What Are Jewish Voters Supposed to Do?
· The Atlantic
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the blowing up of trade talks between the United States and Canada, and President Trump’s reckless trade war against Canada. David discusses how this trade war hurts not only America’s relationship with Canada but its global standing as a reliable trade partner.
Then David is joined by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel to discuss the growing hostility among some Democratic voters toward American Jews. Frum and Nessel discuss why the rhetoric of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed concerns some Jews; rise of anti-Semitism within the Democratic party; and the impossible situation many Jewish voters find themselves in today.
Finally, David ends the show with his thoughts on the new biography on Roy Cohn, American Scoundrel.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Dana Nessel: I think it’s a fundamental mistake for the Democratic Party to think that you can just push Jewish Democrats out and simply replace them with any other population.
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David Frum: Welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Dana Nessel, attorney general of the state of Michigan, and this week’s book will be the newly released biography American Scoundrel, a biography of Roy Cohn and his lifetime from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. Before either the dialogue with Attorney General Nessel or the book, I want to open with some thoughts about the recent blowup in trade negotiations between the United States and Canada.
Now, it’s the Trump administration, though, so those negotiations are blown up as I record on Monday, August 24th. They may be back on by the time you watch on Wednesday, August 26th. Anything can happen with this crazy crew. But let’s assume, as I record, that the negotiations remain blown up for some time.
Now, I wrote in The Atlantic this past weekend an analysis of the economic effect of the blowup of these negotiations, and I hope you’ll take a look at that. Facts, figures, dates, numbers. What I want to talk about today is not the economics—you can read that in The Atlantic, and I hope you will. What I want to talk about is some of the geopolitical implications of the United States behaving in the predatory way that the Trump administration has led the United States to behave in these negotiations with Canada.
Look, I’m recording this in Canada right now as I speak. I do have a Canadian point of view. But I think I can speak more broadly when I say that America has enormously benefited all around the world in reputation and standing from its relationship with Canada.
The U.S.-Canada relationship is a kind of text proof of America’s benignity and good intentions. If you’re a country anywhere in the world, wondering whether to partner with the United States or one of its adversaries—the Soviet Union in the olden days, Russia or China now—you’d look at the U.S.-Canada relationship and say, There is America’s nearest neighbor, a country only one-tenth the size of the United States—smaller in economics, smaller in population—highly vulnerable to American pressure, and yet America has consistently treated Canada as an equal, as a partner, and as a friend. And that model relationship is a proof of the good intentions of America to anybody. And so there you are on the other side of the world thinking, Can we trust the Americans? Think, Well, the Canadians next door; they trust the Americans. They’ve benefited from that trust. They’ve been treated with equality. So will we. So long as the relationship worked, America stood proud in the eyes of the world.
The Trump vision of America is very different. At home, Trump’s vision of how America should arrange its economy borrows a lot from China. As much as Trump rails against China, he wants America to be more like China. His government is taking ownership stakes in major corporations. Favors are dispensed according to cronyism and patronage. He attempts to intervene in the courts on behalf of his own interests in a way that [is] very familiar to those who follow the horrible precedents of the Chinese Communist Party. And internationally, his foreign policy looks not like America as we knew it—the world leader of a coalition of democratic states bound by agreements and treaties negotiated in good faith—but like Russia, a country that has given up on the rest of the world in order to be a bully and hegemon at home.
I think a lot of Canadians feel that what Trump wants from these trade negotiations is not actually any kind of deal. He wants to turn Canada into a kind of American Belarus—a satellite state, nominally independent, but in fact governed from the capital, that can be dominated to create a larger imperial zone where the imperial power does its economics not by trade and mutual benefit, but by domination, predation, and exploitation.
If you’re a country on the other side of the world without a long, friendly history with the United States, if you’re an Indonesia, if you’re a Malaysia, if you’re a Philippines, if you’re a Vietnam, and you look at what Trump is doing to Canada, you think, What will they do to me? We don’t share a language with the Americans. We were not their allies in two world wars. If they will do that to their nearest neighbor and closest partner, what will they do to us? And it sends a message to the whole planet that America is reinventing itself—not as the leader of a league of democracies, but as an imperial power. Much like other imperial powers, much like Russia, much like China. Corrupt at home, dominant abroad, and maybe somebody you have to deal with because they’re so big and rich and powerful, but not someone you want to be a partner with. Certainly not someone you can trust.
The message to the world from the blowup of U.S.-Canada relations is: Look, the Canadians, they’ve got the geography they’ve got. They have very few options. Ditto Mexico. But we? We’re farther away. We have options. And what would be wise for us is to keep an equal distance between the United States and China as we keep an equal distance between the United States and Russia, because what Trump is proving to us again and again is that America is no different and no better than those other powers.
That’s one of Donald Trump’s big ideas. He’s said often in interviews, even when he was running for president and in his first term, Do you think we’re any different from anybody else? He really doesn’t believe America’s different from anybody else, and he’s led America to behave in ways that are no different from anybody else.
But, you know, one of the things that Canadians have kept alive through all these dark months is a confidence that the Americans really are different from everybody else—and that the past of the American-Canadian relationship, that’s the truth. And it’s the present that is the dead end and the false start and the misdirection. So what we all try to keep alive here—and I speak to you from the north shore of Lake Ontario, from a road named for the losers of the American Revolution, Loyalist Parkway—the faith that is kept alive here is a faith that there’s a better America, and maybe someday it will rediscover itself. I hope that’s a faith that Americans can rediscover, too, and hold onto, too, through some very dark chapters.
And now my dialogue with Attorney General Dana Nessel.
