It’s a Monday afternoon and Bernie Sanders just finished praying mincha, the afternoon service, at a synagogue in Beit Shemesh, a bedroom community in the Judean Hills between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
He returned the Hebrew prayer book to the shelf and walked into a study hall in the back of the sanctuary where he plopped down at a long folding table to talk politics.
“Obviously,” said Sanders, leaning back in a chair, his arms confidently resting on the table, “I’ll be voting for Trump.”
Before we go any further, I should point out this is not the Bernie Sanders. This Bernie Sanders is 73, nine years younger than his congressional counterpart, and spent his career working in New York’s garment industry. He moved to Israel in 2019 with his wife, Ruthie
About the only thing he has in common with the senator from Vermont, besides the name, is that they share a gruff “tell-it-like-it-is” attitude they both nurtured in their native Brooklyn.
“Whatever he goes for, I go the other way,” said the Sanders in front of me, dressed in a gray polo shirt and a black baseball hat framing his salt-and-pepper beard. “I’ve got more seichel than him,” he said using the Yiddish word for intelligence.
The senatorial Sanders, who spent several months in 1963 volunteering on a kibbutz, called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a war criminal” over the weekend. What does the Sanders in Beit Shemesh think of his famous namesake? “He’s an antisemite.”
The bearded Sanders, who holds dual American-Israeli citizenship, said his primary source of news about the U.S. is Fox News, and thinks last month’s hush money trial, in which Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a felony, was “a sham” and that taxpayers’ money spent on the prosecution would have been better used to help homeless veterans.
“I think Trump is good for America,” Sanders said, citing issues that are important to him: the economy, immigration and Israel.
Sanders’ views seem to echo those of other Orthodox Americans who made aliyah that I met during a visit last week to Israel. They believe Trump is a better choice for Jews and praise him for following through on his promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Sanders thinks America, where he has more than a dozen grandchildren and where he believes colleges are “basically brainwashing” students, is facing an existential crisis with President Joe Biden at the helm. “If there’s no change,” he opined, “I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel for America.”
Weekend at Bernie’s
Burlington, Vermont, and Beit Shemesh are around 5,500 miles apart, so there’s not much chance that the two Bernie Sanders will ever bump into each other, the old Jewish man equivalent of tinkering with the space-time continuum. Asked if he would like to meet the senator, the Sanders in the back of the synagogue said he has no interest.
“His views are completely different than mine,” Sanders said. “Look at Bernie Sanders’ records and what he’s for. And I’m exactly the opposite.” He called the politician’s policies “crazy ideas,” especially on issues like student loan forgiveness. “I don’t think it’s fair because what about all the people that had to go through college and are still paying through the nose for it?”
My conversation with Sanders winded around — about who Trump should pick for vice president (Nikki Haley), the war in Ukraine (“Why can they do whatever they want, even though it’s American arms and ammunitions?”) and Hunter Biden, whose trial in a federal gun case begins today. We eventually ended up talking about retired life in Israel, where Sanders said he enjoys better healthcare than he would have had in the U.S.
“So you like socialized medicine?” I asked.
“I’m very pleasantly surprised,” he said with a smile.
So the two Bernie Sanders do agree on something.
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