Up (and Down) In Michigan

Words are connected with mental images. They invite unwanted puns or elicit associations buried under trash heaps of history. For me, as both a Jewish immigrant and a cultural historian, the word “Michigan” now rhymes with mishigas, a richly expressive Yiddish word that refers to a whole gamut of mind conditions and behaviors from silliness, tomfoolery, foolishness and nonsense to craziness, madness and lunatic obsession and absurdity.

Growing up in Moscow in the late 1960s and 1970s, I heard the word mishigas from my parents, especially my father, even though both had stopped hearing Yiddish as children after the death of their grandparents in the 1940s and 1950s. Owing to its nuanced tone—from playfully vaudevillian to harshly judgmental—the word mishigas was popular among the children and grandchildren of Yiddish-speaking Jews, having also entered the annals of American culture. In the autumn of 2026, Michigan/mishigas, a riveting rhyme, binding together the Ojibwe/Algonquian-originated name of a Midwestern state and the Yiddish-derived name of an irrational mental state or behavior, rings like a diagnosis.

Of the 33 senate seats up for reelection in Nov. 2026, nine races are most closely watched as they may determine who controls the Senate. Of those nine, seven are tossup races, and in four of them Democratic candidates are vying to unseat Republican incumbents, whereas in three races the contenders from both parties are fighting to fill an open seat.

In Michigan, the retirement of the Democratic senator Gary Peters created a controversial race which, by Sep. 2026, had polarized the Jewish community both in and out of the state. Former seven-term Congressman Michael J. Rogers, born in Livonia, Mich. and raised Methodist, was an army and FBI officer prior to serving for seven terms in the House of Representatives. An old unpedigreed horse of Republic politics, Rogers was once considered a consensus builder. He had on occasion disagreed with President Trump but stifled his own discontent. As an immigrant I find reprehensible the kind of anti-immigrant, xenophobic Trumpian fetor that emits from Rogers’s campaign trail. As the candidates clashed bitterly during the Oct. 21, 2026 Michigan U.S. Senate Final Debate, Rogers referred to his opponent Abdul Mohamed El-Sayed’s having “lied about being an Egyptian dual citizen” and having been “bought off by the Moslem Brotherhood, having donors to his campaign from Hamas … that support Hezbollah” and also asked: “If you’re going to go to the United States Senate, we need to know, ‘Are you for America or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?” More importantly for the question of the Jewish vote and for the national context of the 2026 midterm elections, Rogers sings, faithfully and reliably thus far, from the pro-Israel pages of the Republican hymnal.

Rogers’s Democratic opponent Dr. El-Sayed is a different case altogether. Born to Egyptian immigrants and raised in the Detroit area, son of an engineering professor who has served as a Sunni imam, El-Sayed is a Phi Beta Kappa college graduate, a former athlete and a medical epidemiologist with no political experience. On his path toward becoming the Democratic Senate nominee, El-Sayed, whose many positions align with those of so-called Democratic Socialists of America, defeated the centrist Democratic Congresswoman Haley Stevens by a narrow margin. El-Sayed is something of a Midwestern cousin of New York’s radical, anti-Israel mayor Zohran Mamdani, and he compensates for the lack of Bowdoin prep by showcasing locker-room swagger of a bright boy from a land-grant university.

In Oct. 2026, El-Sayed stated: “I think it’s time for us to realize that like, Israel is not actually our friend.” He has repeatedly blamed Israel for America’s military involvement in Iran. When asked about Israel’s right to exist, El-Sayed replies that he doesn’t believe in “ethnonational states” or “ethnostates” and cleverly adds Egypt and Saudi Arabia to the list of examples so as to downplay his flagrant antizionism. In the same breath he declares, “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” and refers to Israel “as a country which has done a genocide.” After the Mar. 2026 Hezbollah-inspired attack by Ayman Mohamed Ghazali at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, M.I., El-Sayed suggested that “hurt people hurt people,” a comment he subsequently sought to walk back and apologetically decontextualize. He has said about Israel that “they have gotten so aggressive and, frankly, so bloodthirsty […under] Netanyahu’s reign” and that the United States are subsidizing “a foreign military to do things like apartheid and genocide.” El-Sayed has reportedly distanced himself from but refused to disavow his fervent antisemitic supporter Hasan Piker.

