It also raises the troubling possibility that Sanders is using his own Jewishness to mainstream some of the worst actors in the Democratic Party’s progressive wing–either out of the same naivete that led him to honeymoon in the Soviet Union or a wager that their support is necessary to bring about his desired political “revolution” in America. “What [Jeremy] Corbyn has done with the [British] Labour party is not dissimilar to what we’re trying to do with the Democratic party,” he told a British audience in 2017, two years after Corbyn became leader and the anti-Semitic miasma that surrounded him had become a subject of significant media attention. In the U.K. general election, Sanders’ campaign all but officially endorsed Corbyn, as did one of his most high-profile surrogates, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

While Sanders claims not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, he has singled out the Jewish state for censure in other ways, lambasting the current Israeli government as “racist,” the sort of language he never uses to describe Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. His campaign is chock full of BDS supporters, like Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. Last summer, Omar and Tlaib chose not to join the largest ever bipartisan congressional mission to Israel, opting instead to accept the invitation of a Palestinian group that advocates the Jewish state’s destruction, propagates the blood libel, celebrates terrorists who have murdered Israeli children, and published the treatise of an American neo-Nazi group on its website.

When it comes to fighting anti-Semitism in America today, Sanders shows little interest in his native Brooklyn, where poor Jews are being regularly beaten, stabbed, and attacked. Instead, he advocates that the U.S. return to the United Nations Human Rights Council, an abject farce of an institution, which recently selected Venezuela to membership and is itself one of the world’s most reliable forums for anti-Semitic agitation.