Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has taken the unusual step of distancing himself, somewhat, from one of his strongest supporters — the influential anti-Israel livestreamer Hasan Piker — over the issue of antisemitism.
El-Sayed was one of a number of high-profile Democrats to do so days after Piker made comments that some party leaders and others interpreted as justifying threats to American Jews.
Speaking on a Twitch livestream on Aug. 20, Piker stated, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action.” Piker added, “Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”
Piker also referred to Israel as “Jewish ISIS.” He made the comments while showing a picture of Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, a pro-Israel Jewish Democrat running for Congress, and a link to a story about Moss’s reluctance to back El-Sayed.
In response, El-Sayed linked his social media statement directly to Piker as he reiterated his ”commitment to Jewish safety,” stating that “antisemitism is a scourge” and denounced “any rhetoric that puts the community at risk.”
If not necessarily a sharp pivot, El-Sayed’s words — coming from a strident Israel critic in his own right — still represented an acknowledgement that his biggest campaign surrogate poses problems for his relationships with the Jewish community as well as other Democrats.
Piker’s remarks sparked a new round of intense backlash against a figure already facing criticism for harsh words about Israel and its Jewish supporters. Moss and other Democrats said Piker — who is hugely popular on the online progressive left, has been embraced by several progressive House candidates and has spoken at major Democratic confabs — was fomenting discord against Jews.
“Hasan Piker’s talk of violence against American Jews, and directly naming a Michigan elected official, and future member of Congress, Jeremy Moss, is unacceptable. Full stop,” Michigan U.S. Rep. Hillary Scholten, a Democrat, said in a statement Monday.
Calling Piker “a hack who thrives on hate, shock and awe because he lacks substance,” Scholten further described his remarks as “disgusting” and “dangerous for everyone.” The moderate congresswoman had reportedly been in talks to endorse El-Sayed when the latest Piker controversy erupted, ending such dialogue, according to Semafor.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York also weighed in on a post on X, although he did not mention Piker by name.
“There is zero justification for threats against the safety of our Jewish brothers and sisters at a moment of rising hate. We will fight the cancer of antisemitism with the fierce urgency of now,” Jeffries posted. Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin, likewise, condemned Piker’s remarks without naming him.
Some Jewish Democrats did mention Piker by name in their condemnations, including Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Micah Lasher, a Jewish pro-Israel progressive and Democratic nominee for Congress in New York.
“The issue isn’t (just) that he lumps all Jews together and holds us all accountable for the supposed evils of Israel,” Lasher wrote of Piker on X. “It’s that his nonstop drive to demonize the world’s sole Jewish state, along with those who support its survival, crosses the line — by miles — between criticism and Jew hatred of the ancient variety.”
Lasher went further into ruminations on the changing Jewish relationship to Zionism, saying that Piker has “helped turn the Z-word into a slur such that large numbers of Jews, particularly younger ones, disown it partly out of misunderstanding.”
In an email to (JEWISH REVIEW) on Tuesday, Piker, who campaigned alongside El-Sayed at Michigan colleges, said the controversy wouldn’t affect his views or his support of El-Sayed. He also defended his remarks, saying they did not constitute a threat against Jews but a warning of how their support for Israel might be construed.
“I see antisemitism unjustly rising as Israel’s popularity rightfully plummets due to its genocide,” he wrote, quoting a column by Jewish New York Times columnist Ezra Klein that Piker said made a similar point.
In that April 12 article, Klein asserted that “Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing.” In the same article, he noted that Piker had said “offensive things” about Jews, but denied that the anti-Zionist influencer was a “Jew hater.”
In his response to (JEWISH REVIEW), Piker added, “I don’t think any group is monolithic in their approach to issues, and the erasure of anti-Zionist Jews and calling all criticisms of Israel antisemitic only feeds into this dangerous false notion that Judaism and Zionism are inseparable and that all Jews are singularly invested in Israel.”
Piker chalked up El-Sayed’s remarks criticizing his recent comments to a political calculation. “I don’t think Abdul should cave to the Republican attack ads and framing, but if this allows him to stay on message then, he’s going to do what he must,” Piker wrote.
The incident with Piker comes as El-Sayed is working to secure the support of Michigan Democrats ahead of the November election.
El-Sayed’s GOP opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, has highlighted El-Sayed’s record on Israel and relationship with Piker to similarly court Jewish voters. Rogers called Piker the Democratic candidate’s “running mate” at the state party nominating convention over the weekend, and issued a statement on Monday saying Piker had made a “call for violence against the Jewish Community, specifically against Jeremy Moss.”
