I’m Jewish. So Is Bernie Sanders. That Mattered to Me.
It felt like an act of grim cosmic timing to me that Bernie Sanders—who until recently was in the running to become the first Jewish major-party presidential nominee—dropped out of the 2020 race on the first night of Passover. Passover has been my favorite Jewish holiday ever since I learned to celebrate it as an adult. The promises it holds—that we will come together with the ones we love to celebrate our freedom while renewing our commitment to fight for those who cannot yet claim it—are the same promises that sold me on the Sanders campaign.
Minutes after I heard the news that Sanders had dropped out, I listened to the Passover song ”Dayenu”—an ode to gifts normally underappreciated—and cried. This makes me sound extraordinarily devout, until I admit the crucial detail that the song was in the background of a TikTok. This is the kind of Jew I’ve always been: the kind who would rather watch Seinfeld and joke about the flavorlessness of matzo brei (it’s bad, guys!) than look for actual meaning in the religion into which I was born.
To be fair, people have denied my Judaism ever since I was aware of it. My father’s parents were both Jewish, but my mother was brought up by a New England WASP father and an Italian anti-Semitic mother (who was raised in a Catholic orphanage after her Jewish father was killed at Auschwitz). This whopper of a backstory made it difficult for me to answer with full honesty at age nine, when Emily Cohen saw my blonde mom dropping me off at day camp and asked me, “Wait, so are you Jewish or not? Because you know you’re only Jewish if your mother is.”
Cowed into silence by a definition of Judaism that, it turns out, some Jews don’t actually agree with, I put the question of my religious identity aside until college. Most of my close friends there ended up being reform Jews insistent on dragging me along to our campus Hillel organization’s Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah celebrations.
My friends and I went to Passover seders at Hillel too, where an orange was always featured on the seder plate and a good number of the faculty children hunting for the afikomen came from multireligious families. Postgrad seders with friends in Los Angeles were even more liberal, featuring feminist Haggadahs and Suheir Hammad poems recited aloud between hearty, throat-warming slugs of Manischewitz. Suddenly, Judaism felt less like a club I couldn’t show proof of membership to and more like a broad tent that welcomed everything that made me different.
When Bernie Sanders announced his campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination, I felt the same pride in my Jewish heritage that I’d come to recognize at seders as an adult, transposed onto a national stage. Here was a Jewish candidate who spoke openly about his father’s family being “wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust,”, invoking that tragedy in a full-throated condemnation of modern-day hate and extremism.
As a queer woman with a strong opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, I felt represented by Sanders’s advocacy on behalf of reproductive rights and the LGBTQ+ community and his strong record on Palestinian liberation. As I watched Sanders agitate for the disenfranchised, I realized Judaism wasn’t just about the family I was born into but about the beliefs by which I lived.
By the time Sanders reemerged as a candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination last February, I, like many, was disillusioned by so much of what I saw at work in the world. One thing that kept me going was a quote from my namesake and fellow Jew, Emma Goldman: “No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution—revolution is but thought carried into action. Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority and not from the mass.” The other was Sanders’s own brand of revolution.
I believed in Sanders’s revolution; I still do. I was, and am, inspired by his ability to bring together people of all ages, genders, races, ethnicities, and classes with the simple slogan “Not me, us.” As a young millennial who came of age in the internet-addled, post-irony era, I thrilled to see my peers expressing genuine hope for an America that valued those whose interests had historically been ignored.
It will also never stop being meaningful to me that our strongest contender for America’s first Jewish president refused to attend the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual conference in 2020, denouncing “leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights.” Sanders was unafraid to oppose Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on what Sanders called “the suffering of the Palestinian people” under Netanyahu’s rule, and it didn’t make him any less a Jew. In fact, if we’re going with the Talmud-derived notion that “to be Jewish is to ask questions,” Sanders’s dogged challenges to those in power—from Netanyahu to Donald Trump—certainly fits.
“As I hope all of you know, this race has never been about me,” Sanders said in a live address announcing the termination of his campaign on Wednesday. That statement lives at the heart of the Judaism I want to embody: the kind that fights for tikkun olam, or “repair of the world.” Sanders’s person-centered coronavirus response—which included regular public addresses expressing support for the downtrodden and disadvantaged, from the elderly to those incarcerated, at a time when he was unlikely to gain much politically them—was the greatest example of tikkun olam that I’ve ever seen in politics.
When I Zoom with my chosen family to celebrate Passover on Friday, I’ll sing “Dayenu” with Sanders on my mind. If he had just advocated for “Medicare for all,” it would have been enough. If he had just supported the Green New Deal; if he had just gone above and beyond for our nation’s most frequently forgotten members—the working class—it would have been enough. Instead, Sanders fought for all of that and more, tirelessly and with the kind of zeal born out of true conviction. As a Jew, and as a voter, I’ll never forget it.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
