The Most Jewish Election in U.S. History, “And No One Cares”

With two Jewish candidates for president in the Democratic primaries, argues Satya Ungar-Sargon, opinion editor of The Forward, in The Washington Post (March 1, 2020), “This Democratic primary contest is...a historic race for American Jews...The faceoff between the Jewish billionaire and the Jewish socialist is the most Jewish political moment in American history and predictions have abounded that a wave of hatred is about to hit...I’m not worried....While Jews may see two 78-year-old Jewish men running against each other...that’s not how America writ large receives this race. Sanders and Bloomberg are rarely registering in mainstream politics as Jewish. It’s a final gift from the goldeneh Medina—-the golden land, as Yiddish-speaking immigrants once called the United States—at a time when American Jews have never needed it more.”

Ungar-Sargon provides this assessment: “The fact that Sanders and Bloomberg are Jewish is something Americans barely seem to notice about them; it simply receded into the background of their bids for the presidency. Each candidate has been allowed to bring his Jewishness to the fore exactly as often as he would like and not a jot more. This is an amazing fact, the true revolutionary aspect of this election cycle. In the parlance of our times, you might say they’re demonstrating that most coveted of American commodities: white privilege. Sanders and Bloomberg are able to simply blend into the mostly male, mostly white Democratic field. That didn’t happen for Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, or for Julian Castro or Andrew Yang, or for Elizabeth Warren, or Hillary Clinton in 2016, for that matter. For women and other minorities, race and gender are still inseparable from public persona. They don’t get to decide how they are seen; America sees them first and foremost as women or black or Latino or Asian. Not so for white Jewish men anymore. The America that accepted Joe Lieberman keeping kosher and observing Shabbat on the campaign trail in 2000 has gone a step further: In 2020, amid a rise in anti-Semitic vandalism and violence, two white Jews are able to run not on the Jewishness that unites them but on what distinguishes them from each other——which, because God has a sense of humor, is their approach to money.”

She concludes: “it turns out that in addition to gifting Jews the right to practice their religion freely, America had one more gift: the right to make our Jewishness disappear to our fellow citizens....I hope that...we remember to stop and behold the wonder of this moment and recommit to ensuring that all Americans are granted the gifts America has bestowed upon us Jews in campaigns to come—swiftly and in our lifetimes.”*