[Music]
Frum: Dana Nessel has spent the past eight years as Michigan’s attorney general. She built her career litigating civil-rights cases before winning the attorney general’s office in 2018. In office, she closed an investigation into Michigan State University’s handling of the Larry Nassar sexual-abuse scandal, led the state prosecution of the men who plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and brought charges against 16 Republicans who falsely certified Trump as Michigan’s 2020 election winner.
Term-limited out of office this January, Nessel has become an important voice in debates over the future of the Democratic Party of Michigan, and especially against the anti-Semitism she sees rising within it.
She was born in West Bloomfield Township: the site of the March 12th, 2026, terror attack on Temple Israel, the nation’s largest Reform synagogue, and a preschool with 140 children inside.
Attorney General Nessel, thank you for joining me today.
Nessel: Thanks for having me.
Frum: Let’s start, if we may, by just talking a little bit about your personal experiences as a Jewish Democrat in Michigan. You have said that you have felt unsafe attending your own party’s state convention. Tell us what it has been like this summer for you.
Nessel: Well, look, it’s been difficult, candidly, since I entered office, and it’s strange because I sort of built my career prior to becoming attorney general on being an advocate for LGBTQ rights and being very involved in the marriage-equality case that ultimately was resolved by the United States Supreme Court. And this has been my focus for much of the time. Yes, I’m also Jewish, but I’m a gay person in a same-sex marriage, and I had really thought coming into office that was what would make me stand out or be unusual as the first openly gay person to serve in statewide office in Michigan. But that’s not really been my experience, and in fact, since I’ve been in office, it’s been much more interesting to people that I’m actually the first Jewish attorney general in Michigan history. And I would say that, again, I have been bombarded with death threats since the first days that I took office. And at any given time normally, there’s about three people who are currently either serving a sentence in state or federal prison or on probation or somewhere in the proceedings for anti-Semitic death threats against me.
So that was a surprise to me. But things changed in so many different ways after October 7th. And then it wasn’t just, basically, I would say mentally unstable people on the far right that were threatening me or other Jews, but now it became really a both-sides situation, and I began to perceive an enormous amount of anti-Semitism within the Democratic Party.
And so it’s been a challenge since that time, and it’s gotten worse and worse. And what I am seeing from, again, people that I know in my party [is] a fundamental lack of knowledge about Judaism, about my religion, as well as about sort of the historical aspects of the state of Israel and also a complete ignorance about what ties Jews around the globe to Israel itself. And I think that’s really caused a rise in, again, they would call it anti-Zionism, but I call it anti-Semitism.
Frum: Let’s talk a little bit about the reaction or the aftermath of this dreadful attack, attempted attack, on Temple Israel this year. It would’ve targeted children above all—potentially as many as 140 school-aged children. That’s your town, as I said in the introduction. What has it been like to be in a state where such a thing could happen, and how has the reaction to that terrible attempt lived up to, or not lived up to, your hopes and expectations for your state?
Nessel: Well, first of all, I learned about what was happening at Temple Israel from my own son, who was at my parents’ house, that’s just down the street from Temple Israel. And so it was close enough that you could hear all the sirens and all the commotion going on. And I have many members of my family that have been longtime members of Temple Israel. It’s really a focal point of the Jewish community, because it is the biggest Reform temple anywhere in the world.
But, you know, the reaction to it—obviously there’s a lot of people who were quick to call this out. But, you know, I think most concerning, of course, was the statement that our nominee for U.S. Senate made, which was that “hurt people hurt people.” And a lot of us perceived that as sort of making excuses for somebody who sought to murder over 100 pre-K schoolchildren. And that’s the kind of mentality that bothers me a lot.
I will tell you that in 2019, very early on in my tenure, you had that attack in New Zealand—the Christchurch attack that killed over 50 Muslims who were in the process of their congregation and praying. And I immediately went to one of the mosques in Dearborn, and I donned a hijab to be respectful, and I talked about Islamophobia and said it was unacceptable in any realm for any reason. And I didn’t try to get into, like, what were the motivations of the person who killed these people, and did he have mental-health issues? Did he have bad experiences with Muslims? I just condemned it unequivocally, and I think that’s what people should have done with Temple Israel. You can’t make excuses for that kind of domestic terrorism.
Frum: Well, since you’ve raised the Democratic nominee, let me go through the timeline of his statements, so we get a sense of what is fair to say about those statements and what is not. The attempt happened, as you say, on March the 12th of this year. It was heroically averted, and the gunman was deservedly the only casualty, or the would-be gunman. On March 12th, Abdul El-Sayed, who was not yet then the nominee, released a statement that said, “I was horrified and heartbroken this afternoon to hear the reports of an active shooter at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield. I’m thankful that no worshippers, students, or teachers were harmed. We all owe a debt of gratitude to Temple security and law enforcement, who acted swiftly to keep the community safe. To my Jewish sisters and brothers, you have a right to worship in peace … there is no room for antisemitism in America.” So that’s good. That was a statement written by who knows who.
The next day, Abdul El-Sayed released a video with his own face and his own voice, and there he said, “Yesterday, our state was rocked by news of a heinous attack on Temple Israel … I grew up not 15 minutes away from Temple Israel. Many of my childhood friends and classmates worship there.” Good start. But then he goes on to say, “A week earlier, an airstrike killed the niece and nephew of the gunman. Imagine if that had never happened. Imagine there was no war in Iran. Imagine if there were no airstrikes in Lebanon. Imagine if his family had never died. We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.” So that’s not so good.
And then on March 18th, on an internal call, which became public via Punchbowl News, El-Sayed acknowledged that the statement he had made in his own voice and face was a risk, but said he was proud to take the risk.
