By Jonathan Chait
Friday, August 28, 2026
The hard-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker warned Jewish
Americans last week that their excessive identification with Israel would
subject them to anti-Semitic attacks. “If Jews in America keep putting this
idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone
is going to come around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind
you, but against American Jews,” he said. Piker’s tone was one of rueful
concern, not unlike the pose adopted by anti-Semites throughout history. “No
person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of
the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on
their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a
policy both for us and for them,” the Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh said
in 1941.
Several leading Democrats, including Senator Elissa
Slotkin of Michigan and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, issued
statements denouncing Piker’s ugly warning to the Jews as a barely veiled
anti-Semitic threat. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for Michigan’s other
Senate seat, trod more carefully. He issued a
statement “in response to Hasan Piker’s comments” affirming that “all
Americans deserve the right to advocate for what they believe without fear of
violence” and denouncing anti-Semitism, but the statement itself did not say
whether Piker’s comment qualified as anti-Semitism. El-Sayed instead dismissed
Piker as a distraction, saying at a recent rally, “The effort to make this race
about a streamer in L.A. is actually kind of laughable.”
Most Democrats followed El-Sayed’s line that Piker was
irrelevant. “This election is about what’s going to happen when we elect Abdul
to the United States Senate. I am done, so don’t any reporter ask me again
about Hasan Piker. It’s not what November is about,” Representative Debbie
Dingell said at a rally for El-Sayed.
Democrats have good reason to say this. El-Sayed is
running a close race to hold a seat that Democrats probably need to retain to
win control of the Senate in the midterm elections.
But the truth is that Piker, and the uncomfortable
questions raised by his alliance with El-Sayed, is one of the important
questions at stake in the election. If Piker were just an internet pundit, his
rant—the latest entry in a long list of outrageous comments he has made—would
be of little consequence to the Democratic Party. Piker has said that “America
deserved 9/11,” praised Mao Zedong as “one of the great leaders of this world,”
and mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union as “one of the greatest
catastrophes of the 20th century.” His ideology is profoundly
authoritarian. But several left-wing Democrats, especially El-Sayed, have
campaigned with Piker and elevated him into one of their most prominent
surrogates. So El-Sayed’s alliance with Piker has become a political and moral
crisis.
In Michigan, Democrats are trying to avoid handing
Republicans their first Senate win in the state in more than three decades. But
if El-Sayed wins, he would throw open the doors of the party to a strain of
militant politics that many Jews justifiably consider dangerous. The Democratic
Party is now divided between those who are trying to force El-Sayed to stop
encouraging left-wing anti-Semites and those who give him their unconditional
support.
***
The Michigan Senate election has presented liberals with
a grim choice. The Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, has pledged support for a
corrupt, racist, authoritarian-minded administration. Rogers hasn’t made even
the tiniest concession to Donald Trump critics. But supporting El-Sayed means
accepting a strain of anti-Semitic politics that to date has had no place
within the Democratic Party.
What’s more, El-Sayed has already said that he intends to
use his victory as a platform to reshape the party. Him winning could invite a
future in which the United States has not just one party that is open to bigots
but two.
Although El-Sayed has never said anything nearly as
inflammatory as the sorts of comments Piker makes routinely, his mixture of
anti-Zionism and populism treats pro-Israel activism as a nefarious and all-pervasive
force. He has denied
that any Democrat who believes in human rights could have any motive other than
money for holding a position on Israel different from the one he prefers.
El-Sayed tends to depict nearly all opposition to his candidacy as financially
driven, but when applied to Jewish political activity, this charge becomes even more conspiratorial.
Ann Arbor, where El-Sayed lives, is home to a branch of
the Free Palestine movement that has engaged in violent intimidation of Jewish
Democrats. Activists at the University of Michigan not only seized the central
campus grounds for their own but also vandalized the business of Jordan Acker,
a Democratic regent, and made middle-of-the-night attacks on his home, one of
which involved shattering his window with a jar of urine.
El-Sayed has campaigned on the Michigan campus with Amir
Makled, a lawyer who defended the protesters and who has shared
anti-Semitic and pro-Hezbollah social-media posts. When the Justice Department
charged eight of the protesters—one of whom had worked on El-Sayed’s
campaign—in a plot to commit still more acts of intimidation, El-Sayed treated
the indictment as biased, telling reporters, “It’s a lot more about what you’re
advocating for that gets you indicted or not indicted, rather than what you
did.”
