Where’s Sanders, Jewish contender, on Israel?

He’s a Jew from Brooklyn. He’s running for president. But is Israel on his radar?

Once considered a long shot for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has gained significant momentum in recent weeks and trails the presumptive nominee—former secretary of state Hillary Clinton—by only eight percentage points, according to a CNN/WMUR poll released in June. 

Sanders had a bar mitzvah and was raised in a “large Jewish community full of striving middle class Jews who wanted to get up through the education system,” said Alan Abbey, currently director of Internet and media for the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute but formerly a political reporter for the Burlington Free Press in the early 1980s, when Sanders was first elected mayor of Vermont’s largest city. Abbey described Sanders as a “frumpy” politician who was “really able to connect with people and capture their imaginations.” 

Abbey’s parents both attended Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, a public school in Midwood with a largely Jewish student body, around the same time that Sanders did.

“These were working class assimilated Jewish-Americans, and that culture is very deep in his bones,” Abbey told JNS.org regarding Sanders’s upbringing.

Sanders also spent time on an Israeli kibbutz following his graduation from the University of Chicago in the 1960s. Yet in Congress, Israel has been far from the forefront of his agenda, taking a backseat to issues like income inequality, challenging Wall Street, and raising the minimum wage. In the process, Sanders has become someone many consider the darling of the American political left.

“Sanders has been relatively quiet as a senator on Israel issues,” Tevi Troy, who served as the White House liaison to the Jewish community under president George W. Bush, told JNS.org. “Compared to Hillary Clinton, Sanders has been consistent in his role as a backbencher on Israel, while Hillary has gone back and forth a bit.”