Michigan Democrats cross the party line

Hasan Piker warned on a livestream that American Jews tying their identity to Israel will inevitably face physical retaliation. And for Michigan's Jewish Democrats, it's the moment their own party's coalition became a physical threat.

I'm Tamar.

And I'm Eli. This is another episode of Tribe & State, a Daily Lion production, where we follow where Israel and the Jewish world are pulling together, and where they are pulling apart.

It's a week where the boundary between political critique and physical safety fractured across local politics. Today we're looking at Jewish Democrats crossing party lines in Michigan, when mergers become proxy fights, pricing out the open sanctuary, and burying a soldier after four decades. And then, for our members, we go deep on the Canadian Jewish establishment at the municipal crossroads, looking at what happens when local zoning disputes become the new frontline for diaspora politics.

The first story on the desk this week is the fallout in Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for the Senate seat there last month, which, like we said last week, shattered the old assumption of permanent Democratic support for Israel. But the progressive coalition that got him across the finish line is now cracking under the weight of what one of his own surrogates broadcast to his audience. The tension here is between the people trying to win an election and the people who live in Michigan.

That surrogate is Hasan Piker. He told his audience that if American Jews continue to tie their identity to Israel, they're going to face physical attacks. The exact warning he issued is that eventually someone’s going to come around and take action. It's a remarkable thing to hear spoken aloud on the periphery of a mainstream political campaign.

The reaction from the right treats that broadcast as an immediate physical threat. The writers making this case look at Piker's monologue and see a framework that's actively suggesting that antisemitism is self-inflicted. They argue that this rhetoric essentially tells Jews they bring the violence upon themselves by maintaining a relationship with Israel.

That alarm is what's driving people to break their oldest political habits. Which brings us to Rabbi Asher Lopatin. He's a traditional Democratic voter who's crossing party lines to vote for the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, just to make sure this candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, doesn't win. You really hear the fracture in a kitchen-table decision like that. This is a person who's likely spent a lifetime voting one way, who probably disagrees with the Republican platform on almost every domestic issue, but who looks at the rhetoric El-Sayed allows in his camp and decides he can no longer pull the lever.

Lopatin's reasoning is what makes the break so striking. He acknowledges that he sympathizes with the Democratic goal of maintaining Senate control. But he argues that a candidate with these associations is simply beyond the pale, concluding that someone like Abdul El-Sayed is unacceptable. A column in The Algemeiner points out that Republicans like Mike Rogers are demanding El-Sayed disavow surrogates like Hasan Piker, who argues that tying yourself to Israel means tying yourself to a country that inevitably will be seen as Jewish ISIS.

The political center reads the exact same rhetoric as a tactical liability that El-Sayed just needs to manage in order to win. The people looking at the electoral math are completely focused on the margins of a razor-thin race. They emphasize that Jewish voters are a tiny fraction of the electorate, but that the defections among Jewish Democrats could matter in a race that close.

In that reading, the problem is mathematical rather than moral. They're looking at polling that shows broad support among those Democratic voters for presidential candidates who commit to reducing U.S. aid, and they see a candidate trying to thread a very difficult needle. El-Sayed has to distance himself from the worst of his surrogate's comments without losing the young, progressive base that surrogate brings to the polls. It's an incredibly delicate balancing act for a campaign that needs both groups to show up in November.

He attempts that distancing by coming out and stating that he opposes any rhetoric that puts the community at risk. It's a very carefully constructed sentence. It treats the surrogate's livestream as a political gaffe to be cleaned up, rather than a promise of violence.

That gap in perception is the whole story. If you view the livestream as a political headache, a statement about opposing risky rhetoric solves the problem. But if you view it as a physical threat, a carefully worded distancing statement feels like an evasion. It forces voters to decide which of their fears is more urgent.

The next thing on the desk this week is a Hollywood antitrust dispute that just turned into a proxy fight over the definition of antisemitism. Mark Ruffalo is campaigning to block the pending merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery. The actor's targeting the Ellison family—who are backing the deal—by criticizing their ties to Oracle and its defense contracts with the Israeli military. Ruffalo accused Oracle executive Safra Catz of celebrating the campaign in Gaza, applying the word "genocide" to the military's actions.

The studio's response escalated this immediately. Paramount put out a formal statement accusing Ruffalo of deploying antisemitic tropes in the middle of a business dispute. The company insists that deploying the word "genocide" to attack a corporate transaction crosses a line into prejudice that it won't tolerate. That accusation's what splits the week's writing. The progressive defense reads Ruffalo as a legitimate critic of corporate power who's being silenced by a massive conglomerate. The establishment reading looks at the exact same rhetoric and sees a textbook deployment of ancient conspiracies about Jewish wealth and control.

