El-Sayed, Mélenchon, and the Future They Portend

I think often of something the Lubavitcher Rebbe said in response to a question about whether the Holocaust could happen in America. Before I tell you what he answered, it’s important to explain how much respect the Rebbe had for America, how much he valued its freedoms and its inherent goodness. Despite all that, the Rebbe’s response in Yiddish was stark: it could happen tomorrow morning. In the early morning.

I won’t say that Abdul El-Sayed’s potential election to the United States Senate is a trigger for something that dramatic. But I will say that it bodes something very alarming for Jews and for the future of America.

Now, there will be readers who stop reading here, knowing that we’re already in serious trouble from right-wing elements, from MAGA and from our current president. I won’t argue that point. The political pendulum has swung further each election cycle, and the country feels as if that pendulum is about to swing itself right off the clock.

Some have accused me of anti-Muslim bias. Let me answer that plainly: I have none. My issues with El-Sayed would be the same whether he were Jewish, Christian, Hindu or Baha’i. He is blatantly, forcefully, unapologetically against the Jewish State. Not only the government of Netanyahu, not only its policies, but the idea of a Israel itself. When CNN’s Kasie Hunt asked him, three times, whether Israel has a right to exist, he deflected. “I’m not going to play this gotcha game.” The question, he said, was “quite secondary to whether or not they have a right to our tax dollars.” At his very own “Jews for Abdul” event he gave his signature thoughtful look: “I often struggle with the question” of whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Just two weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, before a single Israeli soldier had entered Gaza, he was already accusing Israel of genocide. He called Israel’s leadership “as evil as Hamas.”

To me, this is like refusing to acknowledge France’s or Spain’s right to exist as nations with their own distinct cultures and identities. Why should the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination be any different? One could excuse this as the hedging and dodging of your average politician. My fear is that in El-Sayed, we are seeing something far from average. His platform itself is predicated on his virulent anti-Israelism. It’s been a talking point of his, stated at least as often as his DSA-style reforms for America. To be fair, he says he’s “not technically or practically DSA,” yet he headlined a 2019 fundraiser for Detroit DSA, whose organizers called him “a longtime friend.”

I get it. Just a pal.

He feels to me very much like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the founder and leading figure of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), who has also made anti-Israelism a key part of his politics as he campaigns for the French presidency. Mélenchon is now working to channel the unrest sweeping France, which began over fuel prices, schools and the cost of living, into his campaign. One wonders why Israel has become part of every grievance on the European far left. One wonders if this is not another repeat of what happened in Europe in the 1930s, albeit now from the far left rather than the far right. And one wonders too, how quickly the same thing could spread to America.

Debating the widely used claim that antizionism is something other than anti-Jewishness is to dignify it. Here’s why. Imagine that someone says teapots are actually mallard ducks. I try to explain why teapots and ducks are not the same thing. By entering the absurdity, I would in some sense be validating its false claim. This is a trap that El-Sayed and so many others have used all along. The absurdity is this: Israel is home to nearly half the Jews on planet Earth. To treat its existence as an open question is to treat the safety of nearly half the world’s Jews as an open question.

We’re witnessing a level of open hostility toward Jews that many of us thought was now safely in the rearview mirror. And yet, there were over 6,000 antisemitic incidents in America in 2025 according to the Anti-Defamation League. Nearly half of them involved hostility related to Israel or Zionism. Physical assaults against Jews reached an all-time high.

These, however, are facts, figures. Analysis. But it’s more than that.

It’s like walking alone at night on a deserted street and feeling that something isn’t right, that something or someone is lurking, waiting to do you harm. You say to yourself, “Get hold of yourself, you’re just imagining things.” And so you walk on. And the feeling persists, even as you’ve arrived home and locked the doors. It could be paranoia. Yeah. Could just be that. You might want to make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Maybe switch on the TV set to hear a bit of normal life, to rid yourself of the feeling. You try. But it doesn’t go away.

It’s really one of two things.

Either you’ve just found yourself a bit shaken by nothing at all. Or, because you are a sensitive, intelligent, aware individual — who knows all too well the history that led your own grandparents to flee the pogroms of Europe, while those who ignored the warning signs perished in the conflagration that followed — you think back to the words of the Rebbe. You’re probably not mistaken to do so.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author. This piece was published in his Substack.