And on March 24th, 25th, speaking on Twitter or X, he said, “I called out the antisemitic attack on Temple Israel immediately. The risk I took that these cowards will never take is having the courage to call out an illegal and unjustified war that’s killing children, wasting our tax dollars, and spiking gas prices, too.”
So, he himself had made clear that when he took a risk, the risk was the equation of two completely different things in completely different contexts. So if you’re a Jewish person, I think you hear that, or a friend of the Jews, or someone who cares about Jews, or just a person who cares about condemning terrorism, it sounds like, you know: I’m not making excuses, but I have an excuse.
Nessel: Yeah. So I will say this. Since Abdul’s win, during the course of the primary, this has been a conversation that has continued with the Jewish community, not exclusively, but most of whom supported Haley Stevens. And you know, Abdul has been going through the process, to his credit, of having meetings with Michigan Jewish electeds and the Michigan Jewish caucus of the Michigan Democratic Party. And I think privately, he will say that he regrets having made those remarks. But here we are, it’s almost the end of of August, and he still has not withdrawn those statements and said, I misspoke, or, I now recognize the harm that I caused by making those statements. And it has me concerned that he really stands by them.
And if so, what does that mean for American Jews moving forward if you can rationalize what’s happening in a war in the Middle East on attacks on your own people here in the state of Michigan? That is deeply concerning to me, and I think by the same logic you would say, if Iran were to attack, whether it would be a government building or a church or a mall or what have you, that we would just deserve those attacks because, of course, we are engaged in this war in Iran. And really the list goes on and on, as to how you could make excuses for acts of domestic terrorism.
I don’t think we should ever be making those kinds of excuses, and in a way, propping up people who maybe seek to commit those crimes. It’s a dangerous, dangerous world to live in where you have somebody who supports that kind of logic.
Frum: Well, every terrorist, every killer has a reason. I mean, except for the ones who are so divorced from reality that they operate in a world that is impenetrable to anybody’s reason. But most of them have some kind of professed grievance, some kind of reason, some kind of ideology, some kind of motive. So would you explain, just because some people may have difficulty with this—walk us through this as a prosecutor, as a lawyer. What is wrong with, after you say, I condemn this attack on the Black church, on the mosque, on the Jewish pre- preschool, then going to say: However, I do understand why the killer acted the way he did. What is wrong with that?
Nessel: Well, obviously, when you are providing some sort of rational explanation for why it occurs, I think it possibly encourages other people to do the same. They want to be a hero, too. And that’s why I think we have to have unequivocal condemnation of those kinds of acts.
And, you know, we’ve had many mass-casualty episodes in Michigan just recently. We had a man who killed his entire family. He had been going through a difficult divorce, but I wouldn’t say that’s a good excuse for having murdered his entire family. We’ve had many other events, right? We had a shooting at Michigan State University. We had a shooting at Oxford High School. Many people died during the course of those events, but I don’t recall something similar where people were like, Well, let’s understand the killer’s mental-health concerns or issues that they were going through so that we can better understand a rationale for him doing that. We just, we condemn it.
Frum: Well, correct me if I have this wrong, but my understanding is that the attempted killer in West Bloomfield was not mentally unstable, did not have mental-health issues. He had a cause; he had a grievance. He had come to the United States from another country. He had a political ideology. He had affiliations in that other country. He amassed a considerable arsenal of weapons, and he chose his target very carefully to make a political point. So it’s not a question of mental health; it’s a question of political ideology, which expressed itself through the attempted killing of hundreds of, or dozens of, schoolchildren.
So when you talk about it, I think it’s true—if you had somebody who really was wildly mentally unstable, and they committed a crime that cost human life, it might not be inappropriate to say, This person was mentally unstable, and that’s why they did it. But that’s not what seems to happen here. This seems to be, you’re not endorsing—you’re not trying to spread understanding of the need for greater attention to mental health. You’re drawing attention to a cause that you think somehow balances the scales.
Nessel: I mean, I’m not going to try to excuse the statements that Abdul made in regard to that. And in fact many of us have been outspoken against it. I still—I leave hope for the fact that Abdul will have heard what many of us have said about why we’re very upset about those remarks. And that he will seek to, I don’t want to say clarify, but at least to withdraw those earlier remarks, because he now has a greater understanding of it. That’s my hope, and I’ve had that conversation with him personally. He still hasn’t done it, but I hope that we’ll hear more from him about this soon.
Frum: Well, you’ve spent your life in public office. You’ve won election to high statewide office. How much comfort do you take if—you remember the famous line from the movie, Damn right, I ordered the code red? And weeks or months after the person has said, Damn right, I ordered the code red, and the anti-code-red coalition mobilizes votes against him, says, On second thought, I misspoke when I ordered the code red, now that I realize how much harm I did. Maybe the first statement is the authentic one, and the later one is not to be taken so seriously?
Nessel: Yeah. Well, what I’d like to hear, obviously, from him is that he understands now why those statements are so harmful, and why he shouldn’t be making any kinds of excuses or rationalizations. I mean, people can evolve, and people can be educated, and that’s one of the things that I’ve said to him, and other Jewish electeds or leaders of the community have tried to convey to him.
I mean, there are certainly things that I have said in the past where I displayed some kind of ignorance about an issue, and then you had stakeholders come to me and say, Hey, what you said is offensive to us. Let us tell you why. And I can say, Oh, my gosh, I never looked at it from that perspective, and I now understand, and I will never say anything like that again.
