Bernie Sanders' Identity as a Jew

  

Bernie Sanders: First Jewish Winner of a Primary

“Bernie Sanders and a First for Jews” is the title of an article in the New York Times of February 15, at least on the internet where I read it. I will come back to that headline.
   I subscribe to many of the proposals that Sanders proposes. They are utopian, however, with zero chance of being implemented—even if, per miracle, Sanders were to be elected president. They resemble the views of Norman Thomas who was the socialist candidate when I voted for Truman in my first vote. As Hillary Clinton said, “we are not Denmark.” So I see Sanders’s activities to be designed to push Hillary to the left. And that is a Good Thing—as it is pronounced in 1066 and All That.

   But I am a bit queasy about how  Sanders identifies himself. “I am the son of a Polish immigrant,” he told his frenzied audience, reports the Times. Well, he is and he isn’t. There are in effect two quite distinct groups of Poles who came here. There are those who wound up in the largest Polish immigrant community in Chicago and in other settlements in the Midwest or, for that matter in New York. Most of that population is Catholic or at least was that when they arrived in the States.

   The parent Sanders referred to was a Jew, probably from one of the large Jewish neighborhoods  in Warsaw or another Polish city; the internet is not revealing. A great many of such immigrants first settled on the Lower East Side in New York.  However, those two populations of Polish arrivals have no more to do with each other than either group has with the inhabitants of Little Italy, a bit further North.

   I myself am a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. It would certainly be misleading for me to say that in 1939 I came to America from Germany, as if I were ready to look for an apartment in Yorkville, once a very German neighborhood, with not a few adherents to Nazism during the Hitler period. No more (this is speculation, but not idle) would Sanders’ parent have looked in the US for Polish communities that they left on the other side of the ocean.

   Like Sanders, I am no longer an observant Jew, though I started out as a diligent one of the conservative stamp. Nor has my circle of friends been limited to Jews, though, through the years, there have probably been a majority of them. However, without flaunting my Jewishness (I think), I somehow make sure that anyone who is more than a fleeting interlocutor knows that that is what I am. I diligently read the NYTimes obituaries and do not fail to notice when a subject is Jewish—nowadays most often the child of an immigrant couple, mostly but not only from Eastern Europe—where the Jewish population was multiples of the  half million that were my Landsmänner in Germany of 1939. Early that year is when my family and I emigrated to New York. As it turned out, I have dubbed us Holocaust evaders.
   So I wish that Sanders were a bit clearer or more explicit in the way he identifies himself. He is the first Jew ever to win a primary—not a minor distinction!—and he is entitled to brag about it. But don’t hold your breath about his really coming clean.