Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders greets supporters during a rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on February 26, 2020. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images) Image by Getty Images

Joel Swanson February 27, 2020

“We don’t want Sanders at AIPAC. We don’t want him in Israel.” When Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, made that fiery statement to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Sunday, he sounded like he was trying to cast Vermont Senator and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders out of the Jewish community entirely.

Joel Swanson | artist: Noah Lubin

Danon didn’t quite go so far as to say that Sanders isn’t a Jew, but for a man who has said that the Jewish people own the land of Israel because of the Hebrew Bible, to say that Bernie Sanders is not welcome in that land is tantamount to saying he is not part of that people, a people Danon sees as inextricably linked to the land.

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Of course, Dannon is not alone. Over and over, Sanders’ Jewish pride and Jewish heritage is questioned by right wing Jews. Despite Sanders talking regularly about how his Jewish upbringing was formative on his politics, right of center Jewish activists regularly accuse Sanders of feeling little affinity with the Jewish community, using his Jewish heritage only for political gain.

And there’s evidence that the view is more widespread than we thought. On Thursday, Pew released a poll asking Americans how religious they consider four of the leading Democratic candidates for president: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, to be. Of the four, Biden was the only one whom a majority of Americans consider to be “very” or “somewhat” religious, while Sanders was the candidate who the largest number of Americans — 60% — consider “not too” or “not at all” religious. Interestingly, fully three-quarters of American Jews think of Sanders as not especially religious, compared to 60% of Americans.

It’s ironic: though Sanders is the most successful Jewish candidate for president in US history, Jews are less likely than almost any other Americans to think of him as religious.

There are two ways to parse this finding. Like Dannon, Jews may be trying to cast Bernie Sanders out of the Jewish community, perhaps viewing him as heretical due to his harsh criticism of the state of Israel and decision to skip the 2020 AIPAC conference for political reasons.

Others have resorted to referring to him as “ethnically Jewish,” an attempt to write Sanders out of the Jewish community even though he very much identifies as part of it.

It’s an attempt to draw lines around Jewish identity based on political ideology, a dangerous and malicious trend that needs to be resisted. If Sanders is not Jewish simply because of his politics on Israel, then huge parts of Jewish history are not Jewish, either.

But there is another way of interpreting the fact that three quarters of American Jews think of Bernie Sanders as non-religious, one that’s less dispiriting. It could signal that Jews simply have multiple ways of understanding Jewishness. While polling companies like Pew consider Jewish identity to be a religious demographic category akin to Christianity, Jews understand that Jewishness is something much more than religion, in the modern sense of the term.

There is famously no word in Biblical Hebrew that means “religion” in the modern sense at all. Jewish identity encompasses elements of peoplehood, ethnicity, culture, and a broad array of forms of identity that go well beyond what we now think of as “religion.”

In fact, many scholars now argue that the concept of “religion” itself — the idea of a sphere of belief and ritual separate from an individual’s life in a community and ethnic identity — is an invention of Christianity.

As the Jewish scholar Gil Anidjar writes, Christianity “divided itself into private and public, politics and economics, indeed, religious and secular,” and in so doing it “invented the distinction between religious and secular and thus made religion.”

The majority of American Jews understand that there are ways of being Jewish that just do not fit neatly within the box of “religion,” in the modern sense of the term.

Take, for example, the fact that in 2013, Pew asked American Jews what an essential part of being Jewish is to them. The highest number, 73%, said that remembering the Holocaust was essential to being Jewish — something that Bernie Sanders, notably, has talked a lot about. The only other two categories that a majority of American Jews agreed were essential to being Jewish were “leading an ethical and moral life” and “working for justice and equality” — something that certainly characterizes Sanders’ Jewish identity.

In contrast, fewer than one in five American Jews thought that observing Jewish law was an essential part of being Jewish. Nor do Jews consider belief in God to be an essential part of Jewish identity. More than two-thirds of American Jews say that you can be Jewish without believing in God, and American Jews are actually less likely than Americans as a whole to say they personally believe in God with absolute certainty.

So while American voters may see Sanders’s socialism as a rejection of religious identity, many Jews understand that is an expression of Jewishness, even if it isn’t a form of Jewishness that finds its expression at Friday night services.

Joel Swanson is a contributing columnist for the Forward.

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