El-Sayed’s campaign-trail rhetoric against Israel offers a foretaste of what he would push for if elected U.S. Senator. El-Sayed maligns Israel and thereby offends the majority of American Jews, and yet he drapes his anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish positions with the kind of rhetoric that appeals to both the philistine (lower gas and grocery prices) and the left-leaning younger professional (defeat Trump, stop the “stupid” war, stop military aid to Israel).

El-Sayed’s campaign-trail rhetoric against Israel offers a foretaste of what he would push for if elected U.S. Senator.

Over the weekend of Oct. 24, 2026, a political action committee by the name of Rebellion PAC, which calls for a “populist rebellion” and has a dummy website, released a minute-long, poorly acted, openly antisemitic campaign ad for El-Sayed. It features a tired bearded man and his wife, both of them vaguely Middle Eastern in appearance, talking inside a grocery store. The couple blames high food prices and absence of universal healthcare on America’s support of Israel: “Why the f-ck do we have to pay for all this?” In the ad’s finale, photos of Israeli politicians Bezalel Smotrich, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Itamar Ben-Gvir appear on the screen as the message “Rogers is for … they/them” sounds. This is followed by a photo of El-Sayed shaking the hand of an elderly person with a hearing aid and the words “Abdul El-Sayed is for you.” It doesn’t take much to recognize that the messaging, linking economics with politics and singling out a minority group (Jews) as a scapegoat, comes out of the playbook of Nazi propaganda. It’s no less bewildering that the ad also reeks of homophobia. In what has become a familiar maneuver, El-Sayed’s campaign is said to have distanced itself from the ad.

Michigan is home to about 125,000 to 130,000 Jews, or about 1.4% of the state’s electorate (and about 240,000 to 250,000 Muslims, or about 2.5% of the state’s electorate—with notable Muslim-majority communities such as Hamtramck and Dearborn.) The vast majority of Michigan’s Jews live in the metropolitan areas of Detroit, Ann Arbor and Lansing. According to the 2021 data of the Brandeis American Jewish Population Project, “nearly two thirds (61%) of Michigan’s Jewish electorate identifies with or leans toward the Democratic Party compared with 65% of the Jewish electorate nationally.” The Jewish Democratic Council of America claimed that in the 2024 Presidential election 78% of Michigan’s Jewish voters supported Kamala Harris with 22% supporting Donald Trump (88% Jewish women and 71% Jewish men.) Some data (of which I’m also a bit skeptical) indicates that “the Jewish electorate may determine the outcome” of the 2026 Michigan senate election.

How do Michigan’s Jewish voters feel about El-Sayed?

Over two weeks in Oct. 2026, I spoke with and listened to Jewish Michiganders and Michigeese as I also read social media posts, and op-eds, and open letters. My investigation was not a formal survey but rather part-conversation, part-observation. I sought to identify how the El-Sayed-Rogers Senate race betokened the nationwide trends and patterns of the Jewish political loyalties and allegiances. What I found, not surprisingly, is that in the autumn of 2026 the clear waters of Michigan reflected the furrowed faces of American Jews.

Within the general contours of Michigan’s Jewish electorate, I observed four principal subsets of Jews voting in the upcoming Senate election.

There are Jewish Republicans now rallying behind Rogers. I don’t personally know any in Michigan but I suspect their ranks have grown since the 2024 presidential election. There are single-issue Jewish voters from the ranks of the state’s largely Democratic electorate. If they voted for Trump in 2024 because of what they perceived as Harris’s lackluster support for Israel, on Nov. 3, 2026 they are more likely to vote for Rogers—against El-Sayed. I personally know such Jewish voters, and over the past two years I have grown to understand and appreciate—if not accept—their position. They include ex-Soviet Jews who have little love lost for Trump but see no way of giving their hard-earned votes to El-Sayed.

