Rose Mallinger, 97, went to Shabbat services at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue on October 27, 2018. She was murdered there with 10 other worshipers, among them brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal and a married couple, Bernice and Sylvan Simon.
Their killer had raged online that Jews were bringing “invaders” into America. It remains the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history, committed by a far-right fanatic who saw Jews as the hidden hand behind the nation’s decline.
Jewish communities marked the eighth anniversary on Tuesday.
Far-right Jew-hatred hasn’t gone anywhere. But the hidden-hand theory has a second home, and in Michigan it has a Senate campaign.
As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks taught, antisemitism survives by mutating. Medieval Europe hated Jews for their religion; the 19th and 20th centuries, for their race. Today, they are hated for their nation-state.
Each mutation borrows its age’s highest moral authority. Churchmen cited scripture; the Nazis, race science. Today’s antisemites cite human rights, deceptively demonizing Israel as a “genocidal apartheid state” whose very existence is a crime.
The host changes. The diagnosis never does: the Jews are the reason you suffer.
Police officers guard the Tree of Life synagogue following shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US, October 27, 2018. (credit: REUTERS/JOHN ALTDORFER)The Michigan strain
I’m writing this before Michigan votes on November 3, not knowing whether Abdul El-Sayed will beat Mike Rogers. The result will matter enormously, and I’ll explain why. But the infection didn’t wait for the returns. It has already spread through every corner of his campaign.
Start with the candidate. El-Sayed calls the Jewish state illegal and genocidal, says he struggles with whether it should even exist, and answered a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue by explaining the attacker’s pain. Repeatedly asked whether Iran or Israel poses the greater threat to America, he dissembles.
What makes him dangerous is how he sells this. Asked in a primary debate how he’d make life more affordable, El-Sayed demonized AIPAC and said he would keep Michigan’s money home rather than send it “somewhere else to drop bombs on other people and their kids.”
In August, he declared, “Israel is an affordability issue,” tying it to kids’ glasses, health care, and schools. He told CNN a Democrat who believes in human rights has no reason but money to support Israel, and his fundraising emails blame AIPAC for most of his campaign woes.
Follow the logic. AIPAC is an American organization of American citizens. El-Sayed casts it as a foreign agent bleeding Michigan dry, and Israel’s supporters as bought or bigoted. That’s the dual-loyalty charge, the oldest slander against Diaspora Jews, dressed up as campaign-finance reform.
Cenk Uygur’s Rebellion PAC took that message to its logical end. Its online ad, recycled from Uygur’s failed 2024 presidential run with a new pro-El-Sayed ending, shows a Michigan couple who can’t afford eggs or bananas because their taxes fund Israel’s military, while Israelis get the universal health care Americans are denied. In this ad, Rogers, naturally, answers to Israel instead of Michigan.
When the Anti-Defamation League called the ad a case study in antisemitism, El-Sayed’s campaign only said that it was “not affiliated in any way” and that no one speaks for Abdul but Abdul. It never said what was wrong with the message and ignored a follow-up. Of course not. The message is El-Sayed’s.
The ad was also a lie. Aid to Israel costs each American about $11 a year, nearly all of it spent with American companies on American jobs. Not one dollar touches Israeli health care. Egg prices are down 64% from their peak.
But the ad was never about facts. It’s one of Europe’s oldest libels: your table is empty because the Jews took your bread, and your leaders serve “them,” not you.
Look who surrounds El-Sayed. Hasan Piker, Uygur’s nephew, rallied for him and said America “deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed called Bassem Youssef “hilarious,” and Youssef told Candace Owens 9/11 was an Israeli false flag.
More than a dozen donors to Dan Bilzerian, whose campaign ad asked whether it was time to revisit “that Austrian painter’s opinions,” have also given to El-Sayed.
That’s the far-left and far-right in the same donor file. The Tree of Life murderer and Rebellion PAC’s scriptwriters likely disagree about almost everything, but they agree on whom to blame for what they dislike in America.
Even the Democratic fiancé of Haley Stevens, whom El-Sayed beat in the primary, now says he’ll vote for Rogers because El-Sayed blames Jews for problems “in no way traceable to them.”
Tlaib says the quiet part
Last Tuesday, the Tree of Life massacre’s eighth anniversary, Israelis went to the polls. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who has campaigned for El-Sayed, marked the day: “Regardless of which war criminal becomes prime minister, Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid will continue to face genocide, land theft, and erasure.” She demanded an arms embargo and sanctions until “Palestine is free.”
The votes hadn’t been counted. Tlaib didn’t know who would win and didn’t care. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot, or a centrist unity government: whoever leads the Jewish state is, to her, a war criminal by definition.
That’s the tell. For three years, much of the American and European Left insisted the problem was Netanyahu. Tlaib dropped the pretense: the problem is that a Jewish state exists at all. She has defended “from the river to the sea” as an aspirational call, and her “free Palestine” means the same thing: a map without Israel. The word for erasing a state is “policide.”
What Tuesday will tell us
If El-Sayed loses, Democrats will be tempted to call it a Michigan story about one flawed candidate. It isn’t. He won his primary saying all of this, with Piker on stage. Bernie Sanders campaigned at his side, and Barack Obama joined him last week.
If he wins, the damage is worse. The party’s far-left will learn that blaming the collective Jew for the grocery bill wins Senate seats. Its mainstream will learn something more dangerous: it doesn’t need to excise this sickness, because voters won’t punish it.
The Tree of Life congregation buried 11 Jews because one man believed Jews were the hidden cause of America’s problems. Eight years later, a major party’s Senate nominee says the Jewish state and an American Jewish lobby are why Michiganders can’t afford groceries or health care; his allies put it in an ad, and a sitting congresswoman demands a map without Israel.
The virus has learned to speak the language of “progress.” Whatever Michigan decides on November 3, the Democratic Party has been told what it’s carrying. The only question is whether it wants to be cured.
The writer is a contributing opinion writer for The Jerusalem Post and other Jewish publications, as well as an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former New York Police Department officer.