Bernie Sanders and the Rise of the Jews of Privilege
Benjamin Kerstein
Daily Wire, October 13, 2026. Read the full essay here.
One of the most important and certainly one of the most politically powerful Jews of Privilege to appear in recent years is Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who nearly gained the Democratic presidential nomination twice over.
Sanders is a somewhat strange case. He bears the legacy of the Holocaust in his family and was by no means born into wealth or class privilege. But as much as he may deny it, he is now an elite. In terms of personal history and ancestry, Sanders is not a Jew of Privilege. Ideologically, he is a Jew of Privilege in every way.
Indeed, his privilege has made him one of the most important leaders of the progressive oligarchy now vying for control of the Democratic Party, mainly through the electoral benefits of antisemitism. There have always been money and votes, after all, in running against the Jews.
It became clear very early on in Sanders’s first campaign, when he referred to his ancestors as “Polish” rather than “Jewish” immigrants; falsely accused Israel of killing 10,000 Palestinians in the 2014 war (the actual number was a fifth of that amount); and surrounded himself with advisors and surrogates like James Zogby, Cornel West, and others whose loathing for Israel and unprivileged Jews was palpable, that something was very wrong..…
Continues here. Benjamin Kerstein is a fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Jews of Privilege: Elites, Anti-Zionists, and Our Secret Civil War (Wicked Son & Z3, 2026).