Bernie Sanders has done an amazing job of alienating Jews in Massachusetts, Florida and New York. The last poll I saw showed that he had the support of only 29% of New York Jews against Hillary. And that's before he lied and claimed that Israel had killed 10,000 innocent people in Gaza.
So he decided to fix the problem by doubling down and bringing in a notorious anti-Israel activist as his Jewish Outreach Coordinator.
“I’m very frustrated with the campaign,” Lisa Harbatkin, 72, of Manhattan, told JTA. “Given where today’s left is on Israel, I felt Bernie was too fuzzy on the Palestinians, but good enough. But as the campaign progressed, I became more upset. I wish he wouldn’t hang out so much with Cornel West” – the contentious African-American studies professor who has expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel.
“Sanders has been tone deaf on Gaza. And the interview with the Daily News was appalling,” she said. “He doesn’t go to the AIPAC conference, but he’s going to the Vatican? I mean, come on!”...
Meanwhile, across the room, an activist exchanged vitriol with the campaign’s newly hired national Jewish outreach coordinator, Simone Zimmerman, after demanding accountability for the campaign’s failures on the Jewish front.
Simone Zimmerman would appear to be the anti-Israel activist in If Not Now, a J Street front group pushing its own version of BDS by harassing Jewish charities who help people in Israel.
Simone Zimmerman retweets violently anti-Israel bigots, including Max Blumenthal, who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel and helped inspire the Kansas City Jewish Community Center shooter, along with Hamas apologists like Glenn Greenwald and Yousef Munayyer.
Currently Zimmerman's Twitter account also praises Linda Sarsour who called Muslims throwing stones at Jews "courageous". Yes, this is what the Bernie Sanders version of Jewish outreach looks like.
Stone throwing and BDS papered over with random Yiddish and Jewish words to make anti-Semitism and hatred of Jew seem socially acceptable.
The Bernie Sanders campaign has utterly abandoned any effort to reach out to Jews and is now just scoring points by allying with bigots. He might as well just rename this the, "We Hate Jews" campaign. It would simplify his outreach enormously.