Who cares, at this point, about the Village Voice? Does it
still exist, and if it does, after
one brute shrinkage and shredding of writers after another, is there anything ever
worth reading in it?
For the most part, no, there isn't; it's junk. But J.J.
Goldberg, roving editor of the still vibrant The Forward (forward.com), took the occasion of a crappy polemic in
the current version of Voice to make an interesting surmise about the origins
of Bernie Sanders's democratic socialism. The polemic, which Goldberg dissects
in all its fatuous detail, charges Sanders with insufficient feeling for Israel
and for Zionism. Goldberg argues that, au contraire, Sanders's democratic socialism
derives precisely from an essential tradition of Zionism itself.
As Goldberg sees it, and he hopes more will be forthcoming
from Sanders himself over the course of the campaign, Sanders did not get his
views on socialism from the storied tradition of labor activism among Jewish
immigrants. That was already past tense, and from what we know of Sanders, the
rumors of its glory days did not reach him when, growing up in Brooklyn, he was
more concerned with leading the Madison High School track team than with
sweatshop ordeals some decades back in the Lower East Side.
Sanders, as per Goldberg, got socialism, if I can put it like
that, during his college years at the University of Chicago. There he became
involved with the Young People's Socialist League (youth arm of the Socialist
Party), which, in turn, had connections with Labor Zionism. Labor Zionism was the main force behind
Israel's coming into being, and had socialist allegiances and aspirations.
So, after graduation, Sanders goes to Israel to work on a
kibbutz. He's justified when he says, as he has:
I think I am probably the only candidate for president who
has personal ties with Israel. I spent a number of months there when I was a
young man on a kibbutz, so I know a little bit about Israel.
(On a personal note, I do love him adding "probably"
to the above. )
In any case, he went to Israel a kibbutznik, and, in a
sense, a kibbutznik he returned and remains. Is Israel still the land of the
kibbutzim? No, it's far from. But the spirit of Labor Zionism, in its early
days, and of the kibbutzim, is not a bad thing to bring to politics, even if
you wind up far from Brooklyn, even further from Israel, as a Senator from
Vermont who's making a run for president of the United States.
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