Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders wrote an article for the magazine Jewish Currents under the headline “How to Fight Antisemitism.” It is, in a word, powerful – not only because it movingly melds the personal with the political as it charts the scourge of antisemitic violence, but also because it lays bare the subtler workings of oppression.
“I am a proud Jewish American. My father emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1921 at the age of 17 to escape the poverty and widespread antisemitism of his home country,” Sanders writes. “Those in his family who remained in Poland after Hitler came to power were murdered by the Nazis. I know very well where white supremacist politics leads, and what can happen when people do not speak up against it.”
As with much of the Vermont senator’s rhetoric, “How to Fight Antisemitism” is stirring in part because of its unsparing language: murderer, twisted, nefarious, vicious, hate. Via prose that’s pointed rather than soft – shorn of politesse that can be misleading in its fuzziness – Sanders confronts bigotry with an ethic that tends to elude the political moment: honesty.
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But the article is perhaps more notable for something else: its nuanced grappling with America’s antagonisms and how one form of hatred finds easy accomplices in other forms.
“We have to be clear that while antisemitism is a threat to Jews everywhere, it is also a threat to democratic governance itself. The antisemites who marched in Charlottesville don’t just hate Jews,” Sanders writes, referring to the 2017 rally where Heather Heyer was killed. “They hate the idea of multiracial democracy. They hate the idea of political equality. They hate immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people, women, and anyone else who stands in the way of a whites-only America. They accuse Jews of coordinating a massive attack on white people worldwide, using people of color and other marginalized groups to do their dirty work.”
It’s no little thing for Sanders to offer up such a sharp, multipronged indictment. While he’s always been an unequivocal advocate of social justice in the broadest sense, he’s also frequently been taken to task for not articulating the quieter complexities of inequality.
The most obvious example of this is Sanders’ tendency to address America’s hierarchies largely in terms of class, with race often going unmentioned (this was especially apparent during his 2016 bid for the White House). In this country, however, that’s a fool’s errand.
“From 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments – federal, state, and local – repeatedly plundered black communities,” the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in 2016. “So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.”
In other words, to ignore race is to mischaracterize class. It is to misunderstand power. It is, on top of so much else, to eschew history.
But Sanders’ thinking has evolved significantly, if imperfectly, over the past several years. As my CNN colleague Nia-Malika Henderson wrote in February: “In 2016, Sanders was hesitant to call (Donald) Trump a racist during a debate with (Hillary) Clinton. But during a recent trip to South Carolina to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he called him a racist.”
Sanders’ recent article presents a similar picture of growth. Gone, at least in this instance, is the person who not too long ago rebuked identity politics as a distraction. (“One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics,” the senator once said.)
In his place is someone with a keener understanding of the infinite ways people’s backgrounds influence how they relate to and navigate life. Someone with a fuller awareness of how, while these identities can be used to harmful effect – to do their dirty work – they can also be used to build empathy and, in turn, a country that’s more honest with itself.