I have done that. So I think that Abdul could also do that, obviously, you know? I mean, obviously there’s more issues than just this one statement about what happened at Temple Israel. But, I hope—and again, I’ve conveyed this to Abdul—I hope that he makes the effort to become a little bit more educated on, first of all, our religious values and beliefs, because I think he displays a lack of knowledge about Judaism. He talked about, right after he won the primary, he talked about breaking bread with Jews at Passover. And I was like, Okay, that sentence alone—and, for people who are listeners that don’t know, we don’t eat bread on Passover, very intentionally so. It’s actually a big part of our ceremony.
But I asked, could you learn a little bit more about our religion so that you understand it? Could you learn a little bit more than maybe what your bubble is telling you about the history of Israel and its relationship to the Jewish people?
Because now, when I speak to him, there seems to be a real dearth of like, again, historical knowledge, political knowledge, and religious knowledge about all of those things. And again, I leave room for the fact that all of us have the opportunity to learn more.
Frum: All right, let me ask you more about your experience. I mean, Michigan is going to be a very important state this year. Governor’s race, Senate race. Possibly the control of the United States Senate and the prospects for accountability for President Trump may swing on what happens in the state of Michigan.
You must be under tremendous personal pressure. You are a career Democrat, a lifelong Democrat. You’ve won elections. You have stood up for your beliefs under adverse conditions. How does it... What is the kind of pressure that’s on you? What is that like? And how do you cope with it?
Nessel: Well, I mean, when you talk about the pressure, that’s multifold. What I am most focused on is ensuring that we have safe, secure, accurate, democratic elections, which we always do, but that also those elections are certified. We have three different congressional districts that could very well swing from red to blue. And so, I know that the White House is hyperfocused on Michigan. And that’s, of course, in addition to the U.S. Senate seat, governor, attorney general, secretary of state, etcetera.
So, what I’ve been doing in my office is perpetually working with other stakeholders, whether they be county and municipal clerks that I’m meeting with all around the state, whether it’s our tabletop exercises that we do with the Michigan State Police and the secretary of state’s office and the governor’s office. We are trying constantly to prepare for any circumstances that could serve to disrupt the election, to suppress people from the ability to vote. We’ve had many, many cases that we’ve defended to ensure that people still can have the right to vote, and that it’s not violating either state or federal laws in an effort to suppress people from voting.
So, my job is not only to make sure that the election goes off the way that it should, but also that the election is properly certified. And that means without interference, without the president literally calling people on the county board of canvassers, as he did in 2020. I want to make sure that, again, our elections are done in accordance with the legal processes, and then they are legally certified. So that is the thing that I’m most focused on. I know that there’s going to be some sort of interference from the federal government, and we’re not going to get any assistance from the federal agencies that generally cooperate and work directly with us toward that end.
Frum: There must be people saying to you: Attorney General, the Senate is turning on the state. This is the... Abdul El-Sayed, maybe he’s not great on Jewish issues, but he is the only Democratic nominee we’ve got. If he loses, the Senate may be kept by President Trump. Can you please just keep your concerns quiet ’til after November? Raise them after November if you must, but just be quiet till November. Are people saying things like that to you?
Nessel: Well, let me say a couple things about this. First of all, let me make this abundantly clear. I will amputate my right arm before I fill in the oval next to Mike Rogers’s name. I think that keeping a Republican majority in the Senate is incredibly dangerous. I think Mike Rogers would be a rubber stamp for all of the worst excesses of the most corrupt administration we’ve ever had in American history. So he is a danger. He’s an existential threat to the continuation of the United States as whatever form of imperfect democracy we are right now.
With Abdul, I will say this: We have a lot in common in terms of our general beliefs and principles and policies. And I think it’s important to say that, and I think it’s important to underline and underscore that fact. Trust me; I have much more in common with Abdul El-Sayed than I do with Mike Rogers in terms of my personal beliefs, my political beliefs, my philosophical beliefs about what should happen in the United States, and in the United States Senate.
But with that, you know, I will say this: When I won the endorsement of my party in 2018, I had a really bitter—it’s not technically a primary, it’s a convention contest. But I beat the UAW, I beat the AFL. The individual I was running against was African American, so the Black Caucus wasn’t entirely happy with my victory. So I had to spend a lot of time working with those groups. It took four months for the UAW to finally endorse me.
So I think there’s the understanding that in, especially a very close race like the one that Abdul had with Haley Stevens, he only won by some, I want to say 14,000 votes. And we had a heavy turnout for this primary. So I think it’s only natural to expect that the winner is going to have to talk to those who supported his opponent.
But, for Jewish Michiganders, this is not just a regular like, we’re arguing about what our tax rate should be, you know? This is something that, again, is so, so personal to Michigan Jews. And I think it’s important. I think that Abdul understands this. This could be a very close race. And, yes, we have, I think, one of the highest Arab American populations anywhere outside of the Middle East here in the state of Michigan, but we also have a pretty sizable Jewish population in Michigan. And the thing I will say about Jewish voters in Michigan—they are primarily Democratic. About 75 to 80 percent consider ourselves Democrats or routinely vote for Democrats on the ticket. So this is not nothing.
But for a lot of, and I will speak on behalf of Michigan Jews, we have some deep concerns, and we don’t want to have to choose between the future of the state of Israel and Israel potentially not existing anymore. Even though most of us are highly, highly, highly critical of the current government, highly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu, and highly critical, I will say, of AIPAC, which has become really, I think, the center of what people perceive is all the evils of corporate PAC money in America. Especially here in Michigan; we hear about it over and over again.