Rogers added that El-Sayed’s criticism of Piker “is the epitome of what a conman does — says one thing when it serves him and another when it doesn’t.” Rogers, who is polling in a statistical dead heat with El-Sayed, has pushed outreach to disaffected Jewish voters as part of his campaign strategy.
Jewish Democrats have struggled with the question of whether, or how, to coalesce around El-Sayed, who, among other positions, opposes all military aid to Israel. The candidate is scheduled to host two events Wednesday, including a town hall in heavily Jewish Oakland County, with Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a progressive pro-Israel Jew.
Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost the primary to El-Sayed in a race in which AIPAC and affiliated groups spent tens of millions of dollars supporting her, endorsed him after his victory. Stevens has since urged El-Sayed to distance himself from Piker.
Moss, meanwhile, has so far withheld endorsing El-Sayed, while the state’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, has urged the candidate to “tone down the rhetoric.”
Rabbi Asher Lopatin, who formerly headed community relations for Ann Arbor’s Jewish federation and spoke at a “Democrats for Mike Rogers” press conference days before the latest Piker blowup, has cited El-Sayed’s relationship with the streamer as a key reason for why he shouldn’t serve in the Senate.
The candidate’s latest statement hasn’t convinced him otherwise, Lopatin told (JEWISH REVIEW).
“I don’t want a political statement,” Lopatin said. “I want him to apologize for being around someone like Hasan Piker.”
A sincere effort by El-Sayed to win over Jewish voters, the rabbi said, would “say openly that I respect Jews that are Zionist, I respect the Jewish people who have a sense of peoplehood, who have a connection to Israel.”
Moss, who is hoping to fill the seat in a heavily Jewish suburban Detroit district being vacated by Stevens, also took Piker to task Monday while continuing to gingerly describe his relationship with El-Sayed.
“I will not be lectured by a California podcaster about what Oakland County, Michigan’s Jewish community should and shouldn’t believe,” the candidate wrote in his own statement. (Piker lives and works in Los Angeles.) “And we certainly won’t be gaslit that we’re responsible for the antisemitic harm upon us.”
Moss referenced the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, a Detroit suburb, earlier this year. The congregation sits in the district he hopes to represent, and El-Sayed’s response to the attack, appearing to link it to the attacker having lost family in an Israeli strike on Lebanon, was roundly criticized by the state’s Jewish community.
Moss’s own relationship with El-Sayed has become a larger stand-in for how the Democratic Party may struggle to keep Jewish Americans in its tent amid deep divisions over Israel.
Before Piker singled him out, Moss had told Slate that he’s held several ongoing conversations with his party’s Senate candidate but that El-Sayed was “going to have to demonstrate some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community.”
Responding to Moss’s comments on the initial livestream that prompted the furor, Piker had mused, “I wonder what he has to do to gain the support of Oakland County’s Jewish community. Yeah, he has to drop his critiques of Israel. That’s what it is.”
Prior to his showdown with Piker, Moss told his followers he had been the target of a different sort of attack: “manipulated and unsourced audio” falsely attributing antisemitic tropes to him. In recordings circulating online over the last few weeks, including by a former Democratic primary opponent to Moss, a voice purporting to belong to Moss can be heard saying, “The entire purpose of my campaign is to ensure that the U.S. continues to support Israel.”
In a post on X on Aug. 18, Moss wrote that the words in the audio were not his. He noted that the audio “peddles in offensive tropes and lies — especially the lie of dual loyalty suggesting that Jews are never fully citizens of or loyal to their home countries.”
The Democratic party, which is desperate to hold their Senate seat in Michigan, has limited time to mend fences with the state’s estimated 100,000 Jews. Michigan Democrats are holding their statewide nominating convention on Saturday; Nessel has already said she won’t attend out of fear of being targeted for antisemitic harassment.
Dialogue between Moss and El-Sayed is still ongoing, the former wrote Monday, noting “our shared fight against MAGA extremism.”
Moss said they have “talked about Jewish and Arab safety and security, both here at home in Michigan and in the Middle East.” He added, “There is still work ahead to unite our ticket despite our differences.”
As the Year Turns, Support the Journalism You Trust. (JEWISH REVIEW) covers the stories shaping Jewish life around the world — with the depth this moment calls for. As you reflect on the year ahead, consider a gift that keeps independent Jewish journalism strong.
