Bernie’s Betrayal

By 2023, most Jews (I hope) are aware of the antisemitism scandal that rocked Britain when Jeremy Corbyn served as leader of the Labour Party. For those who aren’t, the CliffsNotes version is that under his watch, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour became something of a swamp for anti-Jewish rhetoric and conspiracy theories, which permeated social media, the press and the halls of the House of Commons. Multiple members of the party were found to have histories of trafficking in antisemitic tropes, including Corbyn himself, who is on the record for designating members of Hezbollah and Hamas as his “friends,” accusing Zionists in his country of “not truly having a sense of English irony,” for associating with Holocaust deniers, and for leading a campaign in 2011 to change the name of Holocaust Remembrance Day to “Genocide Memorial Day” in Britain, on the basis that “every life has value.”

Luckily for Britain’s Jewish community (a little less than half of which reported to have considered leaving the country should there have been a different outcome,) Corbyn was defeated in his bid for Prime Minister in the general election of December 2019, with the worst polling numbers for the Labour Party posted since the mid-twentieth century. Obviously, someone as cooked in controversy and stained with failure as Corbyn could not possibly curry support from popular politicians abroad. Unfortunately, Senator Bernie Sanders appears to have not received the memo. Posing with a bright smile next to Corbyn, Sanders tweeted support for the former Labour Party leader last week, along with two organizations he is associated with. 

Senator Sanders began his political career as an activist for progressive causes in the Chicago area. An infamous picture of him being manhandled by the police at a south-side civil rights protest only strengthened his left-wing bona fides when he burst onto the national scene in 2015. Yet what was always most interesting to me about the senator’s early days was that he worked on a kibbutz near Haifa for several months in his early twenties, back when kibbutzim were not only staunchly socialist (some may call them the only successful socialist model in the twentieth century), but proudly Zionist as well. This history rendered Sanders a recognizable and even sentimental figure in American Jewish circles: a leftie, who was carrying the tradition of Jewish red-bandana politics into the twenty-first century, yet still with an attachment to a particular Jewish nationality (he worked on a kibbutz after all!) My own family hails from this tradition as well, molded in the same Yiddish-speaking Brooklyn neighborhoods as Sanders. Therefore we, and many of our Jewish friends, were prepared to support him.  
 

However, right in front of us, throughout the countless debates, in the middle of the tense conventions and primaries, was the evidence that Senator Sanders did not fit this nostalgic bill at all. On the 2020 campaign trail, he elicited and then touted support from Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who have made clear their specific anti-Zionist opinions (which should be outrightly separated from opinions that are simply critical of Israeli policy,) and hired Faiz Shakir, who has vocally supported the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions campaign, as his campaign manager. Sanders later enlisted surrogates such as Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, infamous for embroiling the Women’s March in scandal after she refused to condemn Louis Farrakhan and after claiming that Zionists could not be feminists, and Amer Zahr, a “comedian” who in May of 2021 during a scourge of violence toward Jews warned against condemning antisemitism, lest one be perceived as a conservative. This series of betrayals did more than just draw appropriate comparisons between the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party and Corbyn’s Labour Party. It was a double cross to American Jews who descend from those who marched in the streets of New York for better wages after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It was a signal that the revolutionary ideas once pored over in the hovel of tenement homes were destined to be only memories. It therefore feels more devastating than your average broken political promise.   

A student of history may interject here. He may argue that the turn of the century era I am romanticizing was specifically anti-Zionist and may point to the new wave of neo-Bundist young American Jews who support Bernie in all his endeavors to prove me wrong. However, this argument would lack context. There were many alternatives to Jewish nationalism proposed before the Second World War, including assimilation, mass conversion, socialism and Haredisim, but as Israeli academic Shany Mor notes, “the verdict of history has been harsh” to all these ideas. After the Holocaust, it was widely accepted in both American and international Jewish circles that the State of Israel was the only option for Jewish liberation and safety. Thus is the reason Sanders worked on a kibbutz, and thus is the reason many of the descendants of the Jewish “red diaper babies” nevertheless feel emotionally attached to Israel today. If American Jews harbored sympathy for the internationalist policies of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, this support was depleted by the 1970s when the communists began defining themselves in contrast with the Zionists. Many American Jews today remain progressive as a testament to the politics of our great-grandparents (over seventy percent of us still vote for the Democratic Party,) yet our vision has now been refined to include our own self-interests as a people. If Bernie Sanders once had the potential to give this demographic a voice, by publicizing his support for Corbyn he squashes it.

 
Corbyn represents a type of socialist politics that refuses to evolve out of the twentieth century. Corbynism is an ideology, rooted in Marxist activism from a Europe gone by, that despises Jewish particularism and the virtue of Jewish nationhood. More than just embodying virulent anti-Zionism, Corbynism is a populism that cannot help itself from re-fashioning traditional anti-Jewish attitudes of scapegoating and demonization to achieve its goals.  

 
Senator Sanders had the opportunity to avoid this. He once championed a vision that millions of Jews could support: a national minimum wage of $15 an hour, universal healthcare and education, and social progressivism that sought to advance the position of minorities. However, his latest association with Corbyn reveals his incapability of separating noble goals from the tragic trajectory of the international left. Senator Sanders therefore betrays the kibbutz outside of Haifa and the Hebrew he no doubt picked up while plowing its fields. He betrays Jews who may have once been inclined to vote for him, and he betrays a global collective of Jews who wish for a better world, only one where their safety and sovereignty is secured. Perhaps this is the reason why, like Jeremy Corbyn, in his political aspirations, Senator Sanders has failed so spectacularly.