Every product intended to be sold in a market, especially one to which it does not naturally belong, needs a certifying agent. Someone with unimpeachable standing in that market has to look at the product, put a stamp on it and vouch for the fact that it may be purchased without violating anything the buyer holds sacred. The buyer trusts the stamp, not the product. He does not have to examine the ingredients himself, because a man whose authority he respects has already examined them for him.
For roughly 15 years, the senior senator from Vermont has run the most successful certification agency in American politics. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) does not merely hold his own positions on Israel and the Jews who defend it; he issues absolution to other people for holding them. His value to the movement he built has never been primarily legislative because legislation is not his primary goal. Sanders’s product has always been permission. That is not a bug, it’s a feature.
Consider the purest example Sanders ever provided: Last Labor Day in Portland, Maine, Sanders endorsed Graham Platner for the United States Senate from Maine, and his early backing turned an oyster farmer who had only harvested for his mother’s restaurant into a candidate who polled within the margin against Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).
Then it emerged that Platner had a skull and crossbones tattooed on his chest that bore a marked resemblance to the Totenkopf, the death’s head symbol worn by the SS. Platner said he got it on military leave in Croatia while drunk and had no idea what it was. Then, reporters discovered deleted posts in which Platner called himself a Communist and wrote things about black people and sexual assault that his own campaign could not defend.
Sanders didn’t blink. He called Platner an “excellent candidate,” reaffirmed his support and said he looked forward to seeing him in the Senate.
Here is what that moment actually was: a hechsher, a kosher certification.
Sanders, whose father’s family was murdered in the Holocaust, examined an SS insignia on a politician’s chest and certified it fit for progressive consumption. Because he did, thousands of Democrats in Maine who would otherwise have felt a lurch in the stomach were relieved of the obligation to feel it. That is the service. Sanders could not make the tattoo disappear, but he could make it meaningless. Only he could do so, because only he possesses the standing that gives the stamp its value.
What finally moved Sanders, weeks later, was a Politico report alleging that Platner had sexually assaulted a woman in 2021, which Platner denies. Finally, Sanders recommended Platner step aside and the group Sanders founded, Our Revolution, withdrew its support for the candidate.
Thus, both support for and opposition to Platner’s candidacy belong to the same man in the same election season, and they establish a hierarchy of offense with no ambiguity. One category of offense was survivable; one was not; and the survivable one was the death’s head. The Jew could make the Nazi symbol kosher, but his standing wasn’t unique or sufficient enough to wash away sexual assault.
Here is what that moment actually was: a hechsher, a kosher certification.
The same stamp is applied at scale in the Senate. In September 2024, Sanders took the lead on five resolutions to block arms sales to Israel, and none drew more than 19 votes. By July 2025, the figure was 27. On April 15 of this year, 40 of the 47 members of the Democratic caucus voted with him to block a sale of Caterpillar bulldozers to Israel, and 36 voted to block the provision of 12,000-pound bombs.
Announcing the votes, Sanders described the government of the Jewish state as the “racist, extremist Netanyahu government.” A filing he made in March called the war with Iran illegal, premeditated and unconstitutional. Every senator who cast their votes in support went home able to tell a nervous Jewish donor that Bernie Sanders wrote the resolution and that answer worked because it was designed to work.
A week ago, the House cashed in the accumulated credit. A total of 103 Democrats—nearly half the Democratic caucus—voted to eliminate the entire $3.3 billion in annual military assistance to Israel that includes funding for the system that stops missiles from killing Jews in their homes. Nancy Pelosi voted yes. The Democratic whip voted yes. Sanders made it all possible.
None of this is my interpretation of how the mechanism functions. Sanders’s own admirers describe it openly and with a certain pride. A former Burlington mayor, praising him in his hometown paper, explained that because Sanders is Jewish and lost family in the Holocaust, he is “inoculated” and nobody will accuse him of antisemitism. When Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) pressed him with “Bernie, now do antisemitism,” it was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) who answered for Sanders, invoking Sanders’s murdered relatives and tikkun olam. Sanders did not have to speak. The genealogy spoke. Then, everyone could bow their heads in obedience and relief.
This brings us to the man who used to hold the stamp pad. Joel Rubin ran Jewish outreach for the 2020 Sanders presidential campaign. He was J Street’s first political director, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama who worked the Hill for the Iran deal and later the head of the American Jewish Congress. He is, in other words, a professional certifier himself, hired to vouch for Sanders in rooms where vouching was required, and he took the job because he wanted a Jewish president.
Last week at the Aspen Security Forum, Rubin told Jewish Insider that Sanders and the operation around him have pushed into American politics “the most categorically anti-Israel, antisemitic candidates that we’ve seen in a generation,” and that this was not an accident of circumstance but a deliberate design intended to shatter Democratic coherence on Israel.
That is not a policy disagreement. That is the guarantor revoking the guarantee. The man whose job was to certify the certifier has examined what the certification actually purchased, and he has taken his name off it.
So, spare us the ritual objections. Nobody seriously disputes that Bernie Sanders is a Jew and that his father’s family really was murdered for the same reason ours were. That is not the charge and never was. The charge is that he discovered, early and correctly, that a Jewish name attached to an accusation against Jews travels farther, faster and harder than the same accusation from anyone else. Sanders has spent a career monetizing that arbitrage on behalf of people who could not have gotten there without him.
Sanders did not build the antisemitism now consuming the American left. He did something more useful: He made it kosher.
