ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  It takes a village, but a village of rabbis, to interpret this statement, given its semantic sleight—its impersonality (“somebody”), ambiguity (“my background,” “my views”), and utter alienation from the self (the climactic third-person “Sanders victory”). Who wouldn’t be confused as to whether a Sanders victory would be of “some historical accomplishment” as the triumph of an ideology, or of a Jew? Which is to ask, cynically, which Sanders is the more electable: the Eurocratic redistributionist, or the Ashkenazi son of the commandments? Which revolution was Sanders promising, the one that takes on Wall Street, or the one that takes on prejudice? Was he demanding Jews be counted among minorities in America, or was he tacitly acknowledging that his white maleness was costuming for his ethnic status and so offering a sly critique of our culture of superficial tokenism?

  The ambivalence of this statement marks the man who made it, and not, ironically, President Obama, as the commanding code switcher in chief of contemporary politics. I’d argue that Obama never has delivered a statement to the American public intended to be received one way by whites and another by blacks. Hillary never has and never would deliver a statement that meant one thing to women and a whole entire other thing to men. However, Sanders’s “historical accomplishment” was taken to mean “the first Jewish president” by Jews and “the first Democratic Socialist president” by the 97.8 percent of the American populace that isn’t Jewish. I’d even hazard that this was how Sanders intended it to be interpreted, and that this double meaning encrypts a private as much as historical truth that for modern Jewry the left may be the mightier birthright, its social-policy compassion and antidiscrimination imperatives constellating an identity that supersedes any other—a replacement for Judaism even more Christian than Christianity.

  As Sanders surely knows but would never discuss, socialism—and its legislation at the national, or universal, level as communism—represented the most provocative and ultimately most poignant attempt by Jews to integrate into Christian society since the emancipations of the Enlightenment. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jewish political involvement was limited to what amounted to extortion: Confined to ghettos, confined to certain occupations, forced to dress according to the sumptuary laws, and perpetually vulnerable to the depredations of hostile populaces, Jews were organized into communities, which were permitted a mock degree of autonomy, and forced to pay for protection. They were compelled to lend, or give, money to benevolent regents, who sometimes spared and sometimes slaughtered them. That’s why the republican revolutions of Enlightenment Europe impacted the Jews more culturally, or commercially, than politically: Their upheavals meant that more sons of moneylenders were allowed into schools and allowed to ply other trades, though justice, as always, was gradual, and far from global. It fell to socialism, then, to fire the Jewish political imagination, with Marx declaring, in his 1844 review of Bruno Bauer’s The Jewish Question, “The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation.” In other words, the true struggle didn’t consist of persuading a certain government to let a certain citizen-race freely practice its religion; it consisted of persuading all citizen-races to surrender their religions and join together to freely practice universal governance. It was Marx’s conceit that under capitalism all peoples had become “Jews”: forced by dint of social, but predominantly economic, inequalities to act entirely out of what he characterized as “practical need” and “self-interest.” Marx’s money lines: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” He concludes: “Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.”

  Now, it’s all too familiar, and all too cheap, to mention how that hope died: in Sovietism, amid the show trials and gulags. Even as the Holocaust’s carnage factories were starting to churn, an exiled Trotsky continued to censure Zionism, declaring, “Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.” To summarize the Jewish anti-Semitism lurking behind nascent socialism, just apply Marx’s description to Trotsky’s prescription: To Marx, to live under “capitalism” was to become “a Jew”; while to Trotsky, “Jews” could only be saved by destroying “capitalism,” which is to say, they could only be saved by destroying themselves.

  What both Marx and Trotsky, not to mention Lenin and Stalin, were proposing was that Judeo-capitalism must evolve into revolutionary socialism—or into communism, as a successor to the dream of Jewish autonomy-oligarchy-kleptocracy. What would redeem this self-hating morass of identity synecdoche and self-eradicating metonymy was America, a country ripe for personal or racial or religious reinvention, in which the transformational procedures that caused European Jews to de-Judaize themselves into “socialists” and separate themselves from their co-religionists by branding them “capitalists” was reproduced by nearly every immigrant ethnicity: Italians, Irish, Russians, etc., and eventually by the nation’s disenfranchised—blacks—who recognized that socialism had been crusading for emancipation and desegregation well before those most basic civil rights had been enshrined as American law.

