The Long Version
A guy with my name won a senate primary.
I woke up to a man with my name winning the Senate primary in Michigan. Not the nickname everyone knows me by. The long one, the one on my passport, the one I slowly spell out for call center agents. Abdul El-Sayed’s name is Abdulrahman. So is mine, though I spell it differently.
He defeated Representative Haley Stevens and could become the first Muslim in our Senate. By that evening our president was on a stage in Las Vegas talking about him. Trump called him a communist and full of it, and then went somewhere else. El-Sayed didn’t love Israel, he said, and didn’t love Jewish people. “He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart and there’s not a fricking thing he can do about it.”
In Detroit that same day, El-Sayed spoke directly to Jewish voters in Michigan. “To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith or any faith at all or no faith at all,” he said, “I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”
Somewhere between those two rooms a conversion happened. El-Sayed holds a position on American military aid to a foreign government. By the time it reached the stage in Nevada it had become a report on what burns in a Muslim’s heart.
James Madison had a word for what the Michigan race kept circling around: faction.
Federalist No. 10 gives the definition in one long breath: “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” It’s tempting to stop at the common impulse of passion or interest. Madison doesn’t. What makes a shared interest a faction is that it is pursued at the expense of other citizens’ rights or of the common good.
He thought the impulse itself was permanent. “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man,” he wrote. “There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” He wanted neither. The first he poetically dismissed: “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires.” The second is impossible.
Religion appears twice in the essay. The second mention is more interesting for our purposes. Explaining why a large republic is safer than a small one, Madison writes: “A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.”
Degenerate. Something has to happen to a sect before it becomes a faction. It isn’t one on arrival.
Brilliantly, Madison’s answer wasn’t fewer differences. “Extend the sphere,” he writes, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests”; that variety makes it less likely that a majority will find “a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.” A Jewish voter somewhere may also be a landlord or a tenant, a union retiree, or a small business owner. He has his own views about Gaza and tariffs. His loyalties don’t all pull the same lever.
About three years after Federalist No. 10 appeared, the Hebrew Congregation of Newport wrote to George Washington, and his reply is legendary: “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” The Government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Washington also crossed a word off his vocabulary. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of,” he wrote, “as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”
The Jews of Newport didn’t hold their rights on loan from the Christians. They were citizens alike.
Michigan spent this campaign figuring out how much of that survived.
Andy Levin had seen the money before. In 2022, redistricting put Levin, a Jewish congressman from one of the state’s Democratic dynasties, into a primary against Haley Stevens. AIPAC’s super PAC spent millions to end his career in the House. It worked. Four years later he endorsed El-Sayed, and after the primary he had something to say to any Jewish Democrat considering Mike Rogers in November. Shame on them, he told the Forward, if they could not find their way to El-Sayed “just because he doesn’t share their exact beliefs on Israel and Palestine. That’s ridiculous.”
The campaign ran an affinity group called Jews for Abdul, organized in part by Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a photographer outside Detroit. Congregants of Congregation T’chiyah, a Reconstructionist synagogue in the suburbs, canvassed for him, and he went to their Passover seder in the spring. Roslyn Schindler, a retired Wayne State professor who taught Holocaust studies, backed him while disagreeing with him about a two-state solution.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America endorsed Haley Stevens. It also endorsed Mallory McMorrow. A dual endorsement is a strange thing to do in a three-way race, and its chief executive, Halie Soifer, explained why. “There are two candidates who stand with our community on issues of importance to Jewish voters … and there is one who does not.”
Michigan’s Democratic Jewish Caucus endorsed Stevens as well. Its chair, Decky Alexander, hasn’t decided about November. Rabbi Asher Lopatin, of a modern Orthodox congregation in the same suburbs, has decided. He won’t vote for El-Sayed and thinks nobody else should. He’s still studying the Republican candidate.
Jewish voters are 1.4 percent of the Michigan electorate. Among them, they produced two rival affinity operations, a dual endorsement, a rabbi urging a boycott of the nominee, and another congregation feeding him at Passover.
And AIPAC. Its affiliated super PAC put up more than $30 million to beat El-Sayed, a record-breaking sum. Outside spending in the primary ran past $60 million, most of it working for Stevens. El-Sayed built his campaign around it. “They’ve set a record in this race to help elect my opponent,” he said at the final debate. He said they knew she would be a reliable vote for the policy they wanted.
There was no single Jewish position because there is no single Jewish constituency.
In March, an antisemite drove a truck packed with fireworks and gasoline into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield. He exchanged fire with an armed security guard, then shot himself after becoming trapped in the burning vehicle. Roughly 140 children were inside. None were harmed. The FBI later classified the attack as Hezbollah-inspired terrorism directed at the Jewish community.
El-Sayed grew up fifteen minutes away and had childhood friends who worshipped there. He condemned the attack the same day. Then he released a four-minute video that named the attacker and observed that an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon had killed members of his family the week before, including two children. “I condemn what he did,” he said, “There is never a justification for attacking innocent people or houses of worship. Never. … Hurt people hurt people.”
Rabbi Jen Lader of Temple Israel wrote in The Free Press that the first statement had been right and the second had undone it. She objected to an attack on a Michigan synagogue being explained through Israeli conduct six thousand miles away, and called it offensive. Her congregation, she wrote, was a local community of families who gather to pray and to mourn together. When they were attacked, she argued, it wasn’t an understandable response to somebody’s loss. The target was a Jewish congregation in Michigan.
She wasn’t wrong to be angry. I wouldn’t want to hear about some Middle Eastern conflict if my son was attacked.
Then she wrote the best sentence of this campaign: “Michigan’s Jews are not abstractions or stand-ins for a foreign government.” She meant it against El-Sayed. It’s also the rule that protects him.
A Jew in West Bloomfield has nothing to do with the Israeli government.
An Abdelrahman in Houston isn’t Abdul El-Sayed.
By July the National Republican Senatorial Committee had developed a preference for Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, the full name that, like me, he doesn’t use much. It carried the preference into the general election. The debut ad used it too, billed him the most radical Senate candidate in America, and told Michigan he supports the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed offered pronunciation lessons: “They think they want to use my whole name against me. Mike, if you can’t say the name … keep the name out your damn mouth.”
None of that is an argument about what he would do in office.
This sort of attack didn’t begin with El-Sayed. In 1949, a Jewish Senate candidate was accused of taking America toward socialism and communism, while voters were warned about the New York “bloc” behind him. Columbia’s Herbert Lehman archive describes the campaign as resorting to antisemitic innuendo.
There is no shortage of understandable objections to El-Sayed. He wants Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE. He previously supported defunding the police. He wants to end military aid to Israel, defensive as well as offensive. He campaigned twice with Hasan Piker, a guy I don’t like. A Michigan voter can weigh all of that and vote against him in perfectly good faith.
Not one of those objections requires his religion. There are enough things to debate that nobody needs to make another one out of his Islam. When the subject of an attack quietly becomes the Jews, or the Muslims, something has gone wrong, and usually on purpose.
The same rule goes the other way. Criticize AIPAC. Criticize its donors. Criticize the Israeli government. But say what you mean. The distance from AIPAC to “the Jews” is one lazy, antisemitic sentence. The anti-Zionist movement has a long, ugly history of crossing it. El-Sayed mostly doesn’t. Not everyone repeating him will be as discerning.
I’m happy he won. My mom uses the long version of my name when she’s mad at me, and last week Republicans used it for basically the same reason. It doesn’t make us a faction.
Our republic doesn’t need Muslims or Jews to arrive at a single voice. Its safety may lie in the fact that we never will.