The defense comes from J Street. Their argument is that scrutinizing a corporation's investments or the Israeli government isn't antisemitism. They worry that blurring the line between criticizing a monopoly and actual bigotry actually harms the community. In their reading, accusing an antitrust activist of prejudice just because he targets a corporate merger cheapens the fight to stop real hatred. The progressive camp takes for granted that scrutinizing corporate monopolies and Israeli policies is always protected speech, no matter how aggressively it's phrased.

Ruffalo himself is leaning heavily on this exact defense. He frames his own comments purely as a critique of military contractors and corporate monopolies. He strongly denies harboring any animus toward Jewish people, insisting the accusations of prejudice are completely dishonest. He's arguing that Larry Ellison is an oligarch who's hoarding global wealth to exert dominance, and he insists that pointing out that financial consolidation has nothing to do with religion.

You can see why that defense lands so cleanly with progressive Jewish groups. They're watching a massive media consolidation, and they see an actor using his platform to question where the money comes from. For them, targeting a defense contractor's executives over their military ties is standard activism. If the executives happen to be Jewish, that doesn't retroactively make the activism antisemitic. The fear on the left is that major corporations are now weaponizing the community's real trauma to shield themselves from antitrust scrutiny.

Mark Goldfeder takes that entire progressive defense apart. He points out that Ruffalo brought the Gaza conflict into a completely unrelated domestic business deal specifically to target the Jewish individuals involved. Goldfeder argues that Ruffalo isn't actually analyzing antitrust law here. He's assembling a very specific, very old narrative about Jewish money, Israeli entanglement, and a media giant. The establishment reading argues you can't separate the criticism from the tropes being used to deliver it.

Goldfeder actually uses the progressive groups' own definitions against them to prove the point. He notes that Ruffalo's attack on Safra Catz fits J Street's own rules about holding a Jewish individual culpable for the actions of the Israeli government. Goldfeder is exasperated by the mental gymnastics required to ignore that reality. In his words, when an organization built by scholars responds to a textual argument by refuting a strawman, it's telling you it read the text and lost.

The hypocrisy is what really animates the establishment writers this week. They're watching progressive organizations contort themselves to protect a political ally. Writers point out that Ruffalo apologized back in twenty twenty-one for accusing Israel of the gravest crime in international law. Now he's bringing back a charge he already admitted was inflammatory. The establishment reading takes for granted that swapping the word "oligarch" for "Jew" doesn't magically sanitize a conspiracy theory about media control.

The stakes here go way beyond one actor's social media feed. The entire debate over how to define antisemitism is no longer just an academic argument over the I-H-R-A or Nexus documents. It's moved straight into the real world, where organizations are actively using these definitions to shield their political allies from the fallout of their own words.

Another story on the desk this week is what the threat of violence is actually doing to the physical space of the American synagogue. We saw this in August when an attacker burst into the Central Synagogue in Manhattan, shouting, spitting, and breaking candles and candlesticks. The suspect damaged ceremonial items on the synagogue stage before assaulting people. The attacker called the worshippers pigs during the incident. He's now facing federal hate crime charges on top of the initial state charges. As we discussed last week, mainstream Jewish leadership is deeply divided over how to handle local authorities regarding security. But the focus in the writing right now is what happens to the spaces themselves when that violence crosses the threshold.

The threat picture is staggering. Mitchell Silber notes that the current landscape of threats targeting American Jews is unprecedented in its complexity. The FBI reports that Jewish people are the targets of nearly two-thirds of religiously motivated hate crimes in the US. So communities are responding the only way they can, by building fortresses. The Secure Community Network says the American Jewish community is now dedicating up to a billion dollars a year to security measures. And that changes the baseline expectation of what it means to gather. It's not just about hiring guards anymore. Tevi Troy, a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute, argues that community members must take personal responsibility and undergo whatever level of emergency training they can manage.

The reality of an attack is brutal. Emergency medical services in the United States take a median of seven minutes to reach urban areas and ten minutes for rural ones. As Michael Masters points out, most fatalities in mass-casualty events result from the delay in receiving life-saving aid rather than the initial injury itself. So the congregation itself has to become the first line of defense. But building a fortress changes what happens inside it. The people raising these concerns point out that highly visible, militarized security measures can actively detract from the feeling of safety and community. As Bennett puts it: "Nobody wants to walk into a building where you walk by loaded semi-automatic machine guns." A synagogue is supposed to be welcoming, and you can't be welcoming behind a barricade. They're asking a very painful question: "At what point does protecting a synagogue begin to change the experience for those coming in?"

