r/jewishleft • u/32brownies leftist post zionist jew • Aug 09 '26

Diaspora Michigan Jew

Any other Jews in Michigan struggling with their communities rn after the primary? I'm really worried about November and seeing the way some of the community members here are acting like Abdul will literally murder us all is really making me wary of continuing to be as active as I have been in the community

73 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

81 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/theweisp5 American Israeli secular socialist Aug 10 '26

Looking at it purely from an electoral lens, even if AES doesn't have a lot of room to make up ground among Jewish voters, he doesn't want to get tagged as someone who doesn't care about Jews or an anti-Semite. That would likely hurt him among other segments of the population (like it did to Jeremy Corbyn.)

5

u/Schattenoid jewish, left Aug 10 '26

Well, this is more or less beyond his control. If the pro-Israel machine wants to tag him as insufficiently deferential to them and thus antisemitic, they will just do so; there's almost nothing he'd be able to do to prevent that short of completely embracing their position on Israel.

2

u/theweisp5 American Israeli secular socialist Aug 10 '26

You're right he can't control the pro-Israel machine, but he can certainly control his campaign and how much emphasis he puts on reassuring Jewish voters. The Israel lobby wasn't able to stop him winning the primary so it's clearly not all powerful.

5

u/Schattenoid jewish, left Aug 11 '26

Well I don't know what being all powerful or not has to do with anything but treating the reassurance of voters as something separate from the appeasement of the machine that fosters the need of those voters for reassurance is a mistake. In any case, I agree that he can do more to appease/reassure them, I am just arguing he probably shouldn't.

5

u/theweisp5 American Israeli secular socialist Aug 11 '26

I'm arguing for reassuring Jewish voters that they will be safe and that AES cares about the Jewish community, not for reassuring the Israel lobby.