There is something deeply Jewish about being asked to look beyond ourselves. Our tradition commands us to care for the stranger, the widow, the orphan and the vulnerable. Jewish history has taught us what happens when people avert their eyes from the suffering of others. But there is something profoundly unsettling about telling Jews that fulfilling those obligations may require us to put aside concern for our own protection, or even our own survival.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently argued that Jews have “a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.” Invoking Esther, she suggested that Jews might be called upon to “sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people” for the sake of humanity.

I reject that premise because Jewish ethics does not demand Jewish self-erasure.

What makes Nessel’s argument particularly difficult to understand is that she knows what it feels like when Jewish safety and belonging are treated as secondary concerns.

Just weeks earlier, Nessel refused to attend her own state Democratic convention because she did not feel safe or welcome. “I don’t feel safe going,” she said, describing fears of being chased, harassed, screamed at or booed. After a party official reportedly called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs, Nessel asked: “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” Then, in August, when asked whether Democrats were doing enough to address antisemitism, she answered unequivocally: “Absolutely they’re not.”

That is precisely why her subsequent argument is so troubling. The lesson of feeling unsafe at a Democratic convention should not be that Jews must become more willing to subordinate our own safety. No political movement committed to justice should ask a minority to accept intimidation or danger as the price of belonging.

Jewish tradition has quite a........

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