Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spent decades telling Jewish audiences that his name meant something important. In a 2010 interview with Jewish radio host Nachum Segal, Schumer said it “comes from the word shomer, guardian, watcher. My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov. And I believe Hashem gave me that name. One of my roles, very important in the United States Senate, is to be a shomer — to be the shomer Yisrael. And I will continue to be that with every bone in my body.” On the Senate floor in 2024, in what was billed as the most important speech of his career, he called himself the first Jewish majority leader in American history and the highest-ranking Jewish elected official the country has ever produced. He wrote a book last year titled Antisemitism in America: A Warning.

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However, on Aug. 5, he endorsed Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed, who won the primary the night before.

El Sayed, a former Detroit health commissioner, spent the primary campaign explicitly arguing that Schumer should be replaced as Democratic leader. He had told the New York Post the weekend before his win that Schumer had “given all of us ample reason to question” his leadership, and that Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), who Democrats would install instead, “would be perfect.” Within hours of the result, Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) released a joint statement praising el Sayed’s “energetic campaign” and pledging to help send him to the Senate.

The endorsement was not really a surprise. Schumer needs the seat. Michigan is one of the handful of states that will decide whether Democrats retake the majority in November, and as the sitting minority leader, Schumer was in a tough spot. However, Democrats have waxed poetic about “principles” and “democracy” for more than a decade, and here was Schumer, the guardian as he calls himself, endorsing a candidate he would rain down fire on if he were a Republican.

El Sayed has called the Israeli government “bloodthirsty” and described its conduct in Gaza as “genocide.” When a man rammed a car into a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, during preschool hours in March, in an attack authorities linked to the driver’s grief over a........

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