In an essay published on Monday in the far-left Jewish Currents, the senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders declared himself “a proud Jewish American” and spoke of his “pride and admiration for Israel,” while expressing his concerns about anti-Semitism on the right. He also mentioned the left-wing variety, but primarily to attack his political opponents for condemning it. But the core of his argument was that “the fight against anti-Semitism and for Jewish liberation” is “connected to the fight for the liberation of oppressed people around the world”—Palestinians included—while anti-Semitism is merely a way for “the right to divide people from one another and prevent us from fighting together for a shared future of equality, peace, prosperity, and environmental justice.”
To Izabella Tabarovsky, Sanders’ rhetoric brings to mind the universalism that the Soviet Union used to minimize anti-Semitism, and eventually to provide cover for its own:
Once we defeat the reactionary forces of the old regime, [the Bolsheviks] claimed, anti-Semitism, too, will go into the dustbin of history. Join our struggle against the universal forces of oppression and your own concerns will vanish into thin air. What did Jews have to do to join this glorious enterprise? They simply had to give up a few things that made them Jews: their “retrograde” and “oppressive” religious rites, their Hebrew and Yiddish, and their connection to the land of their ancestors—their Zionism. . . . Be like us, [they promised], and we will fight anti-Semitism for you.
History has shown how disastrous these kinds of promises turned out for the Jews the first time around. . . . Thirty years after those promises were first made, Soviet Jews . . . found that anti-Semitism was still part of their lives. But their Jewishness was now gone, leaving them with fewer resources than ever to stand up for themselves.
Given the parallels between Sanders’ promises and those of the Soviets, Tabarovsky puts to him the following questions:
Since you are staking a claim in the fight against anti-Semitism, I want to know more about what you have done in the past to do that. Where were you, for example, when Soviet Jews saw their best and brightest thrown in jails, sent to the gulag, harassed, and deprived of their livelihoods just because they wanted to be Jews in the full sense of the word? Did you march with the American and Israeli Jews who were fighting for them? Did you, perhaps, address their plight with your Soviet counterparts when you visited the Soviet Union in 1988? It would significantly strengthen your case if we were to learn that you were on the frontlines of that great struggle against that oppression and persecution of our people.
Read more on Forward: https://forward.com/opinion/434646/senator-sanders-fighting-anti-semitism-requires-actions-not-universalist/