Asked in a recent interview about his personal connection to Judaism, Senator Bernie Sanders spoke movingly about the deaths of family members in the Shoah, his contact with Holocaust survivors as a child, and a visit with his family to the shtetl where his ancestors had lived. He concluded, “I learned at a very early age what, if you like, white nationalism—which is what Nazism is in the extreme—is about, [and] that it is absolutely imperative . . . that all of us do everything we can to stop racism and white nationalism.”
To Benjamin Kerstein, this response sheds light on the irony that the Jewish presidential candidate’s campaign is rife with anti-Semitic staffers, surrogates, and supporters:
This statement is quite striking for a simple reason: it has almost nothing to do with Judaism and Jewish identity. Indeed, it makes clear that to Sanders, Jewish identity means only one thing—the Holocaust. The Holocaust and the memory of the Holocaust are, no doubt, essential aspects of modern Jewish identity, but for Sanders they appear to be the entirety of his Jewish identity. There is essentially nothing else. . . . For him, in other words, there is no Jewish life, only Jewish death.
And this goes beyond mere tragedy. It essentially denudes his Jewish identity of almost any Jewish content. For Sanders, there is no Torah, no commentary to go and learn, no revolts against tyranny, no centuries of thought and contemplation, no great poetry and music, no extraordinary intellectual and scientific accomplishments, no resurrection of statehood and self-defense, none of the extraordinary vitality—secular and religious—in the face of the most terrible circumstances, no vast epic of defiance and redemption crossing centuries and millennia.
And this may be why, in the end, Sanders derives only the universal from specific Jewish suffering. To him, Judaism is merely the struggle against “white supremacy.” This struggle is admirable in and of itself, but it admits no other possibilities. It refuses to acknowledge that the Jews in particular face other threats. That anti-Semitism can come from almost anywhere, even from Sanders’s own allies and supporters. It blinds him to an essential truth: the Jews are more than being for others; they must also be for themselves. If they are not, who will be for them?
Read more on Algemeiner: https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/03/03/bernie-sanders-and-the-question-of-antisemitism/