Then there are the roughly 81,000 Jewish adults in Michigan who voted Democratic in 2024, and yet their ranks are divided.

The narrowest faction are the Jews who identify as antizionist. I expect their share in Michigan to be equal to (or slightly higher) than the reported nationwide numbers, ranging from 2-3% to 7%. Jewish antizionists feel most at home on college and university campuses, and I’m regrettably familiar with a number of them in Michigan’s hallowed academic institutions. For these Jewish self-haters and Jewish political apostates, El-Sayed is an electoral dream incarnate.

The largest and most representative group of Michigan’s Jewish voters—and the group most conflicted over El-Sayed’s candidacy—are the traditional, transgenerational Democrats who, in the words of publisher and podcast host Michael J. Cohen, “are torn between their often lifelong support for the Democratic Party and their deep concerns about El-Sayed’s rhetoric.” The angst and turmoil of Michigan’s Jewish voters comes through with great power and eloquence in the comments of Howard Lovy, journalist and founder of Canary Publishing: “I’m a Michigan voter, a Jew, and a lifelong Democrat who will not be voting for Abdul El-Sayed. He supports the most repressive, fascist, genocidal regimes in the Middle East because they oppose Israel, which contains half the world’s Jews.”

In the voices of many Michigan Jews one hears despair over the prospect of voting for an opponent of Israel and Zionism. Can a vote for El-Sayed by Jews who love and support Israel ever be justified? A vote made to put an “a–hole senator” (as one Michigan voter put it) in the Senate so as to prevent Trump from doing more opprobrious things? A vote justified as practical and presumably coming from a place of ethics yet making a compact with enemies of Jewish survival? This tension found expression in an open, supplicant letter by a group of Michigan’s Jewish Democratic leaders and rabbis under the umbrella of a recently-launched group “Nonnegotiable Michigan.” Their letter, which has also gained support by rabbis and Jewish leaders outside Michigan, was released in advanced of a campaign rally in Detroit on Oct. 24, 2026, at which former President Barack Obama joined arms with Dr. El-Sayed.

In the voices of many Michigan Jews one hears despair over the prospect of voting for an opponent of Israel and Zionism.

How many of Michigan’s Jewish Democrats will not vote for El-Sayed? How many will not vote at all?

As I listened to Michigan’s Jewish voters, my refusenik pride welled up when I read this comment by a Jewish woman originally from Ukraine: “…we did not vote for El-Sayed. We are immigrants. And we know what starts with Jews does not end with Jews. We feel that unfortunately, history repeats itself. The Jews who supported Hitler ended up with the Jews who did not support him. I think, Jews who will vote for El-Sayed will regret later, if he gets elected.” Both a keener knowledge of history and a heavier burden of Jewish memory shaped the following irony-riddled response by another ex-Soviet Jew, a science professor: “I live in Michigan. Actually, Dana Nessel puts this really nicely: according to her, we (the Jewish voters) should place the needs of the world and humanity above our own self-interest and even (sic!) our own survival. If this revealing statement does not convince the Jewish voters not to vote for El-Sayed, nothing else would.”

How many of Michigan’s Jews are still indignant about the state’s Attorney General Dana Nessel’s remarks at a caucus of Michigan’s Jewish Democrats on Aug. 30, 2026 (at which El-Sayed also spoke). Nessel stated: “We [i.e. Jews] have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.” Polemical reactions and comments by Jews with Michigan connections have been mounting. Political strategist Jesse Arm, born and raised in Michigan, argued in a Washington Post opinion piece that universal concerns and values need not negate community protection: “For these reasons, the Jewish future may depart from the progressive political culture that has long found a home in places like Temple Israel [the recently attacked synagogue in West Bloomfield, a hub of Jewish life in Michigan]. Indeed, some members of that congregation are already reconsidering what that culture demands of them.” (The conservative commentator and publisher Daniel Greenfield minced no words when he called Nessel’s position “literally suicide.”)