But the thing is, is that people are thinking about, what are we exchanging? We absolutely don’t want Mike Rogers to win. We absolutely want a Democratic majority in the Senate. But is Abdul going to spend six years railing against Israel, irrespective of who the government is there? That is a real concern, and an even greater concern is how that’s affecting American Jews, because it really is turning up the anti-Semitism. And it’s creating this dynamic where you have a lot of Democrats thinking there’s good Jews and bad Jews, and the good Jews are the ones that don’t believe in Zionism, and the bad Jews are the ones that believe that Israel is our biblical, religious, historical homeland.
And for me personally, it’s been a struggle. Because I have to tell you, for those who proclaim themselves to be anti-Zionist Jews, I don’t know what you talk about during your Passover seder. Like, you can’t follow the Maxwell House version of the Haggadah, as I do in my family. I don’t know what you say. It’s so baked into our religion. And so it’s a real struggle for us right now, as Michigan Jewish Democrats. It’s a conversation we’re having over and over. I was just on a call last night with a number of Michigan Jewish Democrats, and frankly, candidly, many of them are now supporting Mike Rogers. I don’t respect that at all, even though I understand this is a choice that everybody has to make for themselves. But I really wish that between the Michigan Democratic Party—who by the way, I think this is important to say, you have five members of the Michigan Democratic Party who have been criminally indicted with acts of vandalism and terrorism and harassment and intimidation against the Jewish Federation of Detroit, against Jewish elected leaders at their homes. And despite that, they seemingly are refusing to even suspend their membership to allow them to come to convention.
How are you supposed to feel if you are an elected person, and who is a Democrat in Michigan, and you want to go to the convention, and you know those people are going to be there? Especially with all the issues that we’ve had at convention lately, with people who are targeting Jewish electeds or just electeds that are in any way, shape, or form supportive of Israel, and chasing them around and screaming and yelling at them and harassing them and not allowing them to speak. Shouting them down, so that they can’t even speak at [the] convention. It’s making a lot of us feel really uncomfortable.
Frum: Well, let me take you back to the AIPAC question. Look, not all Black Americans support the work of the NAACP. Not all Hispanic Americans support the various groups that purport to speak for Hispanic Americans. But even if you’re one of those minorities who doesn’t support that group, if there’s a political candidate whose entire campaign is about The NAACP is the root of all evil in American politics; I am here to fight the NAACP, and I say that in every speech, your ears would prick up a little bit. Like, I don’t think he’s talking only about those people. I think he’s talking about me, too.
Because there’s some part of me—I mean, AIPAC is a group that has taken some more partisan stances in recent terms than it recently has. It has leaned more toward the Republican side, and I think that’s a strategic and tactical mistake for the pro-Israel community. But nonetheless, I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about. I think we’re talking about American Jews who support Israel, which is the overwhelming American community of American Jews. And by the way for profound reasons, as you say, that are non-severable from a Jewish identity.
Nessel: Yeah. So that’s how I feel as well, even though I’m not a supporter of AIPAC. And whenever I see anything about this topic, the first thing that you’ll see—you’ll see hundreds of comments pop up and say that I’m an AIPAC whore, bought and paid for by AIPAC.
Firstly, AIPAC—and I can’t say this enough—does not support people who are in state offices. Why? Because as state attorney general, my job has literally nothing to do with foreign policy at all whatsoever. I don’t get a vote. I don’t get a say in it. And so I’ve had nothing to do with AIPAC during the course of my time in office.
But if I, God forbid, I say anything about this subject—which I rarely do, I normally only talk about anti-Semitism in the context of how it’s hurting Michigan Jews and how I want to fight back against hate crimes and anti-Semitism and hateful rhetoric and all the rest of it—but that is the first thing people will say. Even though, of course, I’ve never had anything to do with AIPAC.
But that has been the boogeyman for everything. And I’ve said to Abdul, and I’ve said it multiple times, you can’t make AIPAC the central villain in every story. When you’re talking about health care, what does AIPAC have to do about that? When you’re talking about affordable housing, when you’re talking about medications that people can’t obtain, or people who’ve been price-gouged or environmental issues that we have, like, what does AIPAC have to do with any of that stuff? But, I got a text recently from his campaign, and it said, “We’re fighting back against AIPAC, Mike Rogers, and Donald Trump.” In that order. In that order. And—
Frum: When I hear that, I always feel like Liz Lemon in 30 Rock. “Just say Jewish, Jack. This is taking forever.”
Nessel: (Laughs.) By the way, that was one of my favorite shows of all time, so I’m very familiar with all that.
Frum: With all that is at stake in these midterms, and all that is at stake for—and most Jews are on the side, I think, that has supported the lowercase-D democratic coalition against Donald Trump. But in race after race—and Michigan is the white-hot center—but in many others the message from the Democratic Party is, We are making it a litmus test that you say that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. That is an intentional inversion of the truth of the Holocaust, a central event in modern Jewish history. And it’s also being used to say, If you don’t, if you as a Jew cannot go along with this abhorrent lie that is designed to destroy your own history and transfer your history to someone else’s custody, then you’re out of the party. And all Jews need to understand that this is their moment to take a back seat, not only for their beliefs, but even for their physical safety, for the greater good.
And that’s sort of a very paralyzing position to be in, because there is a greater good. But why are Jews the ones who are being asked to say, Your safety, your beliefs, your history—those have to be secondary to everyone else’s safety?
Nessel: Yeah, let me bring up something that is really fresh in my mind, because it just happened over the course of the weekend. Abdul brought Hasan Piker, the streamer, to our state. For old people like me, I had no idea who this guy was. But he brought him to a number of different universities, and he really helped to elevate his profile in this state. And of course, it’s in all my algorithms now, the things that he says. But one of the things that he did over the course of the weekend, or at least came to my attention over the course of the weekend. He made some statements:
Piker: Because people don’t [expletive] with Israel any longer. And if, and if Jews in America keep putting, this, this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s gonna come around and take action. Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.
