Bernie Sanders is Kamala Harris for Jews (2/2)

To look at the cover of JFREJ's "Racial Justice Haggadah" one would think
that the story of the deliverance from Egypt takes place between 1960 and 2015,
and that no Jews were involved.

In the previous installment I sought to discuss how Bernie Sanders' personal philosophy places him at such a conflict traditional Jewish thought that calling him a representative of the Jewish people would be a distortion of that concept. Sanders has in many ways sought to reduce his Jewish heritage as an element of both his personality and his ideas. Like Kamala Harris among many black voters, he is able to act and behave like one of the them, yet his record in office, policies, and public statements show that his priorities lay elsewhere. This is a free personal choice, but it has not deterred fans of his from using him as the standard bearer of all of us. Here are some examples:

• Like with every candidate there was a Jews for Bernie forum created during his 2016 run and over 60 rabbis endorsed him. However, the majority of the signatories to the endorsement were members of far-left feminist denominations that were more about activism than actual theological belief such as "peace" activist Alana Suskin, a reform Rabbi and an official at Americans for Peace Now in the DC area.
• Yale Hospital's chaplain Rabbi Stephen Steinberg penned a piece following the 2016 election claiming "Bernie Sanders encapsulated an idealism of American Jews". In it Steinberg made the absurd claim that Sanders' downplaying of his Jewish identity was in and of itself an expression of Jewish values. This makes about as much sense as claiming a food critic can be anorexic.
• Sanders' Jewish identity questions are such a topic among his supporters and destractors that one of his top fans Katie Halper made a video claiming "secular Jewish identity is real". But if according to people like Halper her identity is not based on nationhood, religious belief and worship, or a common language, then is it to her only a political and cultural persuasion?

Bernie Sanders' political base includes many other progressive Jewish activists as
The Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald. They represent the anti-Zionist Jewish left that
makes Sanders' own views on such topics appear mild by comparison.

Of course the obverse is also possible; Chuck Schumer is outright obnoxious in expression of his identity for the sake of earning Jewish votes, while other communities also have their share of panderers such as Julián Castro (Mexican Americans), Marco Rubio (Cuban Americans), Cory Booker (African Americans), Ted Cruz (evangelicals) and virtually every Irish politician in Massachusetts. However, in each of those communities the role of religion is either essential or related in defining its cultural life. The most recent Pew Research Survey found that only 2% of black respondents saw themselves as atheists. A 2014 survey also by Pew found that 17% of Jews do not believe in G-d while an additional 19% were some form of agnostic. Some would ask why that would matter, but when one considers that Jews are often considered to be a racial out group by both whites and racial minorities the question could then be raised: What exactly does tie a Jewish community together? It can't be a shared appreciation for Philip Roth novels, Larry David's comedy, and other superficial elements of "cultural Judaism".

Sanders' Jewish supporters have substituted personal progressive policies for religious study and practice and branded them as "Jewish values", but that has actually led to many schisms on the Jewish left. As issues of race, class, and gender continue to crop up many in this community get fenced in by debates that show how arbitrary a secular Jewish identity can be. These are the topics that occupy the time and effort of the Sanders supporting Jews (or ones further to the left than him). Here are some sub-plots within this saga:

• Do the Jews lose any placement on a so-called progressive hierarchy owing to a higher average income?
• Why is it that in order to appear fair-handed and tolerant Jewish progressives must actively give cover and support to those that despise them on the pretext of supporting social justice and "anti-colonialism"?
• Why are American progressives including progressive Jews so eager to press the Israel issue to the exclusion of other questionable US allies such as Turkey, the Philippines, and Colombia?

The common refrain from Halper, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal and the like is that as Jews they are not obligated to recognize the State of Israel as representing them. However, it is notable that they don't seem too keen to recognize the United States as representing them either. They call objectors to their criticism "apartheid apologists", neo-cons, and hound anyone that objects to their anti-Zionism or dare to attribute to it the attendant label of Jew hatred by saying that as Jews they cannot be anti-Semitic. 

This was exhibited in incidents such as one  in 2014 when Blumenthal and fellow activist David Sheen harassed German left-wing politician Gregor Gysi and chased him to a urinal in order to confront him about his cancelling of an invitation to them to appear deliberately on the anniversary of Kristallnacht in order to speak about the Gaza Flotilla and why Israel is in their view a Nazi regime. The same Jewish activists that shout and object when the world's only state for the Jews is in any way used to represent them also then take up the mantle of defining what modern Holocaust remembrance is. 

Irreligion does not constitute an identity

The modern Jewish left sees no connection to Jewish sages of past generations such as Maimonides (the RAMBAM)
because they see any importance in their history before the 1930s. 