Everything I have observed in Michigan indicates that the majority of the state’s Jewish Democratic voters occupy spaces that Robert Frost would label as “betwixt and between” (from the poem “Peril of Hope”). The boundary on the left is formed by the tokenistic position of the 1009 individuals (as of this writing) who have signed the open letter with the misleading and self-congratulatory title “Michigan Jews for Democracy”: “Michigan Jews have come together to say: …We are proud American Jews, committed to the safety and flourishing of the Jewish community, and our nation’s democracy. … Some of us are enthusiastic supporters of El-Sayed. Some of us have reservations. But one thing is clear: Mike Rogers embraces a far-right political agenda which makes Jews and all Americans less safe. … We are Michigan Jews for Democracy, supporting Abdul El-Sayed for Senate.” The boundary on the right finds its most articulate expression in the Oct. 16, 2026 op-ed by David Kramer and Lon Johnson, both of whom have held senior leadership positions in Michigan’s democratic establishment: “As a result, we will not vote for Abdul El-Sayed. Some may then conclude we, or other loyal Democrats, need to vote for a different party, but for many of us, leaving the ballot blank is an act of dignity. … Supporting a candidate is a choice, not an obligation. Party loyalty is not blind obedience. Support must be earned, and a vote is never owed.”

I do not know how many among Michigan’s Jewish Democrats will follow the lead of the signers of Jewish surrender. Nor do I know how many of the state’s career Jewish Democrats will vote “with dignity” by submitting a blank ballot. What strikes me as mishigas, to lean on the rhyme that rings in my head in connection with the El-Sayed-Rogers confrontation, is that so many of Michigan’s Jewish Democrats recognize the threat of El-Sayed yet continue to negotiate and contort themselves in plain view of the danger he posits.

It’s probably the Michigan setting, but I keep thinking of the early Hemingway short story “Up in Michigan,” composed in 1921 and included in the writer’s first published collection. Set in the small community of Horton Bay on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the story features Jim Gilmore, a blacksmith, and Liz Coates, who works as a waitress and suffers from a mad crush on Jim. In the finale, Jim takes Liz outside to the docks, rapes her, and passes out. Liz “worked out from under him and sat up and straightened her skirt and coat and tried to do something with her hair.” Then she removed her coat, covered her violator with it, and walked up “the steep sandy road to go to bed.”

If literary texts are capable of transcending their time and place in order to speak to larger questions of the human condition, this early Hemingway story has helped me understand the psychological predicament of those among Michigan’s Jews who hesitate to—yet plan to—vote for El-Sayed. This Senate candidate verbally commits, and symbolically incites, violence against Israel and Jewish identity, and yet Jewish supporters drape his rhetoric over with mirth, apologism or denial, and then return to their homes and their beds.

Michigan’s Jews have the illusion of being able to influence their Senate election. What about America’s Democratic Jewish voters who do not live or vote in Michigan but have followed the El-Sayed-Rogers race with a mix of foaming passion and deepmost apprehension? Like Simon Lazarus, a Washington D.C. attorney who used to work on President Carter’s Domestic Policy Staff, some of America’s Jewish Democrats have been making “Jewish cases for electing Abdul El-Sayed.” Echoing Michigan’s Jewish Attorney General Nessel, Lazarus has opined: “Understandably, some American Jews distrust El-Sayed’s record of ties with antisemitic demagoguery and his views on Israeli policy toward Palestinians—though many Jewish liberals align closer to El-Sayed on that latter front. But the larger interest of American Jews—indeed, of Jews globally—requires preservation of the constitutional order on which their security rests.” I find the appeal to the “larger interests” (sounds like a riff on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”) particularly jarring. Of everything I have read about the Michigan election, I find myself both enthralled and unsettled by a recent essay by the Jewish author, influencer and magazine publisher Elissa Wald. I admire Wald yet find her position—straddling Zionism and Jewish-American progressivism—tragically fallacious. In a piece published on Oct. 14, 2026 and titled “My Anti-MAGA Zionist Manifesto,” Wald writes (emphasis her own):

“I don’t need to be convinced that El-Sayed is bad news. Ordinarily I wouldn’t touch him with a stick. … And there is no doubt in my mind that failing to flip the Senate away from Trump will do far worse harm NOW than El-Sayed becoming one of 535 representatives in Congress [sic].

