Collin Anderson writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the latest spin from Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate.
Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed has attempted to address mounting concerns from Jewish voters by rolling out ads and social media videos touting “Jews for Abdul.” Featured in the spots are three left-wing “social justice” activists with ties to an anti-Israel group that excused Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, arguing it was a result of “Israeli apartheid and occupation.”
A September 8 El-Sayed ad features former Detroit Jews for Justice “Culture and Technology Fellow” Daniel Klein, who sports a yarmulke and poses with his family as El-Sayed says he’ll “be thinking about the people here” in Michigan, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
Klein is a former New York-based reporter for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency who covered the role of “left-wing Jewish activists” in the Occupy Wall Street protests. He left journalism in 2012 to become a “community organizer,” and after a stint at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he joined Detroit Jews for Justice—a self-described “social justice organization” that advocates “for housing justice, water rights, [and] reproductive justice”—in November 2018. Months earlier, Klein was arrested at the Michigan Poor People’s Campaign, a series of rallies against “violence, racism, environmental devastation and poverty” that “leverag[ed] the age-old tactic of creative performative arrest” to “shed light on these injustices.”
“Dan Klein is a former national reporter, and has worked as a field organizer for congressional and city of Chicago elections—yet, he’s proudest of the work he’s done in support of Detroit Jews for Justice,” Klein’s online bio stated at the time. “He currently awaits trial for misdemeanor charges incurred during the Poor People’s Campaign. He has a kitten named Kovner.”
Less than two weeks later, on September 19, El-Sayed released a Rosh Hashanah video filmed at the home of mother-daughter duo Missy and Elaine Shifman, who read prayers from a card and praised El-Sayed’s single-payer Medicare for All health care platform.