Nessel: And during the course of it, they actually flashed on the screen, a guy by the name of Jeremy Moss, who was a longtime state legislator in Michigan. He won the Democratic nomination to replace Haley Stevens in the Eleventh Congressional District, an overwhelmingly Democratic district. He’s very likely to be the next congressman from the Eleventh Congressional District to serve in Washington. And he put up a picture of him. He’s Jewish, and he is supportive, generally speaking, of Israel. And next to the picture it had his AIPAC rating, which is this group that puts out, like, any time a Jewish person contributes, basically, to a candidate, that’s AIPAC money.
And next to it, it had a picture of him in Israel surrounded by a number of Israeli flags. It did not say what he was doing there. He was actually there to protest against the Netanyahu government. That wasn’t covered in there. But I thought to myself, Why is Hasan Piker, who has millions and millions of followers—many of us believe that he is very anti-Semitic, in addition to being racist and sexist and many other things, if you listen to some of the things that he says during his streaming or podcast. And I’m wondering, who’s going to stand up for Jeremy when these really hateful words are being said, and you’re highlighting this Jewish elected who’s going to Congress? Who are the members of Congress, of our congressional delegation in Michigan who will say, That’s not right? Who of our U.S. senators, who in our state legislature will do it? Is it only going to be the Jewish electeds? Will it be the same people over and over again, which is me and two state reps and just members of the Michigan Democratic Party Jewish caucus? Is it only going to be a handful of us? Will we have any allies that are non-Jews who will stand up and say, This is wrong?
And so for a lot of us, you know, we feel really isolated. Like, do we have a home in the Democratic Party anymore?
And I actually put up a query on, it was not my political, but my personal Facebook page. So all the people who can see it are people who I’ve friended on there. They’re not just bots, or just people from other states or whatever. These are all people that I know in some way, shape, or another. And I said, Is there still room in the Democratic Party for people who believe that Israel has a right to exist, and that we should have a two-state solution with sovereignty and dignity and self-determination for both the Palestinians and Israeli Jews? And it was a real mixed result. It was half and half, of a lot of people saying, No, our tent of our party is not big enough for you people anymore. And that was deeply concerning for me.
Frum: You mentioned earlier on that you—and this I’m sure is true for everyone who’s ever run for office—have said things that on second thought were not the right thing to say, or showed imperfect understanding or lack of sympathy. And this is part of the human experience, right?
If you’re a candidate who has built all of his or her previous career in a farm area, and then you run for statewide office and you say something that shows lack of awareness of the problems of city dwellers. Or vice versa: You’re a city candidate, and you haven’t been attentive enough to the needs of farmers or rural people, and they come to you and say, Look, you’ve been rural [or] you’ve been urban through the first part of your career, and now you’re running statewide, and you need to understand us. It’s credible that that person said, Gee, I never thought about it that way. I never had to think about city or country, where I was before. You’re right. I’m learning from you. Thank you so much. I can be a bigger and better representative of more people as I run for statewide office.
But if you’ve based your entire career on I hate the farmers, or I hate the city people, and that’s your message, and everything that you don’t like is a product of a conspiracy by farmers or city people, and then you run for statewide office, and we’re a few weeks from a close election and you suddenly realize, I need 100,000 more votes from the farmers—and then every liberal op-ed writer in America is saying, Here’s what you must say to deceive the farmers into thinking you’re their friend in these last few weeks before the election, I think the farmers or the city people are entitled to be a little skeptical. And to say, You know, that’s just a form of words. Your whole career was based on one view. I think that’s you. I think that’s you. The thing you’ve said all your career, I think that’s you. And I don’t think that’s ignorance. I think that’s you. And if I find it disrespectful of me, that’s not because you don’t understand me. It’s because you’ve taken a view hostile to me.
Nessel: I understand exactly what you’re saying. And I want to believe that that Abdul will educate himself a little bit more on some of these issues that I think he demonstrates a clear lack of understanding in regard to, and does not appreciate some of the nuances in the history of Israel or the background of the Jewish people going back 3,000 years. I hope he will do that.
But what I will say about how I’m looking at this election in many ways is—when you talk about the future of Israel, when you talk about the future of the Jewish diaspora, I don’t know if any of it matters if we have no regulations of any kind on AI, and we end up in a situation where literally, I mean, you just saw over the weekend they had the robot competition in China. If you have literally armies of robots that are driven by AI that are able to—and I don’t mean to sound too crazy here—but, like, enslave the human race, I don’t think that’s the craziest idea out there. And I’ve actually heard a lot of these AI CEOs talk about that. They’ve talked about how AI could result in the end of humanity.
Climate change. I mean, every day we are seeing the devastation that’s brought upon us. I don’t know how much longer the human race is going to be able to continue if we don’t take serious measures to combat climate change.
So there are things that I look at when I think, Well, can I support Abdul and, and perhaps other candidates that are like-minded. We’re not going to have to worry about the future of the Israelis and the Palestinians, because I don’t know that any of us are going to continue to exist if we don’t really get these significant global issues under control. I will tell you right now, in Michigan, we’re getting absolutely hammered by these Canadian tariffs. So you have, you know, you have people all—
Frum: By the anti-Canadian tariffs.
Nessel: The anti-Canadian tariffs. Sorry.
Frum: I’m thinking about Canada. I’m on the north shore of Lake Ontario right now. (Laughs.)