I have absolutely no illusions about El-Sayed and who he is. His tight friendship and extensive campaigning with Hasan Piker tells me all I need to know about him. But he does not have the power to bend all the levers of government to his will. Trump does.”

Much as I would like to, I cannot find political justification in the argument that voting for and electing El-Sayed would put Trump in check. Such a vote, whether it’s allegedly made in the name of universal human values or for the sake of some Jewish political pragmatics is unthinkable folly, indeed an act of mishigas.

I would submit that the phenomenon of Jewish support for El-Sayed and other openly anti-Israel candidates or elected officials in the Democratic party does not logically or rationally stem from issues affecting Israel or the Jewish diaspora. Rather, it exemplifies the phenomenon I would like to call the “Jewish nostalgia for an American political home” in the Democratic party. Fueling this nostalgia is the anxiety that Jews no longer influence mainstream American politics. Various “Jewish cases” for the election of El-Sayed lay hopelessly bare a longing for the time when Jewish in America rhymed with progressive if not socialist, when Jews were civil libertarians if they weren’t gangsters (sometimes both), and when the Democratic party was a political home for the vast majority of America’s Jews.

Various “Jewish cases” for the election of El-Sayed lay hopelessly bare a longing for the time when Jewish in America rhymed with progressive if not socialist, when Jews were civil libertarians if they weren’t gangsters (sometimes both), and when the Democratic party was a political home for the vast majority of America’s Jews.

This nostalgia also stems from a chronic reluctance to recognize that the Democratic party is becoming more and more a party of phantoms of socialism who either refuse to learn from twentieth-century history (especially Soviet history) or are too ignorant to do so. This Jewish Democratic nostalgia, like most other forms of nostalgia, does not address issues or remedy the present. It is a coping mechanism for the ones who have experienced political and social bereavement. Countless are the Jewish losses in America of the first quarter of the 21st century, and the biggest political loss is the Democratic party’s support of Israel. (That a Dominican-American congressman from the Bronx and a maverick Pennsylvania senator—rather than the Jews in the house or senate Democratic leadership—are the staunchest Democratic supporters of Israel speaks volumes about the predicament.)

Calls for the creation of an anti-MAGA Jewish coalition feel like an eleventh-hour performance of Jewish nostalgia for political influence. Such nostalgia has its deeper origins in the late 1960s, when Jewish activism ceased to be inherently Jewish as American Jews had achieved the status quo and overcome de facto discrimination while the still young Israel enjoyed national popularity and antisemitism was becoming marginal or subterranean.

Calls for the creation of an anti-MAGA Jewish coalition feel like an eleventh-hour performance of Jewish nostalgia for political influence.

You may wonder why the one writing these lines—a former refusenik, a Bostonian, an author and college professor—is so taken with this year’s Michigan Senate election. The answer is that through the lens of the Michigan Senate race I see a story of the impending Jewish divorce from the Democratic party and thus a refraction of my own political journey in America.

Shedding illusions is hard, and its even harder to do so when nostalgia performs a siren’s song. I speak from the experience of my family members in the former USSR, Israel, and America. When I reference the pain and pleasure of shedding of one’s political illusions, I also speak of the nearly forty years it’s taken to dispel my own. I’ve never once voted Republican, but over the past two years I have realized I can no longer vote Democratic. I detest Trump and will not vote for him or his menials, but I cannot give my vote to those who refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and those who actively seek Israel’s undoing. This acknowledgment of political homelessness, a particularly difficult predicament for a Jewish immigrant in America, brings me to three closing reflections on the subject of the Senate election in Michigan.

