The Crisis for Democrats in Michigan

T he 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 Speaker 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. [ Graeme Wood: Something is happening to America’s moral code ] 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.