That's the spiritual toll, and then there's the sheer financial cost. They worry there may be no end to what a synagogue can spend in pursuit of safety. Nobody we read this week disagrees that the threat is real, and nobody is arguing that the doors should be left unguarded. The consensus leaves open how long any community can sustain this kind of financial and psychological toll. You spend millions to keep the sanctuary safe, and in the process, you might bankrupt it. There's only so much money a community can raise before the security budget consumes the education budget, the programming, everything that makes the building worth protecting in the first place.

While communities are pouring all those millions into physical guards, they're leaving themselves completely exposed elsewhere. Mark Ginsberg makes this case. He warns that while the tools to create convincing deepfakes have become cheap and accessible, Jewish institutions have failed to update their security practices to match. It's a completely different kind of vulnerability, and it doesn't require an attacker to ever set foot in the building.

He has the numbers to back it up. The Secure Community Network documented one hundred ninety cyberattacks against synagogues and Jewish organizations. Security experts warn that attackers look for the path of least resistance. So a small synagogue might spend its entire budget on an armed guard for the front door, while an attacker uses a cheap audio clip to bypass them entirely. Ginsberg says the people running these institutions are facing adversaries with industrial-grade tools, but they're defending themselves with totally outdated advice.

This isn't just abstract hacking. Israel's National Cyber Directorate has already identified deepfake videos falsely showing the Chief Rabbi endorsing products. It's jarring to think about a rabbi's voice being weaponized against their own congregation. Ginsberg insists that Jewish organizations must apply the same urgency and funding to their digital security as they have to their physical security since October 7. He puts it bluntly: "A community that has practiced saying no politely is a community a scammer cannot script against."

But that brings us right back to the financial limit. If you need a million dollars for physical guards, and another massive budget for zero-trust digital architecture, the institution buckles. The math is completely unforgiving. The American synagogue is being forced to choose between its foundational openness and its physical survival.

Let's step away from the American political scene. The next story on the desk this week is a funeral. Forty-four years ago, an Israeli tank force was ambushed in Lebanon during the Battle of Sultan Yaacoub. Three soldiers were listed as missing in action. For decades, that's where the story stopped. The families aged, the country fought other wars, but the missing remained missing. Then this week, the military announced that the remains and personal effects of IDF Sergeant First Class Yehuda Katz had been located. After nearly half a century, he was finally buried in Israel.

Ari Sacher, writing in the Jewish Journal, builds his piece around what this return actually means for the country. He points out that for years at Katz's yeshiva, no one wanted to be the person who packed away his books. The community simply refused to erase him, leaving his room exactly as it was. Sacher argues that this exact refusal to let go is the foundation of the state's military contract.

He comes at this as a parent. Sacher says that the absolute promise to never forget a soldier is the reason Israeli parents like myself continue sending their children to defend. It's a profound observation about what sustains an army. The state is telling families that it will never stop looking, no matter how many years pass or how much it costs.

Right, and Sacher knows exactly how this looks from the outside. He writes that the country's enemies watch this massive expenditure of resources for one soldier, and they see it as vulnerability, and they imagine that our determination can be exploited. But the reading here is that what looks like a strategic weakness is actually the entire moral engine of the society.

You can't ask a family to send their child to the front unless they believe the country will turn the earth upside down to bring them back. The cost is the point.

The writing across the board this week converges on that idea. The covenant is absolute. But there's a second layer to this conversation, about what that level of national solidarity does to the people at the center of it.

This is where David Stav comes in. In a column for Ynet Judaism, he looks at the flip side of this immense public investment. When a whole country spends decades praying for a missing soldier, or fighting for a hostage, the public starts to feel like they own a piece of that person's story. The boundary between national concern and personal life dissolves.

Stav's careful here. He validates the solidarity first. He notes that the Torah actually demands this kind of intervention, because people aren't supposed to stay indifferent to the distress of others. But he draws a hard pastoral line. A society's mutual responsibility doesn't buy it the right to consume a family's private grief.

His phrase for it is striking. He tells the public that we fought for them because they are our brothers, but they are entitled to their own world. It's a gentle but firm reminder that the public's emotional investment doesn't erase a family's right to privacy. They don't owe the country their inner lives.

He grounds that boundary in the biblical story of Miriam being punished for criticizing Moses over his marriage. The text is teaching that even well-intentioned concern for a sibling can cross a line into forbidden gossip. So you have these two realities sitting next to each other in the week's writing.

They both stem from the exact same national trait. The country's built on this radical, almost suffocating closeness. The same instinct that makes the public demand every detail of a rescued hostage's life is the instinct that keeps a military searching for a missing tank crewman for four and a half decades.

That's the contract holding the place together. Israel's willingness to expend immense resources on the dead is what sustains the morale of the living.