Like most journalists, I’m a competitive sort and take pride in being first and being right. Even a cursory search of my name and Dana Nessel will reveal that I’ve been a longtime critic of Michigan’s attorney general, going so far as to dub her the state’s “Real Life Chuckles the Clown.” Preserving my remaining shreds of faith in America’s justice system requires believing that no state attorney general in the history of the republic has been as incompetent and ineffectual as Dana Nessel.
When Nessel was first elected, I cringed that her official biography pointedly highlighted that she was the first Jewish person and first lesbian to hold Michigan’s chief law enforcement office. Michigan’s Jewish population is minuscule, and neither Nessel’s religious nor her sexual identity was a qualification or accomplishment for serving as the state’s AG. Contrast Nessel with Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, who never made her sexual orientation the centerpiece of her two successful campaigns for attorney general, relying instead on a formidable record of casework and courtroom litigation.
Unfortunately for Nessel, her legal record paled by comparison. Nessel served as a Wayne County prosecutor for more than a decade and was lead attorney for a same-sex marriage case that reached the Supreme Court, although she didn’t argue the case before the justices. Still, her legal record lacked Healey’s formidable bona fides. Nessel’s reelection to a second term was hardly an endorsement of her stewardship; her Trump-endorsed opponent, Matthew DePerno, was previously fired from his former law firm over allegations of padded and false billings, which DePerno denied.
On Nessel’s watch, meaningful oversight was nonexistent—most glaringly on healthcare, when her office failed to act on urgent warnings from a former Beaumont Health vice chair and donor about declining conditions at the once-prestigious hospital system just months before a patient died from anesthesia complications while undergoing a routine colonoscopy. Nessel subsequently allowed Beaumont to be acquired without any conditions by Grand Rapids-based Spectrum Health. The former Beaumont hospitals continue to languish.
Nessel’s Jewish background has become a lightning rod. She declined to attend Michigan’s nominating convention because of repeated harassment she’s endured and fears about her safety.
“The threats 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.”
Nevertheless, during a recent address to the Michigan Democratic Party’s Jewish caucus, Nessel implicitly urged Jews to support the Senate candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed, a strident anti-Israel critic who has campaigned alongside left-wing streamer Hasan Piker—a figure notorious for asserting that America deserved 9/11. El-Sayed was in the room, although Nessel neither mentioned him by name nor formally endorsed him.
Nessel’s pitch was jaw-dropping: she insisted that Jewish voters needed to set their own communal security aside for the greater good of humanity.
“It is perhaps up to us now to follow in [Esther’s] path and sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity,” Nessel said.
To justify this sacrifice, Nessel invoked the biblical lesson of Queen Esther, celebrated on the Jewish holiday of Purim. It is a festive, carnivalesque occasion where Jews are encouraged to drink until they can no longer distinguish between the evil of Haman—a royal advisor who plotted to annihilate every Jewish man, woman, and child across the Persian Empire—and the blessedness of Mordechai, Esther’s cousin and guardian who refused to bow down to the archetypal Jew-hater.
Nessel herself has some notable experience with getting publicly blitzed, though not in celebration of Purim. In 2021, Michigan’s chief law enforcement officer famously drank so much at a Michigan–Michigan State football tailgate that friends had to help her up the stadium stairs and a wheelchair was fetched to keep her from stumbling in the parking lot. She later offered a sheepish social media confession about being a “lightweight.”
Speaking to the Jewish caucus, Nessel explained her rationale for Jewish self-sacrifice for the world’s greater good.
“What good is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?” Nessel asked, referring to climate change.
That sentiment would certainly put a big smile on the face of the healthcare worker in the photo below, hoisting a “From the River to the Sea” sign at a rally organized by the Arab American Medical Association just weeks after October 7. In Nessel’s view, if Jews would simply stop worrying about their own existence and subordinate their own safety and security to causes she regards as more consequential, the world could achieve peace and curb greenhouse gas emissions.
I studied the story of Esther while attending Hebrew school in Toronto, and I wondered how I missed Nessel’s broader lesson of the biblical story. I recalled being taught that Esther was willing to risk her life to save Jews from extermination, not to offer them up for slaughter. Menachem Rosensaft, general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress and a lecturer at Columbia Law School, apparently also learned the same lesson.
