Our guest is Abdul El-Sayed, a child of Egyptian immigrants to the US, a Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Columbia University Medical School and currently a Democratic candidate for the Senate in Michigan. I’m not endorsing Abdul’s candidacy (or anyone else’s), but I was keen to talk to him about being an Arab and Muslim American politician in the age of Trump and about the political debate over Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
We discuss…
What it was like to be a Muslim teenager in post-9/11 America
Speaking across political and cultural divides
The failure of Biden and Harris to address Gaza and its effect on the 2024 presidential race
What Democrats should learn from Zohran Mamdani’s success
How he resists pressure to compromise his principles
Universal health care
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Beinart Notebook to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.