by P.D. Lesko

In 2021, a gunman walked into Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered 11 congregants, wounding six others. In 2023, a Michigan man was arrested by the FBI for plotting to gun down members of East Lansing’s Congregation Shaarey Zedek on March 15, 2024, a date that “apparently referred to the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in which 51 were killed.”

On Monday July 8 two of the three candidates for Washtenaw County Sheriff spent an hour at the Ann Arbor Jewish Community Center showing local Jews just how little they care or understand that Jews are targets of anti-semitic hatred. Alyshia Dyer and Derrick Jackson demonstrated how provincial, ignorant and unprepared the two candidates are to deal with anti-semitism, Jewish hate crimes and threats of terrorism that target Jews, or targets anyone else for that matter. Sheriff’s candidates Alyshia Dyer, Derrick Jackson and Ken Magee answered questions and had the opportunity to rebut each other’s answers to questions from members of the local Jewish Community. The event was well-organized and well-attended, including by former Ann Arbor City Council members Joan Lowenstein and Julie Grand.

Over and over, Jackson and Dyer demonstrated a shocking ignorance of the Jewish community’s safety concerns, and repeatedly focused on the need for local Jews to “dialogue” with the anti-semites and others who would target them for violence, and even murder. The two candidates served up a comical display of knee jerk progressive idiocy.

Derrick Jackson, who has a Black father and a white mother, and who is married to a white woman, was particularly dim-witted. For an hour Jackson, who has no experience in dealing with domestic terrorism, talked in circles about the importance of talking through disagreements. Had the panel discussion been about miscegenation, Derrick Jackson would have had the Lovings “talk it out” with the members of the Virginia Miscegenation League.

Alyshia Dyer did not deviate from to her usual talking points: better mental health care for Sheriff’s deputies, her promise not to cooperate with I.C.E., and the big hot button issue among Ann Arbor’s Jews, in-person visitation at the County Jail. No one told Alyshia that the County Jail is not populated by large numbers of Ann Arbor Jews whose families are thrilled she’ll bring back in-person visitation. Dyer obviously has no idea how much families pay to receive phone calls from their incarcerated loved ones. Securus is bilking local families, charging .16 per minute for local phone calls, and the Sheriff’s Dept. is raking in kickbacks.

The Jews of Ann Arbor are edgy, nervous, and for good reason: as recently as Dec. 2023, hundreds of synagogues in the U.S. were targeted by false bomb threats. The FBI launched a nationwide investigation. In Jan. 2024, “the FBI, DHS, and NCTC warned the public of ongoing bomb threats by malicious actors targeting synagogues, and Jewish community centers.” Members of Beth israel synagogue pay a security fee along with their annual dues. A nice, white-haired, elderly fellow named Ed sits in a chair beside the entrance to the shul and on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. He welcomes those who go to services with a kindly “Shabbat Shalom,” and chats about the weather.

Insert macabre joke about well-dressed terrorist wearing a yarmulka, here.

There are approximately 8,000 Jews in Ann Arbor, a small community, but a community that is being disproportionately targeted thanks to the war which resulted from the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and their Palestinian collaborators.

I lived in Italy for several years. There are bullet holes on the outside of the Grand Synagogue in Rome to remind everyone of the Palestinian terrorist attack in the ’80s (an attack the Italian government knew about beforehand, but did not stop) in which several Roman Jews, including a young child, were murdered. Today, there are 35,000 Jews in Rome and three Italian military police with machine guns and an armored vehicle are stationed outside that synagogue 24-7.

As a guest or a foreign Jew who wishes to go to services there, to get into Il Tempio in Roma, you need a passport, a reservation, and you will go into a bomb-proof booth inside the front door and then get buzzed into the entryway. In Venice, similarly, if you want to attend a Friday night service at one of the 500-year-old synagogues called scuole (schools), you need to call ahead, take identification and prepare to be searched. The Great Synagogue of Florence is surrounded by a 10-foot tall cement wall, has a bomb proof guard’s booth and a bomb proof entry door.

If Dyer and Jackson had appeared before any Jewish community in Europe, they would have been hissed out of the room. To whit, no one clapped at the end of the event. Thanks to Midwestern nice, the Ann Arbor Jews sat through 57 minutes of excellent questions, many ridiculously uninformed answers and a few spicy rebuttals.

Alyshia Dyer in her answer to a question sniped that Ken Magee didn’t “have a clue” about I.C.E. In his rebuttal, Magee quipped: “I’ll take my 30+ years of experience over your 6.4 years of experience any day.”

The questions posed to the three candidates focused on the Jewish community’s safety, feelings of fear and, in particular, the University of Michigan’s nationally-recognized mishandling of the Pro-Palestinian protests that left Jewish students and residents of Ann Arbor who work and teach on the Ann Arbor campus open to anti-semitic harassment by protestors (including non-students) camped out in the Diag.

Ken Magee reminded Alyshia Dyer that, at other events, she has put her own politics before policing in having spoken in support of the Pro-Palestinian protesters who took over the Diag with their tents. Magee said he would be a “geopolitically neutral” Sheriff who will seek to prevent hate crimes.

