Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a poster child for “progressive” Democratic identity politics, is suddenly baffled as to why she’s persona non grata at her party’s state nominating convention later this month.
“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 discussion last week. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
“The threat that I receive are almost exclusively anti-Semitic threats,” Nessel said. “People aren’t interested in the fact that, you know, 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.”
Nessel is deeply troubled that being Jewish has become an issue and longs for the bygone days when simply being an openly lesbian public official was cause for celebration in the Democratic Party.
“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.”
Let’s set a few things straight.
When Nessel was first elected, she proudly touted becoming Michigan’s first Jewish attorney general as well as the first openly lesbian person elected to the office. Both distinctions appeared prominently in her official attorney general biography. Nessel now advocating for “intelligent discourse and debate about ideas” is about as convincing as President Trump lamenting the lack of civility on social media.
When Nessel first ran for office, she introduced herself to Michigan voters with a 2017 campaign ad while seated in front of a fireplace posing this question:
“So when you’re choosing Michigan’s next attorney general, ask yourself this: Who can you trust most not to show you their penis in a professional setting? Is it the candidate who doesn’t have a penis? I’d say so.”
Make no mistake, Dana Nessel has been an undeniable lightweight since taking office in 2019, and I’ve mercilessly questioned her competence in Deadline Detroit, where I’ve repeatedly criticized her most consequential failures.
Among them was her handling of Beaumont Health. Nessel ignored warnings as one of the nation’s premier regional hospital systems unraveled, then approved its controversial merger with Spectrum Health while former CEO John Fox walked away with a $10 million golden parachute on top of the more than $50 million he collected during his roughly six-year tenure.
If Dana Nessel were being badgered and harassed because of her record as attorney general, I’d be among the loudest cheerleaders.
She isn’t.
In Michigan, incompetence isn’t disqualifying for elected officials. Being Jewish is.
That Michigan’s chief law enforcement officer says she can no longer assure her own safety at a Democratic Party gathering is a startling admission. More remarkably, it isn’t the first time Dana Nessel has effectively been forced to disqualify herself because she’s Jewish.
As I noted in a post last May, Nessel admitted that attacks questioning her legal objectivity because she is Jewish ultimately led her to drop charges against seven anti-Israel protesters arrested at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus—a university that had become a hotbed of antisemitism even before the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks.
Nessel said she was influenced by criticism from Rep. Rashida Tlaib and others who argued that her Jewish identity made her incapable of fairly prosecuting pro-Palestinian activists.
Instead of determining whether probable cause existed to move forward, Nessel said Judge Cedric Simpson became consumed with motions seeking her disqualification and repeatedly delayed the proceedings. The breaking point, Nessel said, came when Simpson prepared to investigate the Jewish Community Relations Council of Ann Arbor after it issued a statement defending her against allegations of religious bias. A letter inadvertently sent to a court administrator was somehow entered into the official court record.
“So now we’re at a point where the Jewish attorney general is being investigated, the Jewish Federation is being investigated—everyone’s on trial except the defendants,” Nessel said during a town hall.
It’s all part of an orchestrated nationwide campaign by antisemites operating under the guise of being “pro-Palestinian” to marginalize American Jews and prevent them from holding positions of public influence, particularly in the judiciary and law enforcement.
The campaign is gaining momentum.
Last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled the 18-member committee that will advise him on judicial appointments, boasting that it reflected the city it would serve. Yet the panel included no Jews, despite Jews comprising roughly 10 percent of New York City’s population and having long played an outsized role in the city’s legal community.
One recommended member, retired Appellate Division Justice John Leventhal, was rejected ostensibly because he represented Ghislaine Maxwell on a legal issue arising from her appeal. Yet Mamdani had no objection to naming Ramzi Kassem as his chief legal counsel despite Kassem’s representation of individuals facing national security and terrorism-related charges, including military commission proceedings involving alleged al-Qaeda operatives.
UAW President Shawn Fain, who is under federal grand jury investigation, claims he is being victimized by a Jewish court-appointed monitor because of his and the UAW’s anti-Israel positions.
Members of Congress who support Israel have also become targets.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, recently acknowledged that he voted to cut off military aid to Israel in part because of sustained threats against his family and staff—what he described as a violent and relentless campaign of intimidation by far-left anti-Israel activists.
Smith voted for an amendment introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to strip $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel from the 2027 State Department appropriations bill—a remarkable reversal for a lawmaker who previously told Jewish Insider he intended to oppose the measure.
“To date, my family and I have had our home vandalized, a fire has been set in my driveway, my neighbors’ lives have been disrupted by demonstrations in the middle of the night, town halls meant to be forums for dialogue have been shut down, and a staff member has been physically assaulted,” Smith wrote on X.
Anyone with even a modest understanding of Jewish history could have predicted that Dana Nessel would eventually become a casualty of the progressive politics she embraced.
Jews have long played outsized roles in progressive and revolutionary movements, drawn by universal ideals promising equality, tolerance, and an end to tribal prejudice.
The pattern has been remarkably consistent.
In early twentieth-century Europe, Jewish intellectuals and activists became indispensable to socialist and anti-authoritarian movements, believing those movements would finally secure their place in modern society. Yet once revolutionary regimes consolidated power, many of those same Jews were reclassified as class enemies, “rootless cosmopolitans,” or agents of foreign influence.
From Stalin’s purges to ideological campaigns across the European Left, Jewish participation was welcomed while coalitions were being built, then treated with suspicion once ideological conformity demanded new enemies.
The pattern resurfaced during America’s civil rights era. Jewish lawyers, organizers, and college students made up a disproportionate share of the Freedom Riders and other civil rights initiatives, often risking their lives to dismantle Jim Crow. By the late 1960s, as elements of the New Left embraced anti-colonial Marxism and increasingly defined Zionism as a colonial project, many of those same Jewish allies found themselves pushed to the margins.
The same dynamic has played out more recently.
The Black Lives Matter movement included repeated episodes of antisemitism. In Los Angeles, BLM organizers deliberately routed a 2020 march through one of the city’s oldest Jewish neighborhoods—home to a large Orthodox community—on the Jewish Sabbath. Synagogues, Jewish institutions, and businesses were vandalized along the route. Much of the local media nonetheless portrayed the march as peaceful while minimizing or ignoring the antisemitism.
Progressive Jewish leaders failed to confront the antisemitism, prioritizing coalition politics over the safety and dignity of their own communities.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro disclosed that while Kamala Harris’ campaign was vetting him as a potential running mate, he was asked point blank whether he was an Israeli agent. Nothing in Shapiro’s background suggested he was, other than the fact he strongly supports Israel—a dual-loyalty litmus test that no non-Jewish candidate under consideration was reportedly asked to pass.
Dana Nessel’s present predicament is simply the latest chapter in a centuries-old script.
She rode into office on a wave of identity politics, celebrated as Michigan’s first Jewish attorney general and the state’s first openly lesbian person elected to the office. Progressive orthodoxy elevated her as a trailblazer. Today, one of those identities has become a political liability.
Modern intersectionality isn’t designed to produce permanent allies. It constantly recalculates who belongs to the oppressor class.
The tragedy for Dana Nessel—and for a generation of Jewish progressives who thought their activism bought them immunity—is that the ideology she helped champion no longer has any use for her resume, her sexual orientation, or her past party loyalty.