemitism
Dana Nessel won't be at the August event.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said Thursday she doesn’t “feel safe” attending her party’s state convention in August due to rising antisemitism among Democrats.
“I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. 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,” she said at a roundtable on antisemitism she hosted with the Anti-Defamation League. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She stated she will not be at the party’s nominating convention when it’s held Saturday, August 29.
Aaron Tobin, an executive board member of the Oakland County Republican Party, Michigan’s largest GOP county group, is Jewish and wears a yarmulke. He sees good reason for Ms. Nessel to be afraid.
“She should feel threatened,” Mr. Tobin told The Washington Star. “There’s a lot of Jew hatred in the Democratic Party. The far-left-wing socialists, which are really communists, have taken over the party, I believe, in Michigan and nationwide. There is a huge movement led by [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mandami and Bernie Sanders, who himself is a communist.”
“Bernie Sanders, who unfortunately is Jewish, really has done a lot to legitimize the position of Jew hatred. He’s made it acceptable because all these Jew haters now can say, ‘Hey, I’m just telling you what Bernie Sanders said,’” he continued.
Ms. Nessel has accused President Trump and Republicans for years of stoking the conditions for political violence. This narrative got especially hot in October 2020, when the alleged kidnapping conspiracy against Governor Gretchen Whitmer was first charged. In the years since, several defendants beat the charges in court, while others have had convictions overturned in state court.
Ms. Nessel and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson asked each other which of their homes protesters would target in December 2020. Ms. Benson, the frontrunner in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, tells the story in her memoir “The Purposeful Warrior”: The protesters, angry about the outcome of that year’s election, went to her house. She claims they were armed, as she’s said for years, including in recent fundraising emails. But Detroit police said there is no proof anyone had a gun.
Now it’s Ms. Nessel who fears political violence and fears it within her own party — not for policy decisions she has made and not from criminals she has jailed. But because she is Jewish.
“The threats that I receive are almost exclusively antisemitic threats,” she said at the roundtable. “People aren’t interested in the fact that I’m gay. They’re not interested in the fact that I’m a woman. They are very interested in the fact that I’m Jewish.”
Mallory McMorrow, one of three contenders in the Democratic primary for retiring Senator Gary Peters’ seat along with Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens, withdrew in early July. She said during a May debate that at the Michigan Democratic Party endorsement convention in Detroit the previous month, someone shouted an anti-Jewish slur at her husband, who is Jewish.
Three months later, a Jewish statewide elected official — not only that but Michigan’s chief law-enforcement officer — says she does not feel safe at her own party’s convention.
“I will speak as a member of the Democratic Party here in Michigan that some things have changed,” Ms. Nessel said. “This cannot continue, and the fact of the matter is we have to be able to be a society where we can have intelligent discourse and debate about ideas without people being threatened and certainly without people carrying out those threats.”
Mr. Tobin said it’s different for Jews in the Republican Party.
“These are the people, the Democrats, that are now threatening Jews and feel emboldened with their Jew hatred and to threaten their lives to the point where Dana Nessel does not feel safe and many other Jewish Democrats do not feel safe going to a Democratic convention,” he told the Star. “On the other flip side of the coin, I am welcomed with open arms when I am wearing my yarmulke and go into any Republican event anywhere in the country that I have gone to, including presidential events with President Trump.”
“I went with about five to eight of my friends,” Mr. Tobin related. “We all were in yarmulkes, and people went out of their way to welcome us and thank us for coming. So there’s a stark contrast between how the Democrats are greeting Jews now and how the Republicans are embracing the Jewish community.”
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