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Bernie and me

I spent a good portion of the winter of 1981 on the snowy porches of aging wooden homes in the blue-collar, Old North End of Burlington, Vt., watching Bernie Sanders promote his outsider candidacy for mayor against an entrenched Democratic Party incumbent.
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October 13, 2015

I spent a good portion of the winter of 1981 on the snowy porches of aging wooden homes in the blue-collar, Old North End of Burlington, Vt., watching Bernie Sanders promote his outsider candidacy for mayor against an entrenched Democratic Party incumbent.

Hunched up inside a wool coat, his voice raspy in the cold, the 40-year-old Sanders’ thick Brooklyn accent and machine-gun delivery was worlds apart from the terse yet lilting cadences of the city’s French and Irish-Catholic natives.

I was the newly minted City Hall reporter for the Burlington Free Press, as well as a newly minted Vermonter. Like Sanders, I also was an outsider — a Jewish Brooklynite transplanted to the Green Mountain State.

As my articles began reflecting what I perceived as Sanders’ rise in popularity, I came under sharp and personal attack. One day, as I sat in a downtown diner whose walls were lined with photos of Democrats such as Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter, its owner, a member of the city’s political inner circle, slid into my booth and pressed me against the window.

“He’s not from around here,” the owner said. “He’s from New York. He isn’t like us. He doesn’t know what we need. He can’t win here. Say, aren’t you from New York, too? Are you helping him?”

“I just want to eat breakfast,” I said, and nodded to the waitress hovering nearby, unwilling to take my order while the owner was there.

A few days later, toward the end of the campaign, a crudely drawn, mimeographed flyer made the rounds of downtown. It called itself the “Flea Press” and was festooned with grade-school level drawings. It “reported” on the fact that my parents and Sanders were friends who had gone to the same Brooklyn high school, and that I was therefore in the candidate’s pocket. It didn’t need a Jewish star or big-nosed caricature to communicate its anti-Semitic message: “New York” was — and still is, in some eyes — code for “Jew.”

The Flea Press was partially right. My parents did go to James Madison High School, as had Sanders. But they weren’t friends; my parents were more than a decade older than Sanders and didn’t know him from a hole in the ground.

The pairing of Bernie and me then was ironic in many ways. As has been well reported, Sanders has little love for the media. He sparred with the Free Press over the years and continues to berate the media for focusing on trivia and not his ideas.

Sanders never warmed to me personally, either. In the weeks after his election as mayor, I interviewed him several times in an effort to understand him and therefore explain him to the city of Burlington. He never played the Brooklyn card in seeking to win me over, and was stingy with the kind of personal details that I was seeking for a magazine feature.

[See Alan Abbey's 1981 Bernie Sanders profile here]

It would be “toh-tully” untrue (as Sanders would say in his Brooklyn growl) to claim that we were friends then or now. Yet today, as I think about his presidential campaign, I think that our coincidental similarities can help me offer an understanding of seminal and uniquely Jewish elements that shaped his character.

First was the impact of the Holocaust on his father’s family and his subsequent awareness of the danger of totalitarianism, especially that which grew out of a nominally democratic process. Second was post-war, Jewish New York, a milieu well known for turning out phenomenally successful and assimilated Jews and weaving them into the fabric of America. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg are just two of many other graduates of Madison from that environment.

Sanders has often spoken of his family’s financial straits, yet he made sure he attended university. The drive for a secular education is, of course, a hallmark of the mainstreaming of American Jews. That he first attended Brooklyn College but graduated from the University of Chicago speaks to the collapse of academic anti-Jewish quotas after World War II.

Finally, there is Sanders’ description of his time on an Israeli kibbutz. He spoke of it to me in 1981: “It was owned by the people. There were no bosses. Decisions were made democratically with women having an equal say. The residents worked hard because it was their place. It impressed me.” As a brief sidebar, I will say here that I didn’t fact-check the statement at the time, as I had no reason to question it. Yet there has been a nagging if unstated concern in recent stories in the Jewish media, as no one has yet been able to pinpoint the name and dates of Sanders’ kibbutz sojourn, and he hasn’t offered any help in answering the question.

On the larger question of his stance on Israel, Sanders has navigated a nuanced course that has satisfied neither its critics nor its supporters.

A year ago, right after Sanders flirted with the idea of a presidential candidacy on “Meet the Press,” the Washington Post cited a flimsy poll of 309 registered Iowa Democrats showing his standing at 5 percent to bluntly state, “If Sanders does run, of course, he won't win.”

The latest Iowa polls tell a different tale, yet the election is a long ways off. The usually perspicacious Nate Silver and his team at fivethirtyeight.com say that endorsements from politicos are historically among the best predictors of candidate success, and Sanders is lagging badly in that “primary.”

Sanders’ Jewish storyline hasn’t been told much in the mainstream media, yet some of the coarse stereotypes used against him in 1981 have already cropped up. As the campaign unfolds and questions of character and personality begin resonating with the American public, it will be interesting to see if his background, a narrative familiar to American Jews yet never exposed to the hothouse of a presidential race, will harm his political ambitions.


Alan D. Abbey is the director of media at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

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