Nessel: Okay. So the impact that this is having to us can’t possibly be overstated. I mean, you have people who are going to lose everything, everything, everything, right? They’ll lose their businesses, they’ll lose their homes, they’ll lose their health insurance. So these are real issues that I know that Mike Rogers is going to be terrible on, and will do anything that supports the president no matter how ridiculous his foreign policy may be in a way that is so detrimental to us in Michigan. And I think that Abdul is going to stand up to that.
So there are so many issues. I could go on and on and on. Like, yes; my Judaism is so fundamental to who I am, and what my beliefs are. But what do we do with these crises that are of such enormity that, could it eclipse those other concerns, because they are of such a weighty nature? And that’s going to have to be considerations for me. And I would say to my fellow Michigan Jews who are members of the Democratic Party, or who typically vote for Democrats, these should also be considerations for you. We shouldn’t just be thinking about Israel or even the safety of American Jews when we have all of these other issues that are also incredibly important.
Frum: Well, you, you’re raising a paradox that you will recognize as one of the most foundational questions in Jewish ethics. This quote from the Rabbi Hillel, where he says, “If I’m only for myself, what am I? If I’m not for myself, who am I?” And the subtlety of the quote is obviously—if you’re only for yourself, you’re not even a person, because that’s the what. But if you’re not for yourself, then who are you?
And this is a thing that, in this cycle, a lot of Jews are having to balance. Which is: Most Jews are probably on the side of most of the issues that are represented by the anti-Trump coalition. But important parts of that anti-Trump coalition are saying, But the price of the coalition and of your membership is you must take a second seat, not only for your beliefs about the state of Israel, but even for your physical safety.
So I’m going to ask you to put yourself in—and you are a very highly engaged person; you’re passionately committed to your views—but you must have relatives or friends who are less engaged and who are committed to Jewish survival and to the Jewish connection with the state of Israel. How would you help them to think through the Who am I, what am I question? How, when they’re told this is the right thing to do, but you’re going to have to take a second place in this right thing to do. How should they think about that?
Nessel: This is a daily conversation with my own family, right? I mean, my family that, if you’re talking about my family, without our many cousins and, and whatnot, I mean, probably never voted for a Republican in a U.S. Senate race, ever. Ever! And my parents are 85 and 89 years old, and we’re having these conversations right now.
But I would say a few things. First of all, again, we can’t pretend that this is the only issue facing us, and sometimes we do have to come to the conclusion that we have to do what is best for all of humanity over, you know, those of us obviously who are Jewish, and again, who believe in the right for Israel to exist.
But I want to make this one last point, while I still have the opportunity to do so. I think it’s a fundamental mistake for the Democratic Party to think that you can just push Jewish Democrats out and simply replace them with any other population, you know? We have been such an instrumental part of this party. Whether you’re talking about our activism, whether you’re talking about our legal work, whether you’re talking about the contributions and donations that have been made to the Democratic Party. And the fact that we have very progressive ideals that we’ve worked hard on. And whether you’re looking all the way back—to whether it’s women’s suffrage, whether it’s the fight for rights for African Americans in this country, whether it’s work that I did and many other Jews on LGBTQ-rights issues—we have been an essential part of the fabric of the Democratic Party for a very, very long time. We are an essential part of the fabric of this party, and I would ask the leadership and members of this party to consider that before they do or say things that will force us to leave this party.
I feel like we’re already not wanted in the Republican Party, and I think that this is, you know, essentially a party of fascism. And we know about all the excuses that they make on the far right, and how they embrace the Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens and all the people, and Tucker Carlsons, all of the enormous anti-Semites on the far right.
And I’m not a member of the Republican Party. I can only speak to being a member of the Democratic Party. But I would tell members of our party that this is a worse place without Jews in it.
David Frum: Well, one of the things that people will say, and I think this is a message that Abdul El-Sayed and many of his supporters say, is: All you have to do to be accepted as a Jew is to jettison Israel. That’s all we ask. And just disavow the fate of half the Jewish people who live in the state of Israel. Maybe they’ll be massacred, maybe they’ll be enslaved. Who knows what, maybe they’ll be raped. Just separate yourself from that, and you’ll be left alone.
And I think I listen to that, and I hear, first—it’s not for you to say what is important to me. When you tell me that Israel is not integral to being a Jew, you know, I don’t walk into your house and tell you what is integral to being who you are. So don’t walk into my house and tell me what is integral to being me. But second, that’s a pretty contemptible offer. You’ll guarantee my physical safety if I submit? I mean, 3,000 years of Jewish martyrdom has been people who—it’s a stubborn people, as it says in the Bible itself. We don’t submit to that. And now you’re asking us to, with a threat, maybe sometimes with a smile and a threat, but a threat. Disavow yourself, and you’ll be safe. You say, you know what? The whole point of the state of Israel was that Jews didn’t have to put their safety at the mercy of other people. They could defend themselves. And that’s the Jewish project—is to have a place in the world where Jews are safe because of themselves.
And the American project was to say everyone is safe. It doesn’t matter who you are, because we don’t have majorities that tolerate minorities here. It’s not with permission from other people. It’s not conditional. Your safety is nonconditional. That’s George Washington’s famous letter to the Newport Synagogue. Your safety is nonconditional. You’re an American. You have a right to be the same as anybody else, and to be left alone and respected the same as anybody else. And now suddenly there are all kinds of conditions, but only if you disavow who you are.
Nessel: Yeah. Let me just respond to that in a couple different ways. I’ve said this over and over again, that when a Black person says, That phrase that you’re using, or the way you’re talking about this issue, to me, is racist. I’d like you to stop doing it—we respect that. When we’re talking to somebody in the LGBTQ community and say, I don’t like the phrase that you’re using, or, That term is offensive to me, and here’s why—we respect that in the Democratic Party. We say, Okay, I’m not going to use that phrase anymore. I didn’t realize that it was offensive to you. I’m going to stop. But this has been an outlier for me. I have people saying, You are not going to tell us what you deem to be anti-Semitic. We’ll decide what’s anti-Semitic. That’s not up for you, the Jewish population, to decide. And I find that to be very off-putting and offensive. And I think that’s totally unacceptable.