Dana Nessel, the state’s attorney general, has faced
anti-Semitic harassment and has said that she plans to skip the state party’s
August convention rather than endure more abuse. At the party’s April
nominating caucus, Mallory McMorrow, a then-candidate for Senate, reported that
her Jewish husband was subjected to an anti-Semitic slur. On the weekend before
the primary, Walter Masterson, a left-wing streamer who has appeared with
El-Sayed, disrupted
an event for Haley Stevens, El-Sayed’s pro-Israel opponent in the Democratic
primary, forcing the brewery hosting it to cancel the event. El-Sayed did not
condemn the bully-boy tactics used on his behalf.
Before he warned American Jews that they were bringing
anti-Semitism on themselves by identifying with Israel, Piker displayed on his
Twitch stream a quote attributed to Jeremy Moss, the Democratic nominee for
Congress in a suburban Detroit district: “The entire purpose of my campaign is
to make sure America continues to support Israel. I don’t think it’s wrong for
Jews in America to want to put Israel first. America is not our homeland and we
have been victims of antisemitism here.” Moss insists that the quote is a pure
fabrication, and no one has yet produced any evidence of its authenticity.
Numerous Democrats denounced Piker’s comments. Instead of
apologizing, though, Piker replied on X,
“Aipac boss call was made,” implying that only the influence of the pro-Israel
lobby could have caused Democrats to object to his rhetoric.
El-Sayed has refused pleas from his fellow Democrats to
break off his alliance with Piker, who joined him at a pool party on the last
day of campaigning before the primary. El-Sayed first brushed off the requests
by likening Piker to Joe Rogan, a controversial podcaster whose show some
Democrats have appeared on (but not a figure they have brought out on
the campaign trail). More recently, he argued that the demands that he distance
himself from Piker come from “cancel culture that all of us agreed was a bad
idea back in 2020, but we seem to want to bring it back.”
This is a dodge. El-Sayed’s fellow Democrats are not
trying to silence or punish Piker. They are asking El-Sayed, who chose to bring
Piker out to campaign for and endorse him, to make clear where he stands.
“Abdul El-Sayed had a prime opportunity to cut ties with Piker and directly
disavow his words, but he did not,” Democratic Representative Hillary Scholten
of Michigan told
Politico. “There is a lot of work left to do to unite the party.”
Notably, El-Sayed is using an evasive construction
similar to the one that J. D. Vance has employed to justify his friendship with
Tucker Carlson. “We have far more important work to do than canceling each
other,” the vice president told a conservative gathering last year. The reason
Vance uses this deflection is obvious. He wishes to benefit from Carlson’s
support without being held responsible for his ally’s most inflammatory claims.
This has set off a bitter struggle within the right. Some Republicans are
trying to throw Carlson out of the coalition; Vance wants to keep him in.
Democrats have little trouble understanding that the
right-wing infighting over Carlson is about whether the Republican tent, which
already includes racists, nativists, and vicious Islamophobes, is also big
enough to include anti-Semites. They have correspondingly little trouble making
harsh judgments about the moral compromises Republicans are contemplating in
the process.
What many Democrats don’t wish to admit is that they are
entertaining a similar choice themselves. El-Sayed and Piker have professed
their abhorrence of anti-Semitism. But so has Vance—and, so, for that matter,
has Carlson. If your opposition to anti-Semitism applies only to your
ideological adversaries, and you excuse or ignore it from your allies, it is an
empty bromide.
When Democrats dismiss the controversy over Piker and the
movement he stands for, they are treating the growing influence of left-wing
anti-Semitism as unworthy of concern—or, worse still, a fait accompli. The
Democrats imploring El-Sayed to renounce Piker want more than a generalized
promise to safeguard Jewish safety, or a statement that “nobody” speaks for the
candidate. They are seeking some assurance from El-Sayed that he will speak out
in opposition to attacks against Jews by his own supporters.
El-Sayed has responded as if the only reason Democrats
might hesitate to endorse him is that they hold a personal grudge against him.
“There are a few people who are still nursing wounds or grievances from the
primary,” he told Semafor. “I get it. Losing is hard.” It is true that
losing elections is hard. Losing your moral principles, on the other hand, can
be surprisingly easy.
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