The Heresy and Evangelism of Bernie Sanders | Village Voice
We shouldn’t be surprised by this insistence that Bernie invoke the Holocaust: Museums, school curricula, and the culture generally have so diligently cultivated the image of Jews as primarily survivors or victims of the Holocaust that we’ve learned to see this, and not all that solidarity talk, as properly Jewish. But Sanders carries on a Jewish tradition much longer, and more sacred, than merely paying lip service to the Holocaust. His every utterance about universal health care, economic inequality, and social justice relentlessly embraces Judaism; it’s just a Judaism many people no longer recognize. Bernie Sanders is a Jew of a different era — the kind of Jew that Zionists would very much like us to forget.
The New York of Sanders’s childhood was full of Yiddish socialists. Often, these were Jews of Sanders’s sort, their spiritual practice less fixated on giving glory to God on high than fighting for emancipation here on earth. Although that interpretation of Judaism may seem profane, even blasphemous, at first blush, it has a firm basis in scripture.
The Torah repeatedly reminds Jews that, because we were strangers in Egypt, we are obligated in turn to welcome the stranger in the course of our lives. Scripture also tells us that our religious ceremonies are not ends unto themselves but a means through which to fortify our spirits for earthly liberation work: From Isaiah, we learn that our fasting on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, is not for the purpose of “mak[ing] your voice to be heard on high,” but rather “to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke.”
From: The Heresy and Evangelism of Bernie Sanders | Village Voice
This author is officially a moron. Most American Jews are still Denocratic. Like 80 percent. Why is he acting like most American Jews are right wing Republucabns? Most of those old Yiddish socialists that the author mentioned would have been dyed in the wool Zionists as well. This also escapes the author.Report
And Israel’s root are socialist; hasn’t this jerk ever heard of a kibbutz?Report
Unless I’m mistaken, the author has confounded Sanders’ contemporaries with Irving Howe’s. Sanders was born in 1941; Howe in 1920. Brooklyn in 1952 had a considerable population of people who had come to this country as refugees (something that Leon Wieseltier, a decade younger than Sanders, has written about). However, the Socialist Party was a microfaction by 1952 everywhere but in Wisconsin (metro Milwaukee, really) and played no significant role in New York politics. The American Labor Party was still consequential in 1952, but it was in free fall demographically and formally dissolved before Sanders was out of high school. The ALP was based in the garment unions, which one might assume still had a mess of Yiddish speakers, but I would think that was a social circle distinct from those promoting either Zionism or Yiddish writing. Sanders’ parents may have enrolled in the ALP when they registered to vote (something you could do between 1938 and 1955), but they apparently were not garment workers. Jewish community politics in Brooklyn after 1954 would have been through the regular Democratic organization, reform clubs in the Democratic Party, the old Liberal Party of New York (an ALP derivative), or the Javits-Lefkowitz wing of the Republican Party.
While we’re at it, is it proper usage to refer to people or corporations as ‘Yiddish’? Yiddish is a language. I’ve heard of ‘Yiddishists’ (purveyors and partakers of Yiddish language and literature).Report
Yiddishkeit can roughly translate as Jewishness. But this takes a very Ashkenazi view of the Jewish world though.
Sanders is Yiddishkeit through and through.Report
In which frame? He’s not a practical man. If he’d grown up in Rochester, he’d have gotten that accounting degree at Baruch College, set up his practice on Monroe Avenue, and made a living satisfactory enough to afford a house in Brighton for his wife and children (of which their would have been two or perhaps three). Mrs. Sanders would have been a schoolteacher or social worker and spent just a few years as a housewife full stop. He wouldn’t have season tickets to the Philharmonic, but Dr. Shapiro and his wife down the street would. He sure would not have any bastard children nor would he have been futzing around trying to learn carpentry in his 20s.Report
Bonus points for knowing Irving HoweReport
Yes people are referred to as Yiddish. As examples i’ll trot out my long dead grandparents and their friends.Report
You also see themes from the red haze journalism prevalent 35 years ago (and traded in by Ellen Schrecker in academic circles): the notion that ‘the left’ was destroyed by the federal police and associated cabals. They’re disinclined to acknowledge that their confederates never amounted to much in the broader population (Henry Wallace won all of 2% of the vote in the 1948 presidential election; there were a few Congresses between 1908 and 1953 wherein the ALP and like organizations had more than a half dozen seats, but none where their seat total exceeded 3% of the whole), and that the left-of-liberal vote just dissipated after its 1936 peak).Report