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By Anna Rahmanan
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America’s Jewish trust crisis long predates this week’s Democratic Senate Primary in Michigan, but Abdul El-Sayed’s victory has given it a new battleground-state test. Can universities, media organizations, political parties and civic institutions address antisemitism without filtering Jewish safety through the politics of Israel and Gaza?
The collapse did not begin with one candidate, one campus protest or one election. For many American Jews, it was built through years of rising antisemitic incidents, uneven institutional responses, post-October 7 campus turmoil and a media environment they increasingly see as selective in how it recognizes anti-Jewish hostility.
Michigan now makes that national rupture harder to treat as abstract. El-Sayed’s win over Representative Haley Stevens put Israel, AIPAC, Gaza and Jewish communal fear at the center of the Democratic Party in a pivotal state, showing how a crisis of institutional confidence is moving from campuses and community-security meetings into electoral politics.
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Michigan Gives A National Trust Crisis A Current Test
Think of El-Sayed’s win as a stress test.
He ran on ending U.S. military aid to Israel, while pro-Israel groups—including AIPAC—spent heavily to back Stevens. His supporters saw the result as a rejection of outside money and a sign that Democratic voters want a sharper break from Israel's war in Gaza.
Many Jewish institutions and pro-Israel Democrats, however, read the same race differently.
To them, it crystallized a question that has been simmering across campuses, in newsrooms and within the Democratic Party: Are Jewish communal concerns treated as legitimate civil-rights concerns, or do they become politically suspect the moment they intersect with Israel, AIPAC or Zionism?
The debate isn't simply the familiar argument over whether criticism of Israel is antisemitic. It's about where the line is drawn between protected political speech and hostility toward Jews, and who gets to define that line. The Michigan race gives that debate new electoral weight, bringing one of America's most contentious cultural arguments into a Senate contest in a battleground state that both parties feel like they need to win.
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The Campus Breakdown Came First
Michigan also matters because the state’s campuses and Jewish institutions have already been pulled into the post-October 7 conflict. In June, federal prosecutors charged eight people associated with the University of Michigan with alleged conspiracies to threaten university leaders, law enforcement, businesses and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.
The charges remain allegations and the defendants are entitled to the presumption of innocence, but the case gave legal form to a fear many Jewish families had already voiced—that protest politics could spill beyond argument over Israel into intimidation of Jewish people and institutions that are perceived as pro-Israel.
The University of Michigan had already faced federal scrutiny. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said it resolved complaints alleging the university failed to respond to harassment of students with shared Jewish ancestry or Israeli identity during the 2023-24 school year. The resolution did not say all allegations had been proved, but it required the university to review policies, train staff and reassess how to respond to reports of discrimination and harassment.
Universities speak often about inclusion, safety and identity-based harm. The grievance among many Jews is that those principles appear less reliable when the hostility is aimed at them and framed as activism against Israel.
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The Trust Is Broken: Jews Are Changing How They Live
The most revealing measure of broken trust is what American Jews now do differently.
Many Jews have become more careful about wearing visible Jewish symbols, posting about Jewish identity online, attending campus events, sending children to certain schools or trusting employers and universities to respond if antisemitism appears in the language of anti-Zionism. They're beyond questioning whether antisemitism is rising, now focused on whether institutions will recognize the shift quickly enough, name it clearly enough and act on it consistently enough to make Jewish life feel ordinary again. Because trust is not lost only when an institution openly fails but when people begin to assume the failure before they ask for help.
For Jewish students, that can mean wondering whether administrators will treat a threat against Zionists as a threat against Jews or whether they will first litigate the politics of the word “Zionist.” For Jewish parents, it can mean reading campus statements less for comfort than for loopholes and for Jewish professionals, it can mean calculating whether a mezuzah, a Star of David necklace or a public comment about Israel will make them vulnerable at work.
Those are small acts of self-protection, but together they describe a large civic retreat. A community that once saw American institutions as unusually reliable guardians of Jewish security is now asking whether those same institutions still know how to protect Jews when doing so is politically uncomfortable.
Why Trust Broke: Institutions Seem Selective When Jews Are The Target
Antisemitism is a tale as old as time and American Jews have lived with it for a long time. The more corrosive and defining shift now involves how major institutions have become selective in how they recognize prejudice—and universities are the clearest case study.
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Many campuses have spent years teaching students to take identity-based harm seriously, to avoid language that makes minority groups feel unsafe and to treat harassment as more than physical violence. But, after October 7, many Jewish students felt those same institutions became hesitant and procedural when the targets were Jews, especially when hostility was wrapped in the language of Israel, Zionism or decolonization.
That perceived double standard is devastating to trust. It tells Jews that institutional protections may depend less on the harm itself than on whether the victim fits the institution’s preferred political vocabulary.
The media problem is different but related. Many Jews believe antisemitism is covered intensely when it can be attached to the political right, and more cautiously when it emerges from progressive spaces, campus activism or anti-Israel movements. Others argue conservative media show the reverse pattern, emphasizing left-wing antisemitism while giving less sustained attention to white nationalism, conspiracy theories and replacement rhetoric.
Across those divides, the common complaint is the same: anti-Jewish hatred is often recognized through a partisan filter before it is recognized as anti-Jewish hatred.
Politics has made the breach worse, of course (because, politics, right?). Democrats are trying to manage a coalition split between younger progressives who want a much harder line against Israel and Jewish voters who increasingly feel exposed. Republicans have sought to exploit that divide, even as parts of the right continue to tolerate or minimize extremist rhetoric that has long targeted Jews. For many Jews, neither side looks like a fully reliable institutional home.
That is why the trust collapse is so hard to repair.
Institutions cannot rebuild it with statements alone, they would have to show, repeatedly and in public, that the rules they apply to other forms of bigotry also apply when Jews are threatened; that criticism of Israel does not excuse harassment of Jews; and that Jewish safety is not contingent on whether Jewish politics are convenient for the coalition in charge.
Some Institutions Are Responding, But Trust Lags Behind
There is a fair counterpoint that American institutions have not been uniformly silent. Universities have revised protest rules, federal civil-rights officials have investigated antisemitism complaints, police have increased security around synagogues and Jewish schools, and political leaders in both parties have condemned anti-Jewish hatred.
Unfortunately, as much as they matter, those responses have not closed the trust gap. Many Jews judge institutions less by whether they eventually issue a statement than by whether they understand the threat before public pressure forces action because timing and language matter, as does the consistency of rules reinforcement.
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That is what makes the American Jewish Committee’s finding so revealing: 55 percent of American Jews said they avoided at least one behavior in the previous year out of fear of antisemitism.
Broken trust looks like people changing what they wear, where they go, what they post and how openly they identify.
Where This Goes Next
Michigan is now a test of whether this trust collapse can be handled politically without making it worse.
El-Sayed’s supporters will argue that criticism of Israel, opposition to U.S. military aid and attacks on AIPAC spending are legitimate parts of democratic politics. They are right that no American policy, foreign government or lobbying group is beyond scrutiny.
The question for many Jewish voters is whether that scrutiny can remain distinct from suspicion toward Jews as a community. The obvious danger is the creation of a political climate in which Jewish safety concerns are dismissed because they are presumed to be cover for Israel, donor influence or attempts to silence debate.
The trust collapse is unlikely to reverse quickly. It may take years, perhaps decades, because suspicion hardens once a community begins to expect institutional failure. Every delayed statement, uneven standard or carefully hedged response becomes evidence for what many Jews already fear—that full participation in American public life now requires a private calculation about self-protection.
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