Two Jews Walk Into a Presidential Primary

MIAMI—In a country where anti-Semitic assaults have spiked and the president has sometimes hesitated to condemn neo-Nazis, two men who celebrated their bar mitzvahs in the 1950s all of a sudden need to speak about their Jewishness.

“I do know I’m not the one Jewish candidate operating for president,” Mike Bloomberg, the former New York Metropolis mayor, advised a packed synagogue right here in the present day, referencing his Democratic-primary rival Senator Bernie Sanders. “However I am the only one who doesn’t need to flip America right into a kibbutz.” For the first time in American historical past, this area of interest joke match neatly right into a campaign for the White Home. And for the first time in American history, there’s a very good probability that a Jewish candidate for president will beat one other Jewish candidate to grow to be a serious get together’s nominee.

Earlier than this campaign, neither Bloomberg nor Sanders spent a lot time publicly discussing, not to mention celebrating, their Jewishness. However a couple of weeks ago, Sanders was ice-skating during a Hanukkah celebration at a Des Moines rink, lighting an enormous menorah with a blowtorch and mouthing the words to some of the Hanukkah songs. And Bloomberg was here, making a direct attraction to Jewish voters complete with deli references and Catskills-style rim photographs. He quoted Leviticus (a e-book he identified by its Hebrew identify, Vaykira) in Hebrew and stated, “Lo ta-amode, don't stand by idly whereas your neighbor’s blood is shed,” stumbling slightly over the pronunciation, very similar to how he misplaced the emphasis on the word kibbutz.

To those who know Bloomberg properly and even spent years working for him, this can be a shocking turn. As mayor, he was extra of the stop-by-synagogue-on-Rosh-Hashanah type of observer, not the man who’d make a not-so-subtle reference to Donald Trump as “a pharaoh who knows not Joseph,” and discuss “standing together, rejecting demagogues who try to seduce us by enjoying us towards each other, and uniting behind the one defend that can shield us: our widespread values as American citizens and our widespread humanity as God’s youngsters.” Bloomberg went all in, going instantly from “When Moses descended from Mount Sinai, he smashed the golden calf and raised excessive a pill of legal guidelines,” to noting that Monday is “the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation,” and recalling his own go to to the demise camp a number of years in the past.

This wasn’t a speech like several presidential candidate has delivered earlier than—and that includes Sanders. Earlier than launching his 2020 marketing campaign, Sanders not often discussed his Jewish roots, publicly or privately. Sanders superfans know he spent a number of months after school in Israel working on a kibbutz, however he’s talked about that more by means of his socialism than by means of any connection to the Jewish state. For years, Sanders referred to his father as a “Polish immigrant,” which some noticed as a pointed erasure of his id—when Eli Sanders arrived in America, in any case, his passport from the Polish government would have listed his nationality as “Jew.” Jewish leaders have criticized him for selections like speaking on the evangelical Liberty University in 2015 on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Yr.

Discussing his personal life doesn’t come naturally to Sanders, both, and aides’ efforts to get him to talk more about his personal story last spring didn’t result in a lot. When Sanders does converse of his Jewishness, it tends to be in the context of larger values. At the Hanukkah celebration on the ice rink in Des Moines, Sanders condemned the stabbing attack that had simply occurred at a synagogue in New York. He mentioned that his father’s household had been “worn out” by the Nazis, however spoke about it as instilling in him primary humanist values. His father fled anti-Semitism, he stated, in addition to violence and “horrible, terrible poverty.” That, he stated, is what America is meant to be about: “What makes this nation nice is that we now have individuals here from tons of and tons of of countries everywhere in the world.” That, Sanders and his supporters would argue, has far more in widespread with Jewish values than Bloomberg’s type of financial coverage, which boosted the wealthy throughout his time as mayor.

“I'm what I am,” is how Sanders put it in 2015, when Jimmy Kimmel asked whether or not he believed in God. “And what I consider in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.” This view has advanced. In October, in an look in Washington at the nationwide conference of J Road—a progressive group that goals to affect American policy toward Israel—Sanders stood up during his interview and stated, “I'm very proud to be Jewish. I sit up for being the primary Jewish president within the historical past of this nation.”

Sanders went on, arguing, “If there's any individuals on Earth who understands the risks of racism and white nationalism, it is definitely the Jewish individuals. And if there's any individuals on Earth who ought to do every little thing humanly attainable to struggle towards Trump’s efforts to try to divide us up … and convey individuals together round a standard and progressive agenda, it's the Jewish individuals.” The Sanders campaign promoted those comments just lately in a new online video. But a lot of the footage it makes use of to elucidate Sanders’s “intrinsically Jewish values” is of Sanders’s Jewish outreach director, not the candidate himself. And although Bloomberg kicked off his speech in the present day with a video clip of nearly each shot of him sporting a kippah throughout his years as mayor, Sanders’s determination to wear a kippah on the Hanukkah celebration in Des Moines was notable partially as a result of it’s so uncommon to see one on him.

(Senator Michael Bennet and the investor and businessman Tom Steyer, who're nonetheless in the Democratic race, each have a Jewish dad or mum, but neither grew up as training Jews. Earlier than Bloomberg and Sanders, the Jewish candidate who got here closest to the White House was longtime Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who was Vice President Al Gore’s operating mate in 2000 and ran for president himself in 2004.)

In Miami, Bloomberg laid out a Sanders-esque argument that Jewish values require Jews to face up for others who face discrimination. But he then turned virtually immediately to an argument about Israel—one that pulls a transparent policy distinction with Sanders. Bloomberg would put no circumstances on Israeli assist, “regardless of who the prime minister is,” he promised.

That is removed from Sanders, who’s spoken out forcefully against Netanyahu and his policies, and in favor of Palestinian rights. Jewish values, Sanders argued, are being betrayed day by day by how the Israelis have handled Palestinians, and there’s nothing defensible, or Jewish, about standing by him. That may be a widespread opinion among Netanyahu’s detractors. At the J Road convention, held before Bloomberg jumped into the race, Sanders stated he felt that as a Jew, he might criticize Israeli policy with out being referred to as a bigot. “It’s going to be very arduous for anybody to call me—whose father’s household was wiped out by Hitler—anti-Semitic,” he stated.

Trump voters attended Bloomberg’s rally. Earlier than the event started, I overheard a number of talking to at least one another about wanting to listen to what he had to say relating to his help for Israel. Profitable over Trump supporters in Florida might make a distinction for Bloomberg if he’s the Democratic nominee. But he’ll should beat Sanders first.

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