It is for this reason that I, in speaking individually and breaking with the consensus across the entire Jewish socio-political spectrum, believe that the focus on the Holocaust to the exclusion of the rest of our thousands of years of history is now backfiring on Jewish communities. Identities defined by tragedy can never escape them, whether reparations are paid or generations pass. Holocaust education is important, yet it does not supersede the study of the Five Books of Moses, the learning of the festivals in the Jewish calendar, or at least basic familiarity with who the key rabbinic authorities of the Antiquity and Middle Ages were such as Rashi, Maimonides, the Ben Ish Khai, and Rabbi Shimon Bar Yokhai. 

The modern alternate-identity Jews of the Sanders mold will never evoke the memory of any of those figures because they have retrofitted their entire belief system from modern progressivism. This has an at-best tangential connection to anything within Jewish tradition, whether from Europe, Babylonia, North Africa or elsewhere. In 2017 Halper claimed that Rep. Keith Ellison's defeat in the race for DNC chair was due to an "Islamophobic smear" notwithstanding the fact that Ellison has lied about his affiliation with the anti-Jewish Nation of Islam that traced back to his days at University of Minnesota Law School in the late 1980s. These were affiliations that were proudly promoted by fellow left-wing journalist Tim Murphy of Mother Jones  in 2017.  Whereas they will not object to allied activists such as Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory self-affiliating with historical quacks such as Louis Farrakhan (who claims the Earth is trillions of years old), they ignore the generational intellectual connection from Maimonides in 12th century Spain and Egypt to modern Jews of virtually every ethnic backgrounds today. 

Perusing the public decalarations and twitter feeds of progressive groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), IfNotNow or Jewish Voice for Peace one would be hard put to find any reference to any figures from Jewish religious history unless placed within the context of Tikkun Olam which as mentioned in the prior installment. For example JFREJ in 2016 commemorated Passover with a Racial Justice Haggadah. The Haggadah in Hebrew literally means "Narration" and it is a set account of the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The story of the Exodus has nothing to do with "racial justice", but rather divine retribution against Pharaoh and the redemption of the Israelites to the Land of Canaan, or as it is also known the Land of Israel. The JFREJ Haggadah, on the other hand, quotes 1960s Civil Rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, has Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown on the cover. It also sacreligiously adds items to the Seder plate such as coffee for modern slavery, human trafficking, and slave labour as well as an olive "which represents solidarity with Palestinians and Palestine and the struggle for justice and peace in Israel and Palestine".

To be clear discussing these topics and taking these positions is everyone's right as an individual, but to alter a historical text that dates to the 1st or 2nd centuries is an intellectual distortion. Groups like the ones examined here are active allies of the national Women's March, an organization whose co-chairs Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory were all alleged to have used a theory that Jews victimize people of colour and were complicit in the slave trade in order to push out fellow movement official Vanessa Wruble.

Sarsour and Mallory have wielded their mantle as women of colour at the head of the Women's March in order to engage in turf wars against rival progressive activist groups, especially those that have Zionist orientations or are critical of their position on Zionism.  In March 2017 Sarsour made the statement that one could not be both feminist and Zionist. During an October 2017 March for Racial Justice in New York Sarsour's supporters clashed with the Zioness group that were there to represent progressive Zionism. This included a male Jewish Sarsour supporter confronting the Zioness activists and asking why they carried no signs in support of Palestinian rights. And in the Spring of 2018, in the wake of the Starbucks bathroom controversy, the Women's March successfully lobbied the coffee chain to exclude the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an anti-Semitism watchdog, from sensitivity training for its employees. These confrontations have not come without a price for Sarsour et al, yet their victories have signaled that the role of many Jewish organizations on the activist left is steadily eroding to irrelevance.

The Overrunning Sewer

At a certain point the broader community was going to have to confront the spectre of the debate that Sanders and like-minded Jews such as Blumenthal and Greenwald were trying to drag into the forefront: Whether it is more important to be a doctrinal progressive than to defend one's own Jewish heritage. For the members of that category, Jewish heritage must take a back seat and submit to their own personal political beliefs. This has burst to the surface with the current saga of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), a Somali-American also known as the first congresswoman to be permitted to wear a head covering on the House floor.  On February 10 she ignited a controversy when she claimed in response to one of Greenwald's tweets that the US Congress's affinity to Israel was driven by greed, and that AIPAC was essentially buying votes. Numerous politicians from both parties, whether it was GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy or House Foreign Affairs Cte. Chair Eliot Engel demanded apologies for those comments as well as further ones that she made subsequently after issuing an "unequivocal" apology that included many equivocations.

