After his early main victories, Sen. Bernie Sanders is nearer to being America’s first Jewish president than anybody has come within the nation’
After his early main victories, Sen. Bernie Sanders is nearer to being America’s first Jewish president than anybody has come within the nation’s historical past. However 10 years in the past, he was simply an iconoclastic socialist senator from a small New England state the place I, a Jewish woman from New York, occurred to be attending graduate faculty. A number of instances, I watched Sen. Sanders stroll down Montpelier, Vermont’s Fundamental Avenue, for a July Fourth parade and expressed my approval so intensely my classmates teased me. I used to be kvelling (a Yiddish phrase which means feeling a way of delight).
As a secular New York Jew, Bernie felt like household. And as an avowed democratic socialist, he was one in all a mere handful of nationwide political figures whose positions aligned with my core beliefs. My pleasure arose principally from the connection between these qualities: the concept of Judaism and social justice as intertwined.
But fast-forward to 2020 and polling signifies that full-throated Jewish help for Sanders hasn’t but materialized. In truth, one Pew survey conducted just before the Iowa caucuses in late January discovered that Jewish help hadn’t consolidated round anyone candidate, regardless of the historic presence of Sanders and one other Jewish contender — Mike Bloomberg — within the race.
Based on Pew, just one in 5 Jewish voters most popular both Sanders (11 p.c) or Bloomberg (eight p.c). The opposite candidates for the Democratic nomination had equally break up help, with 31 p.c preferring Biden, 20 p.c for Warren, and 13 p.c for Buttigieg; the remaining 11 p.c had been undecided, refused to reply, or gave one other response. (We don’t know but how Sanders’s robust performances in Iowa and New Hampshire will have an effect on these numbers.)
For those who’re shocked by this selection in Jewish voters’ preferences, you’re not paying consideration. Sure, American Jews are a reliable Democratic voting bloc. Regardless of efforts by the Trump administration to make use of Israel coverage (together with shifting the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem) to court Jewish votes, he stays wildly unpopular with Jewish voters. Within the basic election, our help will possible rally round whoever wins the Democratic mantle, whether or not or not it’s Sanders. However the clichéd-for-a-reason saying goes like this: “two Jews, three opinions.” And this early main polling is an ideal instance.
Like many American Jews who see our heritage as an id, a tradition, and a mind-set reasonably than solely a “religion,” Sanders identifies as each Jewish and secular. He has spoken extra about his background this campaign season than within the 2016 election, connecting his household’s historical past of persecution along with his values.
For a lot of, Sanders embodies a specific means of being Jewish. He attracts a “universalistic imaginative and prescient of a greater world from explicit Jewish experiences of struggling and oppression,” according to Jewish Currents’ Joshua Leifer. “What’s acquainted shouldn’t be essentially beloved … however to be an American Ashkenazi Jew and hearken to the speech of Bernie Sanders, and watch the movement of his palms, is to know he’s one in all us,” writes Talia Lavin on the New Republic, including that Sanders is a part of a “lengthy and flourishing custom of secular Jews — and specifically secular Jewish leftists — who had been Jewish in each particle of their being.” A vocal group of youthful Jews have made this affinity into their calling card, nicknaming him Zeyde (Yiddish for grandpa) and forming new “Jews for Bernie” teams across the nation.
However American Jews, removed from a monolith, carry intersecting identities: We embrace girls, LGBTQ of us, and folks of colour, and a few of us are Sephardi or Mizrahi in origin. Some Jews, myself included, really feel that electing a girl president is extra pressing than a Jewish one. Even for me, an authentic Bernie fangirl, Elizabeth Warren’s aggressive defense of reproductive justice — my defining political challenge — is compelling sufficient to compete for my vote.
Some Jews don’t essentially really feel the kinship with Bernie that I do; they’re religiously observant, in distinction to his secularism, or they expertise their Jewishness otherwise. And why ought to it’s in any other case? If the statistic that 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton teaches us something, it’s that there is no such thing as a rule saying individuals will vote primarily based on a specific “group id,” and even that group id is a hard and fast class to start with. With youthful voters eschewing fellow millennial Pete Buttigieg for Sanders and older voters doing the opposite, with girls voters not but flocking to the feminine candidates and black voters sticking with Joe Biden in early polls, that is the first that must put the ultimate deceive the parable of identity-first voting.
A couple of particular bumps do lie within the street for Sanders and Jewish voters, they usually’re price discussing. Israel is one. It’s ironic: Sanders is the one main presidential candidate who has lived in Israel, working on a kibbutz in his youth, and right this moment his position on the occupation is extra humane towards “the needs of the Palestinian people” than any of his rivals.
As a result of he foregrounds the human rights disaster in Gaza and the West Financial institution, Sanders is going through heightened assaults on this challenge, together with from the so-called pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC. Proper-wing factions have gone as far as to insinuate that he’s anti-Semitic. Whereas that is ridiculous on its face (and, in actual fact, Sanders’s two-state place on Israel and Palestine traces up with the majority of American Jews), the scaremongering could also be sufficient to discourage various Jewish voters from leaping on the bandwagon with Sanders.
One other stumbling block to Jews’ full-throated embrace is the worry of an anti-Semitic backlash. Barack Obama’s presidency and Clinton’s nomination have proven that when a member of an underrepresented group achieves new heights politically, it invitations vitriol and backlash. Provided that anti-Semitism is already on the rise, many older Jews specifically might really feel that nominating Sanders will appeal to consideration they don’t want. “Every time fast social change threatens the soundness of the present social order, the right-wing is tempted to fall again on the reason of left-wing politics as a Jewish plot,” Joel Swanson writes at the Forward. “The inconvenient undeniable fact that essentially the most profitable Jewish presidential candidate in historical past can be essentially the most profitable socialist can solely feed this conspiracy concept.”
It’s additionally plain that some American Jews — like some individuals of all teams and backgrounds — could also be cautious of Sanders’s pressing social messaging. This group of voters might hate Trump, however they’re unmoved by Sanders’s name for radical realignment or “revolution,” believing it to be impractical, too excessive, or an obstacle to defeating Trump. Sanders should win over these cautious voters of all backgrounds to be able to make it to the White Home. A poll of American Jews taken in September 2019 by the progressive Jewish group Bend the Arc and launched this week discovered that “75% view President Trump unfavorably, and 66% view him very unfavorably … in an open-ended query about what issues most in regards to the 2020 elections, the most typical response was defeating Donald Trump.”
Many of those considerations talked about above break down alongside age traces, with youthful voters tending to embrace Zeyde’s radical politics extra warmly than their mother and father. This can be a sample that seems to carry throughout demographics. However coverage and beliefs apart, I’d think about most Jewish voters are merely preoccupied with the identical “electability” obsession that many Democrats preserve expressing. They need somebody who can beat Trump and are hedging their bets, or backing whoever looks like a average frontrunner, till the most effective contender turns into obvious — therefore the help of Biden earlier than Iowa.
Within the coming weeks, we must always query any narratives that attempt to pin Sanders’s decrease polling numbers amongst Jews on his views on Israel, anti-Semitism, or any single figuring out issue. Like everybody else, American Jews are following the outcomes, listening to the coverage debates, watching the information, and ready for his or her fellow Democrats to make their selection. And if that selection is Sanders, there could also be worries, sure, however there may even be a whole lot of kvelling.
Sarah M. Seltzer is a author in New York Metropolis and an editor at Lilith Journal.