  Nearly all of the major figures who enabled this integration through reidentification, who went down like Moses into the rail yards, packing plants, and sweatshops, and brought socialism to America, were Jews: Daniel De Leon (1852–1914), a Sephardic immigrant from Curaçao and the forefather of industrial unionism, became the leader of the Socialist Labor Party of America and a three-time failed candidate for governor of New York; Samuel Gompers (1850–1924), an immigrant Jew from England who was the first president of the American Federation of Labor; Victor L. Berger (1860–1929), an immigrant Jew from Austro-Hungary, who founded the Social Democratic Party of America, converted Eugene V. Debs, who had been a Democratic member of the Indiana General Assembly, to socialism, and became the first socialist elected to the House; Morris Hillquit (1869–1933), a Jewish immigrant from the Baltics, who co-founded the Socialist Party of America and was a two-time failed candidate for mayor of New York City and representative of New York’s ninth congressional district—Sanders’s birth district; and Saul Alinsky, the Chicago-born codifier of community organizing, who influenced Sanders’s grassroots-collectivization campaigning (and, parenthetically, served as the subject of Hillary Clinton’s undergrad thesis). These Jews, who established American socialism, did so in an adopted language. Their main rhetorical twist was to insist that “democracy”—lowercase “democracy”—didn’t exist, except as a lexical superstition that meant “capitalism.”

  MONEY LIBEL

  This revalencing, however, regardless of its aspiringly assimilated American socialist pedigree, might still serve as yet another explanation for why Sanders is loath to discuss his Judaism: Money is at the center of his platform. He stood onstage in New York, three blocks from the Bank of America building, seven blocks from Morgan Stanley headquarters, eight blocks from JPMorgan Chase, eleven blocks from Citigroup, and accused those and other banks, and the credit-rating agencies, and the regulatory agencies, not just of criminal negligence but of having done deliberate harm:

  Greed, fraud, dishonesty, and arrogance, these are the words that best describe the reality of Wall Street today.

  The entirety of the formula reminded me of the High Holiday liturgy, when Jews stand in front of one another, and in front of God, to enumerate their sins and repent for them: “greed” (beat your breast), “fraud” (beat it), “dishonesty” (beat it), and “arrogance” (beat it). I understand this characterization betrays my own sensitivities more than Sanders’s, but still I couldn’t avoid the association, or the suspicion that even while he was accusing, he was also atoning. But for whom? And for what?

  A confession: The fact that there were no pogroms in this country after the 200
8 financial collapse still astounds me, and almost had me convinced that anti-Semitism was on the wane in America, until I was reminded of the equally astounding fact that no goyish bank CEOs were shot or stabbed or beaten or kidnapped in the aftermath. And though Jewish men are seen as disproportionately represented in bank boardrooms, at least as disproportionately as they’re represented on bookstore shelves, and in pairings of non-Asian men with Asian women, the truth remains that the vast majority of bank CEOs are goyim, and the largest bankruptcy to result from the crisis—indeed, the largest in American history—was perhaps Wall Street’s most historically Jewish firm, Lehman Brothers, which went to its grave with $613 billion in debt.

  Still, pockets—empty pockets—of anti-Semitic tropes still fester: websites dedicated to the kabbalistic significance of the number 613 (the number of mitzvot, or commandments, in the Torah), and to the Zionist Occupied Government perpetrated by Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs; Ben Bernanke was chair of the Fed; Robert Zoellick, also at Goldman, headed the World Bank. Sheldon Adelson ran, and still runs…Sheldon Adelson. Jews comprise around 2 percent of the U.S. population, yet over 40 percent of U.S. billionaires…

  This money libel, in which Jews are accused of draining money from world coffers, is the modern version of the blood libel, in which Jews were accused of draining the blood of Christian babies for ritual use, which itself was a medieval renewal of the ancient accusation that Jews were the killers of Christ. The metaphoric equivalencies, between blood and money, money and Jews, coruscate from under the slander: Jews, who murdered the child of God, were punished and condemned to wander; rather, they were forced to “circulate,” and so to conceal their identities, to “convert” or “exchange” their identities; in every situation, they had to remain “fungible.” In sum, Jews move like money moves, and their Judaism, like all valuta, is an arbitrary principle, both race and religion yet neither—always in transit, always redefining its worth, capable of taking on all forms and no forms, like their God.

  The thing is, while I’m quite certain that Jews don’t hold Easter-time baby-murdering ceremonies, nor do they control all world events, I’m not sure that the poetry—the metaphors, again—behind the money libel is unfair, or wrong. Jews have always been mutable, and made trades. They’ve always passed, or tried to pass—as Christians, as socialists, as white. Some of us even broke out of Brooklyn poverty, sat in to integrate the University of Chicago, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., moved to Vermont to dabble in the counterculture, and convinced a bunch of libertarians with guns that we were enough like them to elect us mayor of the state’s largest city, and then to send us to Congress and even, who knows, beyond.

  DEFLATION

  Here’s Sanders’s chief speech technique: He puffs the audience up into a frenzy with all variety of denunciations, and then—he lets the air out…whoosh. So many of his policies seem like deflations—reductions of banking influence, sure, but also letdowns, paltry punch lines to elaborately set up jokes.

  For example, after railing against the banks for a few impassioned minutes, he says that under his administration, he’s going to go all (Teddy) Roosevelt and bust them up. How’s he going to do it? Are you ready?