“It would appear that Nessel did not pay attention in her religious school classes at West Bloomfield’s Temple Kol Ami, since Esther did no such thing,” Rosensaft wrote in eJewishPhilanthropy (eJP). “What Esther did was risk the displeasure of her husband King Ahasuerus (the Persian king Xerxes I) and possibly her own life in order to ensure the survival of her people — that is, the Jewish People. Nessel’s analogy is, to be kind, entirely off base.”
Rosensaft said Nessel’s remarks “constitute a new low” in contemporary political discourse.
“Simply put, it is ludicrous for anyone, let alone a state attorney general, to state categorically that anything, including ‘the needs of the world,’ should ever be placed above Jewish survival,” he said.
Rosensaft noted that Nessel is from the same state where Henry Ford used The Dearborn Independent in the 1920s to peddle antisemitic polemics in the American mainstream.
“Before [Nessel] opens her mouth again, it would behoove her to watch Gaylen Ross’ superb documentary, ‘Sapiro v. Ford: The Jew Who Sued Henry Ford,’ which chronicles how this particular brand of antisemitism endangered American Jews and targeted Jewish survival,” Rosensaft said. “In the 1930s, America Firsters such as Michigan native Charles Lindbergh and Detroit-area priest Father Charles Coughlin wanted Jews to keep silent about the persecution of Jews in Germany because they felt that Stalin was a greater threat than Hitler. We know how that turned out.”
Nessel might also consider reading historian Timothy W. Ryback’s recent article in The Atlantic about the League of Nationalist German Jews, a fringe faction of roughly 7,000 fiercely patriotic, middle-class professionals led by Berlin attorney Max Naumann. Convinced they were Germans first and Jews second, the group disdained Eastern European Jewish immigrants, rejected Zionism, and invited conservative speakers like Paul Fechter to attack Jewish influence in arts and media.
As the Weimar Republic fractured, Ryback said Naumann drifted hard right, first tolerating and eventually supporting Hitler’s rabidly antisemitic politics. Naumann convinced himself that Nazi antisemitism was temporary political rhetoric that would subside.
Events didn’t turn out as Naumann expected. By 1935, the Nazis outlawed Naumann’s organization and arrested him. The Jewish devotees who believed their loyalty and self-erasure would save them ultimately shared the fate of the German Jews from whom Naumann had tried so hard to distinguish himself.
Nessel urging Jews to sacrifice their own safety and security was in sharp contrast to a message Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar delivered to Muslims years ago. Speaking at an annual Council on American-Islamic Relations event in California in 2019—the very speech where she made her infamous “some people did something” remark about 9/11—Omar offered this poignant message to the American Muslim community:
Many people expect, expect our community to feel like it needs to hide every time something happens. But repeatedly we have shown them that we are not to be bullied. We are not to be threatened. We are not to be terrorized. We are strong and resilient, and we will always show up to be ourselves because we know we have a right to a dignified existence and a dignified life.
It’s as if Omar read the Book of Esther and understood its meaning.
What’s been overlooked in the critical coverage of Nessel’s speech was that she was being honored by the Michigan Democratic Party’s Jewish caucus. The timing made her appeal even more remarkable: Nessel had skipped the party’s state convention the day before, citing safety concerns, then told Jewish Democrats they might have a moral obligation to sacrifice their own “safety and security.”
If the caucus is looking for another compromised Jewish Michigan Democrat to fete, they should consider former Rep. Andy Levin.
Levin famously called Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib his “comrade” and in 2021 denied that she was antisemitic. Two years later, StopAntisemitism chose Tlaib over Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and supermodel Gigi Hadid for its 2023 “Antisemite of the Year” award.
Levin, who was defeated by Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens and was a fierce critic of AIPAC, received substantial funding from J Street, a lobbying group highly critical of Israel’s policies. J Street attacked AIPAC for being funded by billionaires, which was particularly rich given a 2010 story in The Atlantic noting how J Street tried to conceal that George Soros was a significant early donor, along with a foreign donor in Hong Kong.
J Street initially endorsed Tlaib but withdrew its support after she abandoned her backing of a two-state solution. During the 2022 midterms, a J Street-funded PAC aired a 30-second ad against Stevens and AIPAC, showing footage of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and noting that AIPAC had endorsed Republicans who voted to challenge the 2020 election results.
“No campaign cash is worth abandoning our democracy,” the narrator intoned.
Dana Nessel is hardly the only Jew who believes that sacrificing Jewish safety and self-determination to defeat Donald Trump is a noble cause.