Bernie Sanders encapsulated an idealism of American Jews

(Arnold Gold-New Haven Register) Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally on the New Haven Green on 4/24/2016. (Arnold Gold-New Haven Register) Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally on the New Haven Green on 4/24/2016. Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Bernie Sanders encapsulated an idealism of American Jews 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Let’s imagine that the American Jewish community wanted to build a statue for the ‘greatest’ American Jew. For whom would it erect that statue? Probably the leading candidate would be Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. He was the first Jew named to the Supreme Court (a bigoted fellow justice wouldn’t even acknowledge him) and he was a leader of American Zionists. Probably it would be déclassé to note that he never went near a synagogue, loved his family’s annual gift of a ham under his Christmas tree and he wasn’t buried in a Jewish manner. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.

I want, however, to make my own nomination. I want to nominate Bernie Sanders. If he couldn’t get the White House, he should at least get something! 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.

For some, he was too Jewish. Oddly, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a very comfortable Jew, lost her job when her subordinates, hoping to hurt him, talked about reminding Appalachian voters that Sanders was a “Jew”. Not nice.

For some Jews, he was the wrong kind of Jew. Yes, he spent youthful time on a kibbutz and lost family in the Holocaust, but he wouldn’t stress those facts. He defied AIPAC’s attempt to be the touchstone of the American Jewish community.

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.

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