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Four years ago, Bernie Sanders rarely spoke about his Jewish faith and how it affected his politics.
That has changed in the 2020 campaign, so when he was asked about it tonight, he spoke at some length about its impact on his life.
“When I try to think about how I came to the views that I hold, there are two major factors,” Sanders said. “No. 1, I grew up in a family that didn’t have a whole lot of money. … The second one is being Jewish.”
He then recalled his youth in Brooklyn, New York, in a Jewish community that became home to many European Holocaust survivors.
“In the community that I lived in you go downtown, shop, and people had the tattoos from the concentration camps on their arms,” Sanders recalled.
“I remember, as a kid, looking at these big picture books of World War II and tears would roll down my cheeks when I saw what happened to the Jewish people. Six million people were killed by Hitler,” Sanders said. “I think at a very early age, before my political thoughts were developed, I was aware of the horrible things that human beings can do to other people in the name of racism or white nationalism, in this case Nazism.”
After telling the story of his family’s return visit to its old hometown in Poland a few years ago, Sanders said those memories, and an understanding of what happened to the Jewish people who lived there, drives his opposition to the current administration.
“That,” he said, “is why I will do everything I can to end the kind of divisiveness that Trump is fomenting in this country.”
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