Black conservative group pushes pro-Jewish, Israel messaging in Michigan

YPSILANTI, Michigan (JTA) – A Black conservative group is distributing signs and paying for billboards in Michigan encouraging Black voters to support Jews and Israel, in the days before a contentious US Senate race in which the Democratic candidate has struggled to shore up both voting groups.

The Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), a Washington, DC-based nonprofit, has paid for a series of yard signs reading “Blacks and Jews Standing Together” throughout cities with high Black populations, including Detroit, Flint and Ypsilanti.

The nonprofit’s director, Star Parker, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an email that their goal is “to remind black Christian voters of unique and special reasons to stand with Israel.”

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Parker said CURE is also paying for billboards in the area reading “Self Defense is Not Genocide” and “Many Black Evangelicals Agree that Israel Has a Right to Exist.”

The signs and billboards do not name any candidates. But Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, has alienated many Jewish voters with his rhetoric on Israel and comments on Jewish safety.

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He has also had difficulty shoring up Black support, another traditional Democratic constituency. That has shifted somewhat in the race’s final days, with one poll commissioned by the Detroit News suggesting that 87 percent of likely Black voters would support El-Sayed.

Still, there can be distrust between Black and Arab communities as with Jewish and Arab populations. Sam Robinson, a Detroit-based reporter for a historic Black newspaper who has interviewed scores of Black voters in viral interviews, recently told the Columbia Journalism Review, “There’s a scarcity mindset that there are only so many resources and Arabs are somehow taking Black people’s share.”

Republican Mike Rogers, meanwhile, has courted Black voters as well as Jewish ones, with pro-Rogers ads highlighting tensions between local Black and Arab communities. A new super PAC linked to Rogers has spent heavily on ads stating that El-Sayed “has been disrespectful and dishonest with Black voters.”

CURE’s signs targeting Black voters appeared in the final week of the campaign. They followed an October 22 interfaith roundtable in Detroit hosted by the organization, in which a local rabbi appeared alongside Black pastors to discuss the history of Black-Jewish organizing — a longtime alliance that has been shaken in recent years for a number of reasons.

Rabbi Aaron Bergman of Adat Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, participated in the CURE roundtable. Over email, he told JTA that politics was not meant to be the focus of the event.

“It was mostly about teaching about antisemitism, which I guess at this point in history is political,” Bergman wrote.

El-Sayed has focused much of his campaign’s homestretch on shoring up the Black vote, visiting Black churches and holding events with former president Barack Obama and senior US Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, a Black congressional leader. Driving up turnout in Black communities, usually one of the Democrats’ strongest constituencies, is viewed as key to his chances of taking the seat.

Pro-Israel Democrat US Rep. Haley Stevens’ last-minute decision to endorse Rogers instead is a wildcard. Star told JTA she believed many “black Christian voters” would follow her lead.

“Their support for Israel needed a boost,” she said. “I believe this endorsement has taken Mike Rogers over the finish line with Black voters.”

Yet there are signs that Palestinian rights may be a more animating issue among Michigan’s Black voters this year than in the past. Pro-Palestinian state Rep. Donavan McKinney, a democratic socialist, won his primary challenge against a pro-Israel incumbent in a majority-Black, Detroit-area congressional district in August. And during one Stevens primary campaign stop in Detroit, a Black community organizer directly confronted her over her support for Israel.

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