In every election cycle there is a speech that throws the stakes into painful clarity.
In the 2026 election cycle, at least for Jews, that speech came from Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, the last Jewish Democrat holdout in the state, who had skipped the party’s convention because she didn’t feel safe, but unlike Mallory McMorrow, who had also faced threats because of her Jewish daughter, and Haley Stevens, hadn’t gotten on board with the Abdul El-Sayed campaign and the alliance of Marxists and Islamists taking over her party.
But addressing an event for Michigan Jewish Democrats, Nessel made her best case in a speech that will last long past this cycle because of the nakedness of its horrifying argument.
“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” Nessel told Jewish Democrats. Those “needs of the world” required Jews to vote for Democrats, including presumably El-Sayed, who had made excuses for a Muslim terrorist attack against Jewish children in the preschool of a Michigan Temple.
But Michigan Jews were told to look past the attempted massacre of their own children.
Many Jewish Democrats feel they “must choose between our faith and our party,” she said, and she then argued in favor of choosing faith in the Democratic Party over faith in Judaism.
Attorney General Nessel suggested that Queen Esther, who had risked her life for the Jewish people, should be the role model for Jewish Democrats. “It is perhaps up to us now 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.”
This Jewish version of Jonestown, a universalist Masada in which the Jews sacrifice their “faith”, their “self-interest”, their “survival” and even the “very future of our own people” to elect Socialists who want them dead and thereby “save the rest of humanity” from global warming, is the very best remaining argument that any honest Jewish Democrat can offer for the party.
What is the glorious cause for which Jews must end their faith and the future of their children?
Attacking Republicans, AG Nessel claimed that “their support of selfishness and blind obedience to the world’s biggest and most dangerous fool is a direct abdication of our responsibilities as Jews whose traditions demand a profound obligation to the world and compassionate action toward others.” In short, stopping Trump necessitates Jewish extinction.
Trump, according to Nessel, is so terrible that Jews must be willing to vanish from the earth and support Abdul El-Sayed, Hasan Piker, Mamdani and every Marxist and Islamist antisemite. That is to be part of our “obligation to the world” and “compassionate action” by siding with our killers.
But if Trump is so terrible and the Democrats are so good, wouldn’t the threat to Jewish survival come from him rather than from the Democrats? The case for voting for Abdul El-Sayed over Trump should be straightforward and the story of Queen Esther needn’t be turned inside out.
Jews wouldn’t be committing suicide by voting for Democrats, but saving themselves that way.
And yet, Jews are instead told to vote for the party that will end their “faith”, their “survival” and even the “very future of our own people” rather than vote for the party that wouldn’t do that.
Sure, voting for Trump and Republicans might save the Jews, one of the highest-ranking Jewish elected officials in the state argues, but it’s nobler to let the Dems destroy them instead.
We’ve gone from “is it good for the Jews” to “it’s bad for the Jews and that’s a good thing.”
But if the progressive side is really so good and compassionate, if it’s the only hope of saving mankind, the side of Tikkun Olam and the right of history, why does it require the end of the Jews? It’s a curious question especially since Nessel chose to stay away from the party’s convention because, “I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying.” Is this really what the side of the angels looks like or the side of the devils?
The inescapable conclusion is that either the Jews are bad or the Democratic Party is.
Trying to square the circle leads to Nessel’s call that the Jews should vote for the Democrats even if they kill them as some spiritual human sacrifice on behalf of all mankind. When Emma Lazarus, whose poem appears on the Statue of Liberty, recited, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” as she was dying, she was quoting Job to G-d, not to the Democratic Party.
Nessel dodges the issue by arguing that the Democrats are god, even if a cruel and viciously antisemitic one, who alone have the ability to save mankind and the planet. “What good is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?” she argued.
But if the issue is anything short of the magical Democrat ability to save mankind while killing all the Jews, there is no longer an argument for Jews to commit suicide by voting Democrat.
Dana Nessel is being attacked for these remarks, but all she really did, in her crisis of the soul, was bring out the text from the subtext. Ever since Obama, the discourse for most Jewish Democrat groups has focused on all the things that are more important than not killing Jews, like abortion, global warming, affirmative action and the whole right side of history.
Nessel is the first high-ranking Jewish Democrat to admit that the Jews, like some progressive Moses, will never make it to the political promised land, but will have to die for the leftist cause.
It’s not a new idea. The more honest Jewish Communists made the same arguments. Once Lenin had declared that the Jews were an illegitimate people brought forth by capitalism (echoing earlier socialist dogma going back to Marx and Fourier), it was obvious they would have to disappear: the only question was whether they would go quietly or go to synagogue. Those who went to the synagogue, like my great-uncles, were shot, while those who shut down the synagogues and told the NKVD which Jews to shoot… ended up being shot anyway.
And that’s the point that Nessel and the party’s Jewish apologists are missing.
Jewish survival is never incompatible with doing the politically right thing. The sorts of movements whose success is incompatible with Jewish survival are evil movements anyway. That’s a lesson that Nessel and Jews of all political stripes should have learned from Nazism and Communism. Any movement that will kill the Jews is not going to stop with the Jews. Its promises to save mankind and the planet are just excuses for killing even more people.
A movement that is reduced to telling Jews they must die for the right side of history is a profoundly evil one that is the actual threat not just to Jews, but to the entire human race.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.





Who is holding a gun to her head or has her mind magically disintegrated...
She appeared sane a couple of months ago...
This speech cannot even be characterized as crazy or stupid. It is coming from a very dark and scary place...???
The anti-humanismn of these ideologies targets a people whose ethic of life is one of the greatest of their many contributions to mankind.
Any sane person will recognize this.
Thank you for your moral clarity.