Bernie Sanders encapsulated an idealism of American Jews

By Rabbi Steven J. Steinberg Updated 5:47 pm, Friday, December 15, 2017

Excerpt:

Sanders represents a classical tradition in the American Jewish community. Before World War II, the dominant cause among American Jews was not Zionism or reform. It was socialism and unionism. The goal was not to make society better for Jews, but for all people, particularly the working classes. Jews might organize as Jews, they might argue from Jewish sources, they might argue in Yiddish, but the goal was to unite with Italians and Hispanics and Irish in the garment industry and everyone else, to give all working people a decent life. In the end, our ethnic and religious differences would not matter.

For some Jews today, Sanders wasn’t Jewish enough. He didn’t emphasize a Jewish identity. Clinton rooted herself in Methodism, Kaine in his Jesuit background, Cruz in his evangelical lineage, Trump in being daemonic. Many Jews were outraged that Sanders didn’t wear Judaism on his sleeve. Why a guy from Brooklyn with his accent, looking the archetypal Jewish grandfather and expressing a passion for social justice would need to say, “Jewish, Jewish” was beyond me. When his brother spoke of their working-class parents’ pride in him, “kvell” (pride) was the only word I heard. Nothing more needed.

Weirdly, some interlocutors couldn’t figure out what Jewish meant. One interviewer wanted to know how he could stand in the way of a ‘first’, a woman president. Basically he had to answer her talmudically, “You don’t know how I’m a first as well?”

So here was Bernie, a remnant of the single great Jewish American movement, one which felt that out their backgrounds they wanted every American to have health care, retirement security, civil rights, educational opportunity, human dignity. He encapsulated an idealism of American Jews. A statue to Bernie would be a statue to more than a century of a particular kind of American Jewish values.

http://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Bernie-Sanders-encapsulated-an-idealism-of-12434593.php

Rabbi Steven J. Steinberg retired after two decades as Coordinator of Jewish Chaplaincy for Yale-New Haven Hospital.