But the last thing I will say is this, if that’s the deal that has to be made—and I’ve been really candid about this—I was Jewish before I was ever Michigan attorney general. I’m going to be Jewish afterwards. I was Jewish before I was ever a member of the Democratic Party, and if I have to, I’ll be Jewish afterwards, too.
Frum: Attorney General Nessel, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
Nessel: Thanks for having me.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Dana Nessel for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a new biography of Roy Cohn: American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark.
I had the opportunity to meet the notorious Roy Cohn once in my life, when I was an undergraduate at Yale. He came to address a group of students. It was a small group, because the name of Joe McCarthy’s famous henchman had obscured a little bit with the passage of time. There were maybe six or eight of us there, and we all observed he was just as creepy in person as he was creepy in legend. And that’s the story that is told by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark in their new book.
Roy Cohn, of course, was the chief aide to Joe McCarthy during his investigations of the early 1950s. Those investigations led to disaster for McCarthy, who was eventually censured by the Senate and who died of alcoholism as a comparatively young man in 1957. But Roy Cohn went on to a more lucrative future, even if he never lost his notoriety.
As a shady lawyer in New York, he handled divorces. He represented many Mafia figures. He was involved in all kinds of proceedings that would have got anybody else disbarred or even sent to prison. But Roy Cohn went from fame to fame, progress to progress. He never paid his taxes. So despite all of his amazing career success, he died broke because he owed millions of dollars to the IRS, which they reclaimed from his estate, leaving very little behind. But he certainly lived life the way he wanted to live it.
Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark tell a withering story of his career, but they also illustrate how many people who thought they despised him and despised his politics were drawn into his orbit because of Roy Cohn’s fathomless ability to find favors that people wanted and to deliver them. He lived by a code of loyalty, and he drew into his network of favor-exchange many people who would become pillars of the New York liberal establishment of the 1960s and 1970s.
Roy Cohn was a bad man, and he fully deserves the nickname of “American scoundrel” that he’s given in this book. But there is a blind spot in the book, and a blind spot in the way that people think about him that I kept dealing with as I read this otherwise fascinating and important book. One of the characteristics of post-McCarthy America is that, having felt so bad about the way people were accused falsely and dragged into conspiracies and had their names besmirched—some of them innocent, some of them merely naive fellow travelers. Some comparatively few of them actual traitors or spies. But there became a kind of blind spot about the moral decision to have been a communist in the 1930s and 1940s, and I noticed that throughout the biography of Roy Cohn.
Kai Bird previously wrote a biography of the great scientist Robert Oppenheimer. In fact, it is his 2005 biography of Robert Oppenheimer that became the basis for the Christopher Nolan 2023 movie. Now, if you’ve seen Oppenheimer, one of the things you see is that Oppenheimer is the victim of a false persecution because of his left-wing sympathies in the 1930s, which are suggested in the movie to amount to no more than a sympathy for the Spanish Republic and a desire and a willingness to make donations to Spanish Republican causes. Many, many, many people of liberal view shared that outlook.
But in the years since 2005, more and more evidence has come to light that, in fact, Oppenheimer was probably a [Communist] party member between 1939 and 1941. That’s the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, so this is not a premature anti-fascism. This is not a desire to support the only people who seem to be fighting against Hitler. He joined the party and stayed in it after Stalin signed his pact with Hitler and into the 1941, at least according to the latest suggestive evidence collected post-2005.
One of the most eminent historians of the Cold War period and the atomic-research program, Barton Bernstein wrote on the eve of the release of the Oppenheimer movie, “New evidence also leads to a reassessment and thus taking far more seriously, much negative evidence on Oppenheimer dating back to the 1940s that many historians, including myself, often unwisely in about the 1970s to 2002 period, minimized or disregarded. It is no longer possible or reasonable to comfortably conclude, as had many liberal interpreters, including myself, that Oppenheimer in the 1954 hearing”—that’s his security hearing—“was candidly forthcoming about his late 1930s and early 1940s politics. He was not. He lied, and he sought to deceive.” Now, that story about Oppenheimer is relevant to reading this new book about Roy Cohn.
Again, in this otherwise encyclopedic and analytic biography of Roy Cohn, you see a minimization of what happened in the 1930s and ’40s with actual Communists. In pages 32 and 33 of American Scoundrel, Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark call Whittaker Chambers a serial fabulist and treat it as an open question whether Alger Hiss was indeed guilty of perjury, and that’s not an open question. We know that not only from the investigations that were taken, conducted at the time, but from later releases of Soviet transcripts that identify Alger Hiss as a Soviet asset in the 1930s.
That doesn’t excuse Roy Cohn, who was a scoundrel and who lied and who abused his office and was guilty of, again, things that would get anybody else disbarred or sent to prison. But it does mean that when we reckon with the past, we need to understand that even when we identify the villains correctly, we’re often at risk of identifying the heroes wrongly. Those who are on the wrong side of Roy Cohn were not heroes, even if Roy Cohn was indeed the American scoundrel and great villain that Bird and Goldmark so vividly portray.
That’s it for this week’s David Frum Show. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope if you like the show that you’ll continue subscribing to The Atlantic. That’s the best way to support the work of me and all of my colleagues. Please share this material on any social-media platform you have access to. That helps with the show’s algorithm. See you next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.