Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Jewish Democrat whose eight years in office will conclude at the end of December, said at an event in Lansing on Thursday that antisemitism in the state — and in the statewide Democratic Party — has gotten so bad that she will not attend the party’s nominating convention next month. 

At the party’s first convention of the year, in April, attendees chose a pro-Hezbollah candidate over a pro-Israel Jewish incumbent for a slot to be a University of Michigan regent. Party members loudly booed Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), a pro-Israel Democrat running for Senate, when she addressed the room, leaving Jewish attendees “shell-shocked,” as a former Ann Arbor city councilmember said at the time. 

“I don’t feel safe going,” Nessel said at the Thursday event, which was organized by the Anti-Defamation League and featured other Michigan Jews speaking about their own experiences of antisemitism. “I feel like my presence is not going to be welcomed. 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. And I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying. And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen.”

Nessel spoke candidly, as heard in audio of the event obtained by Jewish Insider, about a problem that she said has gotten “worse and worse and worse,” including within her own political party. 

“I can’t speak for the Republican Party because I’m not a member of that party, but I will speak as a member of the Democratic Party here in Michigan, that something’s got to change. This cannot continue,” Nessel said. “I have profound fears about what is going to happen to this state, and what is going to happen to this country if we don’t have a significant change of course.” 

Nessel was billed as the moderator for the roundtable, where she heard from parents whose children had faced antisemitism in Michigan schools, the director of Chabad at Michigan State University and a rabbi from Temple Israel, the West Bloomfield synagogue that is still reeling from an antisemitic attack in March. Nessel listened to the stories and asked questions of the participants, but she also spoke at length about her own experiences and her perception of the threat that antisemitism poses. 

“I can’t just say that it’s caused me a good deal of depression. I often feel despair,” Nessel said. She described gradually coming to terms with the modern reality: that antisemitism is now a feature of American society, and a fixture on both the political left and right.

“I’ve never seen it in my lifetime. I appreciate that my parents did — certainly my grandparents did,” Nessel said, noting that her grandparents fled Eastern Europe. “To see some of the same language that was used during that time period, and we’re seeing it emerge now in modern-day America — if you would have told me that … I still will say I was very naive and I didn’t think, ever, that this could happen in modern-day United States of America.” 

Antisemitism is not entirely a post-Oct. 7 phenomenon for Nessel. In March 2023, several months before the Hamas attacks in Israel that kicked off the war in Gaza, federal investigators arrested an armed Michigan man for threatening to kill Jewish people serving in state government, including Nessel. But she stressed that things have only gotten worse since.

“Especially since Oct. 7, what has become clear to me,” said Nessel, is “how few people know anything about our religious beliefs, how little many people know really about Israel or about any connection that the Jewish community has with Israel.” 

When she won her race in 2018, Nessel became the first LGBTQ person elected to statewide office in Michigan. She expected to face threats about that. She did not expect that nearly all of the threats against her would be because she was Jewish. 

“The threats that I receive are almost exclusively antisemitic threats. People aren’t interested in the fact that I’m gay. They’re not interested in the fact that I’m a woman. They are very interested in the fact that I am Jewish,” Nessel said. “That is a barometer as to the focus that people have.”

ADL Michigan regional director Elyssa Schmier told JI that Nessel’s comments about the Democratic Party convention surprised her. 

“I do think it says something that the highest ranking Democrat or any party official in our state who’s Jewish does not feel comfortable or safe,” Schmier said. “I think that there are people on both sides of each political party that want to remove Jews from public life and make it so they fear for their safety or their family’s safety, or the ability to even achieve what they want to achieve in those settings.” 

Rabbi Arianna Gordon, director of education and lifelong learning at Temple Israel, lauded Nessel for speaking openly about the antisemitism she has faced in politics. 

“There’s some really scary things happening in the political conversation right now, particularly here, but there also are politicians who really have shown up for us and for the Jewish community, and who I know care deeply about us,” Gordon said. “Good for her for saying that out loud.”