Shedding illusions is hard, and its even harder to do so when nostalgia performs a siren’s song.

One: Learn from the legacy of Jewish refuseniks. I have previously argued that refuseniks were the last great Jewish political movement in Diaspora. The purpose of the refusenik movement was to free Jews from the Soviet bondage. Ours was an activism on behalf of Jews that also made the world a better place, not the other way around. There is a direct lesson for today’s Jewish voters torn between their past allegiance to the Democratic party and the growing threat of its left wing. American Jews tend to celebrate their participation in American progressive politics while failing to see a powerful alternative in the activism of Jewish refuseniks. Would that today’s American Jews abandon the idea of political activism for the sake of others—including those who, like El-Sayed, openly articulate their opposition to Israel and Zionism.

Two: Putting an enemy of Jewish selfhood in the U.S. Congress can never be a Jewish goal. El-Sayed as a Democratic contender who exploits the climate of Trumpian America to empower himself is less troubling than the very idea of a candidate running against Israel. In this sense, El-Sayed is also a cipher for the radicalized left of the Democratic party: a younger, less Soviet (and more Baathist) muscular version of Senator Bernie Sanders. Explaining why he recently gave one million dollars to El-Sayed’s campaign (following the party lead of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), Senator Sanders stated: “I was outraged … that AIPAC … dumped 9 million dollars in support of Mike Rogers. … And what AIPAC wants is continued US financial support for the Netanyahu government in Israel, which, in my view, is a genocidal government … and a continuation of the war in Iran … . AIPAC and Netanyahu want to continue that war with Trump [sic], and I think we’ve got to end that war. Abdul believes we’ve got to end that war.”

Make no mistake: a vote for El-Sayed is a vote against Israel, not a vote against the Netanyahu government. Saying this during the Israeli elections that may well see Netanyahu defeated is especially revealing.

Three: A vote is not a matzevah—whatever else it says besides the pei-nun and one’s name in the past (political) life. A vote is not to be made out of nostalgia for a bygone political era. Do not vote to unearth your political past or your ancestral memories of Jewish activism on behalf of civil libertarianism. Those memories had been put to their final rest in the 1970s. Rather than submitting empty ballots of Jewish dignity, perhaps we should pour what remains of Jewish activism, Jewish influence and Jewish resources into a third party, moderate, centrist, founded on traditional liberal values? Or, perhaps instead America Jews should look beyond these shores toward a new great aliyah—the 21st century American aliyah.

Do not vote to unearth your political past or your ancestral memories of Jewish activism on behalf of civil libertarianism.

I will stop here—out of nostalgia for the illusion of Jewish unity. In closing, I turn to Isaac Babel, that great poet of Jewish upheaval. Babel has a short story from 1913 titled “Childhood. At Grandmother’s.” This early gem features a Jewish boy’s weekly Shabbat visits with his grandmother. She feeds him abundant meals with gefilte fish and fruit compote and teaches him about life in her imperfect Russian with an admixture of Yiddish and Polish. I used to think that American Jews were done loving their children and grandchildren so much that they would break their hearts with harsh and cynical wisdom. Perhaps I was wrong. What this Odessan grandmother says to her grandson in the 1900s applies to the socio-political illusions of today’s Jewish voters who find themselves at the crossroads:

“’Learn,’ she suddenly speaks with power. ‘Learn, you will achieve everything—wealth and fame. You must know everything. All of them will fall and prostrate themselves before you. All must envy you. Do not have friends. Do not give them money. Do not give them your heart.’”

Maxim D. Shrayer is a bilingual author and a professor at Boston College. He was born in Moscow and has been living in the US.. since 1987. His recent books include “A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas” and “Immigrant Baggage,” a memoir. Shrayer’s new collection of poetry, “Zion Square,” came out in 2025.