Mike Rogers' Religious Bigotry Threatens All of Michigan’s Jews

In a world and a Midwest where Vivek Ramaswamy flounders, weaponizing a disturbed mother and a history of child abuse against his opponent, it’s difficult to argue that anyone has run a filthier campaign for statewide office. But Ramaswamy has been lapped by the mothballed Floridian Donald Trump migrated north to run for the U.S. Senate in Michigan.

Mike Rogers has centered a single argument for putting Trump’s pick in the upper house of Congress: Islamophobia.

And all the empty claims he’s surfaced to fuel what has been one of, if not the, most bigoted campaigns in U.S. history come down to guilt by association or, worse, insinuation. The only real evidence he has against Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic candidate’s full name, family, and professed faith.

The joke is Rogers spent his years in Congress urging Washington to work with Egypt’s government, no matter ran it. Funny how he feels he deserves precise nuance for his actual record while favoring smears about imaginary connections for his opponent, all engineered to maximize the number of times Mike Rogers can say the word “Muslim.”

And this convenient spew of hate should feel familiar and terrifying to every Jew.

It’s the same sort of fact-free fearmongering that has led to the greatest tragedies of the last century. It lurks in the dark heart of every blanket accusation against George Soros. It courses through the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that now animates the Trump State Department and echoes the propaganda of Nazi Germany.

That was the conspiracy theory that was on the mind of a monster who slaughtered 11 in a synagogue in Pittsburgh during Trump’s first term, at the peak of the time when the president was spewing lies non-stop about Soros and caravans.

Absurdly targeting a minority group to claw for power used to enrich the wealthiest and most shameless people alive is an overarching hallmark of Trumpism. But Rogers, with his comically empty candidacy, has taken it to an extreme our state has never witnessed before. And he’s doing all in service of a president who is literally in business with Saudi Arabia, the country that produced most of the 9/11 hijackers. Funny how access to money and power eases the right’s concerns about associations that actually exist.

And my fellow Jews know what Trump’s placeholder is doing: dividing us by pretending to offer care. A betrayal that he will likely never atone for.

It’s the same strategy that sees the Trump regime feigning a defense of Jews while it’s really attacking the higher education system we love, while hiring men (and promoting a Senate candidate) with known white nationalist and neo-nazi connections, while using the antisemitic slur “Shylock” in a speech and, certainly, far worse in private.

And it will not work on the majority of us who will proudly vote for Dr. El-Sayed and the entire Democratic ticket. We know that Islamophobia feeds the same beast as Jew hatred for the same cruel, senseless aims. We know this even as our community struggles to come to terms with even how to discuss the horrors of October 7 and the war crimes that followed.

And we know this tidal wave of hate is only coming because Mike Rogers can’t run on anything else.

Trump’s policies have been a nightmare for Michigan, like a satire of what he promised on the campaign trail. His aggression toward next-door neighbor Canada and military threats to our NATO partners transcend even the most vile comments he made on the campaign. And the skyrocketing prices sparked by a losing war against Iran have been such a disaster that Rogers, a long-time hawk who has longed for nothing more than more and more military adventures, has to now pretend to be against the war.

He does this even though we all know that he will do nothing to check Donald Trump in any way if we make the mistake of electing him. Rogers will only encourage Trump’s tantruming trade wars, ICE abuses of our neighbors, and the massive Medicaid cuts that will likely force Michigan’s rural hospitals to make huge cutbacks or close as soon as they hit in January.

And he’s even proven that he’s willing to echo Trump’s democracy-hating election denial, which saw the president try to steal the votes of almost 3 million Michiganders in 2020.

The pain Mike Rogers will enable in office is real. And the anguish he is playing with on the campaign trail is deep. It’s aggravating an ache at the heart of the challenge of existing as a Jew in a country that is now filling up ICE camps with a civilian population that now either matches or exceeds Japanese-American internment.

Since I first saw the numbers tattooed on the arm of my first Hebrew School teacher and heard her say, “I was younger than you then,” I’ve never been the same.

With our luck, we’ve been granted something that has almost never existed in history: We are Jews who can freely and safely speak our minds, practice our faith or not, and generally be accepted as fully fledged members of society.

That great luck gives us a great responsibility. We are endowed with a duty to be the first to stand up for anyone who is targeted by any variety of the sick, opportunistic hate that has chased our ancestors around the globe.

I’m asking my fellow Jews in Michigan to help elect the first Muslim American to the U.S. Senate—a devoted dad, a scholar, a visionary thinker, and a genuinely good dude.

Let’s be the people we hope others will be, and reject the hate that can easily turn against us and our families. Our safety depends on it.