Bernie Sanders finds a new role in the Senate — Jewish summer camp counselor

The longtime pacifist chastised a senator and a Teamster

Bernie Sanders, probably dispensing some world-weary wisdom. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

By PJ Grisar November 15, 2023

Senator Bernie Sanders, with all the beleaguered gravitas of a Camp Ramah director or Solomon Schechter principal, upbraided a Senate colleague who almost got into a physical fight with a Teamster on Tuesday.

In a hearing on health, education, labor and pensions, Markwayne Mullen (R-Okla.) read a tweet from Teamster General President Sean M. O’Brien, which called Mullen a “Greedy CEO” and appeared to challenge him to a fight “anyplace, anytime cowboy.”

“Sir, this is a time, this is a place,” Mullen said to O’Brien, who was in the room testifying. “You want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults, we can finish it here.”

The two men, both middle-aged, seemed to want to engage in fisticuffs with C-SPAN cameras rolling, until Sanders, weary of this tomfoolery, somehow channeling the spirit of every fed-up Jewish authority figure since Abraham Aveinu, told Mullen to sit down, reminding him that he is a United States Senator and this behavior was unworthy of him.

“This is a hearing, and God knows the American people have enough contempt for Congress, let’s not make it worse,” Sanders said, in a classic tactic deployed by administrators and rabbis whose young charges’ squabbling threaten to become a shonda fur de goyim.

While many may remember this reminder to set a good example — a light onto the nations or, at least, onto our gentile neighbors — being a member of Congress never stopped anyone from wanton acts of violence. You’ll recall how Preston Brooks assaulted Charles Sumner with a cane in 1856, an altercation as vivid in my mind as the time Scott Caplan smacked Ari Katz-Rosen with a siddur during Hebrew school.

Maybe it’s Sanders’ Vermont-by-way-of-Brooklyn mien that has me imagining him fitting comfortably into the role of a Jewish school or camp administrator. I’m not sure he ever served in that capacity — or how, exactly, his democratic socialist values and slideshows on Eugene V. Debs would go over with a modern-day board of directors.

Thankfully we needn’t work too hard to imagine it. He already played a rabbi in the 1999 film My X-Girlfriend’s Wedding Reception. There’s no doubt in my mind that that character, Manny Shevitz, once deescalated a brewing battle on a JCC youth charter bus.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at grisar@forward.com and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

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