Bernie Sanders, the one Jew running for President, seems to have the most distant relationship to Israel of any of the main contenders.
Jared Sichel writes for the Jewish Journal:
On April 12, Simone Zimmerman, a Los Angeles Jewish day school graduate and UC Berkeley alumna, was named head of Jewish outreach for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, a dream job for a young, politically active, liberal American Jew. Then, on April 14, Zimmerman was suspended by the campaign.
Zimmerman’s downfall, her #IStandWithSimone supporters have argued on social media and in online opinion pieces, was not ultimately the fault of the Sanders campaign, but, rather, brought on by the Jewish-American establishment. They see the establishment as intolerant of millennial Jews who view Israel differently than what they were taught by their parents, teachers, rabbis and even their summer-camp counselors.
The Sanders campaign offered no official reason for the suspension, but it followed the revelation of a screenshot of a profanity-laden Facebook post by Zimmerman from March 2015 (which she later edited) in which she said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “sanctioned the murder of over 2,000” Palestinians in the 2014 Gaza war. Zimmerman had also penned an op-ed published by JTA in May 2013 that criticized Hillel International for refusing to sponsor speakers or partner with organizations that support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Zimmerman’s posts were first revealed by Noah Pollak, a conservative Jewish journalist at the Washington Free Beacon, and they came in the wake of a Sanders’ comment to the New York Daily News, in which he mistakenly called the number of civilian fatalities in the most recent Gaza war 10,000, instead of the accepted number, which is fewer than 2,000, an error he later corrected.
Pollak’s piece and others like it led to a torrent of criticism against Sanders from mainstream Jewish leaders, including from Anti-Defamation National Director Emeritus Abe Foxman, who told Jewish Insider, “Bernie Sanders needs to fire Simone Zimmerman.”
After the suspension, a counter-response erupted, led most prominently by Peter Beinart writing for Haaretz, along with bloggers at +972 Magazine and Mondoweiss, organizations such as Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and the Foundation for Middle East Peace, as well as many young American Jews taking to Twitter and Facebook.
What those 48 hours revealed — aside from being an embarrassment and distraction for the Sanders campaign — is a divide between mainstream Jewish America and a growing number of millennial Jews raised within those institutions. These young Jews now reject key elements of the narrative they were taught about Israel and are actively trying to change how American Jewry talks about and teaches the Israel-Palestinian conflict. These young activists consider America’s mainstream Jewish community as complicit in what they see as Israel’s immoral occupation of the West Bank.
