Jewish Democrats have widely condemned a party official’s email that sought to question Bernie Sanders’ religious faith. They insist that the issue is irrelevant to how they cast their vote, though they are doubtful as to whether the US is ready to elect its first atheist president.
Emails released by WikiLeaks show that Brad Marshall, chief financial officer of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), considered raising the question of whether Sanders is an atheist in the hope of costing him votes in the primary contest against Hillary Clinton.
“It may make no difference but for KY and WVA [West Virginia] can we get someone to ask his belief,” Marshall, who has since apologised, wrote in an email on 5 May. “He had skated on having a Jewish heritage. I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”
Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, said on Tuesday: “The email was a disgrace for calling into question Bernie Sanders’ religious practices. There is no place in the DNC for a culture in which any staff can invoke the religious practices or lack of in any presidential candidate. If I was running the DNC, no one would say that because I’d kill them. I mean that figuratively.”
Goldstein, 54, wearing three Clinton campaign badges including “Jewish Americans for Hillary”, added: “To criticise a Jewish candidate for their alleged atheism is not to understand what Judaism is about. I am a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter but no one could say Bernie Sanders doesn’t have a staunch commitment to social justice. I don’t believe people of faith have an inside track to morality.”
But asked if the US is ready for a godless president, Goldstein had a striking answer: “I’m gay and America would have less of a problem with a gay president than an atheist president.”
Jewish Democrats held a meeting on the sidelines of the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia on Tuesday. Many played down the significance of the leaked email, arguing that it smacked of someone trying to impress and never had a chance of being adopted. They also suggested that it is Christian evangelicals, not Jews, who are still concerned about a candidate’s religion.
David Bernstein, president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said: “There are many highly committed Jews who are atheists including some of the founders of the state of Israel. Being Jewish is not just part of a religion but part of a people. I don’t concern myself with the theological views of Jewish people and atheism is certainly no novelty.”
Joyce Miller, 69, who works in finance in New York, agreed: “Many Jews are atheists. Jews were not going to be swayed by it. Bernie Sanders is a typical red diaper baby: born to radical parents, radical Yiddishist religion. They want their children to be married in synagogue but they don’t attend synagogue.”
Sanders typically wore his Jewish identity lightly during the campaign although he spoke during one of the Democratic debates about how proud he was to be Jewish, and told how his father’s family was wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust. His support base of young liberals would be the people least likely to care about his faith, Miller added. “I think Bernie Sanders is a traditional Jew like many Jews with their own view of what God means to them.”
Miller said she knows the rabbi who converted Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, to Orthodox Judaism in 2009 before she married property developer Jared Kushner. “I don’t think Trump has the level of insight to think about it much,” she commented.
Daylin Leach, a state senator in Pennsylvania, condemned the author of the DNC email. “When you have an organisation as large as the DNC, you always have one or two people who are off. As rather secular Jew myself, I found it offensive. I attribute it to one person who should be fired.”
There was never a remote chance of Marshall’s suggestion being taken seriously, he added. “Can you imagine someone going to Hillary Clinton, saying we want you to give a speech saying Bernie Sanders doesn’t believe in God? They would have been escorted out of the building. It’s insane.”
Last week Ted Cruz, a conservative Republican, surprised many by referring to atheists in a convention speech. Is America ready for an atheist president? Leach replied: “I don’t know if they would take to someone who ran as an atheist or stood before a packed Shea Stadium and said, ‘I am an atheist.’ That said, I don’t know if they are scrutinising people’s religion as much as they used to. As long as you’re not in people’s face, you can be quiet about your religion.”
One thing he is certain of is that America is not ready for Trump, he told the gathering: “The way he demeans people, the way he retweets stuff from white supremacists and fascists, the way he puts out the Jewish star over money, the way he tells the Republican Jewish Coalition: ‘You people like to make deals, right, but you don’t like me because I don’t want your money’. This man is a walking ethno racial stereotype generator and, as Michelle Obama said so eloquently last night, this is not what we want our children to see.”
Gail Yamner, former president of a political action committee from Clifton, New Jersey, put it differently: “I do not believe Donald Trump is antisemitic. I do think he’s a racist and xenophobe. If you allow people near you to promote hate then I’m not sure what it says about your character or bank of knowledge.”
When Trump tweeted a graphic critical of Clinton that featured a six-pointed star, a pile of cash and the words “most corrupt candidate ever”, it was “clearly antisemitic”, Yamner added. “It scares me that white supremacists are encouraged to think that he’s with them.”
Sanders’ faith made no different to Yamner, she continued. “I’m an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter and I didn’t consider his religion. I never looked at him as a Jewish candidate anyway. Culturally he is and Hitler would have said he was, but it wasn’t a factor in my consideration.”
Jerry Acker, 59, a lawyer from Detroit, said of Sanders: “He identifies as a Jew. He has a Jewish mother and he’s Jewish. I don’t judge people by their religion. People to get to judge who they want to lead the country. We’ve had some presidents who are more religious and some presidents who are barely religious. If you apply a religious test then they lie to you because they want to be president.”
- This article was amended on 27 July 2016 to correct one of the states mentioned in the leaked DNC email about Bernie Sanders’ religion. It was Kentucky and West Virginia, not Washington state.