Golda read right to left. Some still don’t - opinion

Honored at the Michigan Democratic Party Jewish Caucus’s Summer Simcha in Birmingham, she asked the room what their Jewish values required of them in November. Then she answered. Jews, she said, have “a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.”

She reached for Queen Esther to make the point. Esther, Nessel explained, offered her own life to save her people. Now, Nessel continued, it may be time for Jews to “follow in her path and sacrifice the comfort, safety, and security – and even the very future – of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”

She asked what good it did to defend Israel’s right to exist if the planet itself became uninhabitable: climate, AI, nuclear risk, inequality – these, she implied, outranked Jewish safety.

The inversion is not a small error. Esther risked her own life so that the Jews of Persia would live. She did not instruct her people to accept their own erasure for the sake of the empire. Mordecai’s warning was the opposite of Nessel’s counsel: silence would not save Esther, and deliverance would come from elsewhere if she failed.

Nessel turned a story of Jewish self-preservation into a brief for Jewish self-erasure. Critics across the spectrum said so immediately. Menachem Rosensaft, the son of Holocaust survivors, wrote that no people’s survival should be treated as a political bargaining chip.

Others noted that no official would dare tell Black or Muslim voters their group’s continuity must wait until the planet is saved. The charge was not merely that Nessel misspoke. It was that she volunteered other people’s children.

In a race defined by El-Sayed’s record on Israel, many in the room and far beyond it heard a clear instruction: swallow the fear, stay on the ticket, and treat Jewish security as one interest among many rather than the first one.

“Come November, what do your Jewish values tell you to do?” was not an open question. It was a prod against walking away.

El-Sayed has given those voters ample reason to walk. He has called Israel a “rogue state.” He has accused it of genocide and apartheid. Asked whether the Israeli government is as evil as Hamas, he answered, “Yes. Hamas – evil. Israeli government – evil.”

He has repeatedly declined to say that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, calling the question “secondary” to whether Israel has a right to American tax dollars.

“The question is whether we want a politics where our money is sent over to Israel to fund genocide and apartheid instead of investing in our own kids.”

That is not a policy disagreement. It is a refusal to grant the Jewish state the same legitimacy he assumes for every other nation.

After a Lebanese-born attacker rammed a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield in March, while over 100 children five and under were in the early childhood center, El-Sayed condemned the assault and then added that “hurt people hurt people.”

The FBI described the attack as Hezbollah-inspired terrorism targeting Jews. El-Sayed later called his framing a mistake and apologized. The initial instinct still matters. Context was offered before the wounded community had finished counting its children.

He has also campaigned with Hasan Piker, the streamer who told his audience that if American Jews keep tying their identity to Israel, “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”

Piker called Israel “Jewish ISIS” and said Jews were “making antisemitism worse.” El-Sayed eventually said no one speaks for his campaign but him, and that antisemitism is a scourge. He did not drop the alliance when it was still useful.

In January 1931, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that the National-deutsche Jude, organ of Dr. Max Naumann’s National German-Jewish Party, argued that patriotic German Jews must support any party that served Germany’s interests “even if it is antisemitic.”

They treated Zionists as unpatriotic and Ostjuden as a disintegrating alien element. Germany came first. Jewish peoplehood came second, if at all. History recorded the result.

There have always been Jews who believed that loyalty to the nation or to abstract humanity would purchase safety. They have been wrong with grim consistency. Henry Kissinger once told Golda Meir that he was first an American, second secretary of state, and only third a Jew.

Meir answered that in Israel they read from right to left. The line was not a joke. It was a ranking. Jewish continuity is not an afterthought to be scheduled once the climate models look better or the party coalition holds.

Jews who live in America, or anywhere else, owe their countries honest citizenship. They owe the wider world the ordinary duties of decency.

They discover, often too late, that the world they elevated above their own people did not return the favor. Homelessness is not a metaphor when the people you trusted decide your existence is the problem they no longer need to solve.