  Within the first one hundred days of my administration, I will require the secretary of the Treasury Department to establish a “too big to fail” list of commercial banks, shadow banks, and insurance companies whose failure would pose a catastrophic risk to the United States economy without a taxpayer bailout.

  A list! Note where the stress lies: not on the breaking, the bashing, the smashing, the pleasure of revenge, but…on a piece of paper! As Spielberg might remind us, “The list is life.”

  Another few impassioned minutes are spent lamenting the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which, as Sanders explains, disentangled the activities of commercial and investment banks. What’s he going to do it about? He’ll reinstate it, with new provisions!

  But instead of outlining what those new provisions might be, he instead credits Elizabeth Warren with having conceived them, or introduced them, and then delves into a history lesson on how the original act was passed under (Franklin) Roosevelt but repealed under (Bill) Clinton. He concludes the non sequitur by quoting former secretary of labor Robert Reich at length, and in doing so once again demonstrates his penchant for referring to himself in the third person:

  Bernie Sanders says break them up and resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated investment from commercial banking. Hillary Clinton says charge them a bit more and oversee them more carefully….Hillary Clinton’s proposals would only invite more dilution and finagle.

  Yes, “finagle.” Which, though it’s technically derived from Old English, has never sounded more Yiddish.

  More? Sanders goes on a rant about interest rates, about bank fees, the rape of the middle class. To quote Chernyshevsky, “What is to be done?” Sanders says he’s going to order a cap on ATM fees at $2! Or, to be precise, “two dollas”!

  One last? Like an amateur observational comic, he asks the audience if they’ve noticed that banks are making more money than ever, but when you need a bank in your neighborhood, you can never find one. What. Is. Up. With. That? If you want a loan, you have to go to a payday lender, who entraps you in a debt cycle. So, nu? Sanders would empower all U.S. post offices to offer essential banking services.

  This was the most intricately signifying stretch of his performance, as he seemed to be doing Larry David doing him, but doing the material Seinfeld might try out in a guest appearance at a civics class on his child’s Take Your Father to Work Day. Of course, he wasn’t. Sanders wasn’t doing anyone, not even himself. This wasn’t about him, because nothing is.

  This is about how lists and ATMs in the post office are going to save America.

  USURY

  Nothing could’ve prepared me for what came next—the ultimate complication of my emotions, and the one statement that will forever prevent me, who makes judgments about everything, from ever being able to decide whether Bernie Sanders doesn’t care about his lack of polish, or doesn’t even recognize his lack of polish:

  If we are going to create a financial system that works for all Americans, we have got to stop financial institutions from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and outrageous fees….The Bible has a term for this practice. It’s called usury. And in The Divine Comedy, Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for those who charged people usurious interest rates….Today, we don’t need the hellfire and the pitchforks, we don’t need the rivers of boiling blood, but we do need a national usury law.

  OK, then. Usury. The derivation is Latin, usuria, from usus, past participle of uti, “to use.” Usury means demanding compensation for the “use” of money. It means, in contemporary terms, “charging interest.”

  Sanders has the literature correct: The Bible proscribes usury, but what he failed to mention—what he doesn’t seem, again, to either care about or recognize—is the fact that this proscription allowed the Roman Catholic curia’s various inquisitions to prosecute it as a heresy, punishable by death. Of course, moneylending was one of a handful of occupations that Jews were permitted to engage in, or, in not a few cases, coerced into engaging in, during the Middle Ages, which makes it understandable why noblemen and merchant borrowers would be interested in criminalizing interest. This made the money they were borrowing essentially free, and the moneylender would have to lend on the black market to turn a profit. Dante condemns this practice, that’s true, and relegates usurers not just to the Seventh Circle, but to a subcircle of the Seventh Circle, the lowest of the low: to be harried by the monster Geryon and tortured below the suicides and murderers, amid the sodomists and blasphemers. I wonder whether Sanders would agree with the Florentine poet’s stance on men who have sex with other men, men who use the name of God in vain, and men who off themselves. (To be fair,
I presume he’s on board with being antimurder.) I also wonder whether Sanders shouldn’t have chosen a less-charged, less-invested-with-peril name for his proposed legislation—a name that wasn’t used as a virtual synonym for crafty Jewish malice for over a millennium and a half. What about the No Outrageous Fees Act (NOFA)? Or the Lower Interest Rates Regulation (LIRR)? I mean, couldn’t one of his volunteer redshirts from Harvard/Yale/Sarah Lawrence have googled “usury,” just to gauge how fraught that term might be, especially from the mouth of a Jew? Or maybe the requisite googling was done, and Sanders intends to provoke, or just can’t be bothered?

  The great artwork concerning usury Sanders leaves unquoted: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. And it was at the moment that he pronounced the word again that I had the sense of being present at a new and very skewed production.