Derrick Jackson made a video he posted to Facebook after the protesters were removed from the Diag. In his video, he assured viewers that no Sheriff’s deputies had participated. How comforting. The U-M Police had asked both the Ann Arbor Police and the Washtenaw County Sheriff for help. The Michigan State Police assisted.

Ken Magee, unlike his opponents, said as Sheriff he would have responded to requests from the University for help dismantling the protester’s “village.” Magee said he would have stepped in as soon as the first tent went up, had he been asked. He said he supports the First Amendment and protest, and said the protesters could have talked about their concerns 24-7; establishing a tent village crossed a line into creating a hostile atmosphere for other people, said Magee.

Ken Magee, who has 30 years of policing experience, including fighting terrorism, told attendees that while dialogue is important, the community needs a Sheriff who will focus on policing and policies aimed at preventing hate crimes.

One of the questions the candidates fielded was about “welcoming strangers.” The three were obviously unaware of the broader meaning behind the question. Alyshia Dyer blathered on about how she will not cooperate with I.C.E. She urged those in attendance to go to the Sheriff’s website and see that her opponent Derrick Jackson is lying about the Sheriff’s Dept. not cooperating with I.C.E. It was a singular display in not being capable of reading a room.

Derrick Jackson, who said he was going to just talk about himself and not about the other candidates, waxed rhapsodically about “welcoming folks” into “the community.” His answer suggested that local Jews concerned about their physical safety, rising anti-semitism and anti-semitic hatred could have their fears assauged by a picnic in a park with the people seeking to target them, maybe over a shared meal of tref— some pork ribs, baked beans with a thick slab of bacon for flavoring, and a pile of crab cakes.

Derrick Jackson sat in a room full of Jews and Jewish leaders whose grandparents likely fought to see the Civil Rights Act of 1965 passed, so Derrick’s grandparents could register to vote and exercise their right to vote safely. In the 60s, it was American Jews who saw Black people terrorized and Black churches bombed. In response, they marched together with Black leaders and protested to stop the violence. In his failure to acknowledge that connection, and that debt, and in his hairbrained suggestion that “engagement” and “dialogue” will combat local anti-semitism and hate crimes, Derrick Jackson showed precisely how inexperienced and arrogant he is.

Today, it’s synagogues that are being bombed and Jews being targeted.

Ken Magee, though more focused on policing and putting policies into place to help Jews feel safe and be safe, missed his opportunity to engage in a meaningful way on the question of welcoming strangers, as well.

Jews are commanded to welcome strangers. The Passover story teaches that Jews should welcome strangers into their homes. Each year at Passover, Beth Israel synagogue matches our family with 3-5 “strangers” from the congregation in need of a Seder.

The question about welcoming strangers, then, was meant to be answered with that Jewish dichotomy in mind.

Dyer, Jackson and Magee’s ignorance of the history of anti-semitism was on prominent display.

Jackson, in particular, was out of his depth when answering specific questions about how, as Sheriff, he would help local Jews feel safer. He took the opportunity to brag about having dinner with “a member of the Israeli government and the local rabbi.” There are at least half a dozen local rabbis who lead their different congregations, a fact Derrick Jackson didn’t bother to learn.

Local Black pastors, said Jackson, had “no idea” that Beth Israel synagogue on Washtenaw Ave. has been the target of anti-semitic protesters for over a decade, protests covered by media worldwide. Either the local Black pastors are woefully uninformed about the targeting of religious institutions in Ann Arbor, or Derrick Jackson portrayed them as such. Either way, it was a sad statement on Black religious leaders in Ann Arbor, at least the ones who support Jackson.

Alyshia Dyer had no specific policy changes to recommend when discussing hate crimes and terrorism.

Ken Magee suggested, practically, that the Sheriff’s Dept. needs to be fully staffed. Derrick Jackson talked about “making community.” Seriously? That’s exactly what the Nazi’s did: they “made community” based on the principles of eugenics, excluded and expelled Jews from the “community” then murdered six million of them to keep “the community” racially pure.

Kudos to the local Jewish community for putting on the event.

I’d say that Jackson and Dyer deserve dunce caps, but those are forms of Judenhats worn by Jews in the Middle Ages. The two clearly did no homework about the rise in anti-semitism and hate crimes against Jews in the U.S. and none of the three had any data to share about hate crime locally.

Ken Magee at least was aware that U-M President Dr. Santa Ono had been hauled before Congress to answer for the antisemitism on his campus.

Alyshia Dyer and Derrick Jackson, at base, demonstrated an inability to engage local Jews on the subjects of personal and community safety. Ken Magee did better, recognizing the 300 percent rise in hate crimes targeting Jews nationally. Magee was the only one of the three who has been a victim of terrorism (he was working at the Olympic games in Atlanta, and was in the park when the bomb went off). He was the only candidate who has provided security services, including for President Obama in 2010 when he delivered the commencement address in Michigan Stadium.

Alas, the event was evidence that even in multicultural, progressive Ann Arbor, Jews are still marginalized and their concerns about being targeted because of their religion, are fundamentally misunderstood, including by two of the people who want to be the next County Sheriff.