Bernie & American Socialism

“Du host gevunen /du host zikh aleyn gefunen,” the beloved Yiddish poet, Morris Rosenfeld, sang. “You have finally won / You have finally come into your own.”

Bernie Sanders and the History of American Socialism

Bernie Sanders has deep roots in an American socialist tradition that once captivated millions.
by Tony Michels 4/6/16

Evidence suggests that, in the early 1960s, American college students favored pouring beer on their heads and dancing to “Louie Louie” over joining the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). But if anybody was likely to join the Socialist Party’s youth auxiliary, it was a brainy child of immigrant Jews, a son of Brooklyn — where Jewish voters had, for decades, cast ballots for socialists and liberals who resembled socialists.

For Bernie Sanders, socialism was something of a birthright.

Sanders began his political career under the tutelage of his older brother, Larry. President of Brooklyn College’s Young Democrats Club, Larry used to take Bernie to Manhattan’s Lower East Side to campaign against an urban renewal project that threatened to displace low-income residents.

It seems fitting that the country’s first serious socialist presidential candidate since the 1930s should have political roots in the Lower East Side — the cradle of New York socialism. Known as Kleindeutschland in the nineteenth century, the area’s German immigrants transplanted Karl Marx’s teachings to American soil and built a sturdy workers movement aligned with the Socialist Labor Party. Little Germany eventually gave way to “The Great Jewish Ghetto,” as more than five hundred thousand Yiddish-speaking immigrants streamed into the area ...

More here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/bernie-sanders-young-peoples-socialist-league-new-york/


Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs addressing a 1912 meeting in New York.