What has ensued since then is a whirlwind of attacks between Omar and her cohorts Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, the Republican House minority, and the Democratic leadership. After a further flare-up of the controversy last week Speaker Nancy Pelosi opted to pass a compromised resolution that condemned several forms of bigotry including anti-Semitism rather than a more specific one directed at Omar. The result was that the Democratic Party leadership appeared desperate for Omar to keep her mouth shut but too scared to explicitly discipline her. The reactions that followed were both comical and telling:

• Democratic 2020 presidential candidates senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris all affirmed that Omar and other critics of Israel should not be silenced.
• Fellow candidate Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) refused to answer a press question about his response to the controversy. Booker then ended his press conference hastily. This is a major move for Booker who in the past was considered a pro-Israel 
• House Democratic leaders made extraordinary leaps of logic to diffuse anger from the pro-Israel wing of the party including Pelosi claiming that she did not understand the "weight of the words" she used to majority whip James Clyburn claiming that Omar's experience was "more personal" than that of Jews whose parents had survived the Holocaust. What Clyburn forgot to mention was that there remain living survivors of the Holocaust as well. 

I use the last example to show how those evoking the Holocaust can often have their own message turned against them. It is a lose-lose situation, as everyone has a subjective agenda to promote through the debate. Anti-Israel campaigners want to depict it as a genocidal war machine on a par with the Nazis or Apartheid South Africa, and the pro-Israel counterparts identify in their rhetoric tropes and innuendos that mirror actual Nazi propaganda. There cannot be a common ground between the two. 

How far will they go for Omar?

It is for this reason that voters in the 2020 election must accept that there will not be unity in a Democratic ticket, something they should have learned in 2016 after the carnage of the primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Depending on the outcome of the primaries and the convention delegate vote either the progressive or moderate wing will hemorrhage votes to a third party candidate. As a big tent movement the Democrats can attempt to unite Americans of diverse backgrounds and persuasions, but not of completely contradictory values and policies. Once Pelosi and Clyburn decided to pull support for a resolution condemning Omar for her remarks, she made a comment the same week attacking former President Barack Obama for his policies on child detention at the US-Mexico border as well as the drone striking policy of the War on Terror. She then denied that this was the intent in her statement in a tweet that included audio that actually validated the media's representation of it.

Today her ally Ocasio-Cortez has made public statements condemning FDR's New Deal as racist while also condemning Ronald Reagan. Such direct attacks on two presidents considered icons within the Democratic base cannot be seen as helping to foster a consensus within the party, whatever the merits of their arguments. What it serves to do instead is to suck the oxygen out of the room that would go toward determining who would be the best nominee of the party in 2020. This is fine for those that have already made up their minds, but imagine the situation for a dark horse candidate with an alternative vision to present such as anti-interventionist Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI), tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, or Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. At South By Southwest (SXSW) Ocasio-Cortez, with her remarks about FDR and Reagan, drew a larger crowd than any 2020 hopeful, and she is not eligible to run until three weeks before the 2024 election.

The Rift and the Vacuum

Video: Prospective independent candidate Howard Schultz claims he can "beat the system" but it's possible that he could break the system by presenting a centrist compromise for anti-Trump Democrats that also loathe Bernie Sanders. This is causing panic among Democratic strategists.

What this means for the 2020 race is that there will be a polarization within the party between the progressives like Sanders and the centrists as represented by former VP Joe Biden (yet to declare). The trust between these two camps has not improved since 2016 given the sometimes libelous claims leveled against Sanders' supporters ("Bernie Bros") who are blamed for everything from voting for Trump to actually being Russian operatives. Even for voters like myself that despise Sanders for his policies and personality it seems tasteless and cowardly for the media to use him as a whipping boy for the failure of the Clinton campaign in 2016.

Where does this leave the vast majority of Jewish voters that have reliably voted Democratic since before FDR? The last GOP candidate to win a plurality of this demographic was Warren Harding in 1920. The last time that one polled above 30% was in 1988 when George HW Bush won 35% of the vote. With the conflicts described above, is it possible that a cohesive block of Jewish voters no longer exists? Barring a spectacular jump in 2020 Jewish votes for Donald Trump another possibility is that centrist Jewish voters will choose a third party or independent candidate such as former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz or Mark Cuban. Schultz warned on Friday that a far-left Democratic candidate could re-elect Trump, while Cuban has made noise in the past about running and could attract major attention by virtue of his prominent role on the CNBC series Shark Tank that mirrors Trump's own run on The Apprentice. The irony of the change from 2016 to 2020 is that a Sanders victory in the primary could jar the bitter breakaway vote against the nominee that Clinton supporters and media pawns wrongly accused his supporters of perpetrating. To be clear, this group may include not only Jewish Democrats but likely older Clinton and Obama liberals, white middle class suburban voters, and Democratic business owners. Sanders will have to make up this ground by appealing to working class voters in the Midwest, progressives, and urban minority voters.