Bernie Sanders and the kibbutz conundrum

[Alfresco]

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Bernie-Sanders-and-the-kibbutz-conundrum-441490
Excerpt:
By YAKIR FELDMAN �1/14/2016

With the US presidential primary season about to kick off (the Iowa caucuses take place on February 1; the New Hampshire primary is the week after), polls indicate that Vermont Senator Bernard “Bernie” Sanders is threatening to overtake Hillary Clinton, who pundits presumed was the unchallenged front runner in the Democratic Party.

Who is this Bernie Sanders? Google tells us much about him. He was born almost exactly three months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland whose families were killed in the Holocaust. He is a talented folk musician. He earned an undergraduate degree in political science in 1964, and, shortly after spent several months on an Israeli kibbutz.

As Israelis, his presence on a kibbutz intrigues us. Knowing that a kibbutz stint can have profound influence on one’s outlook, we have a natural interest in knowing which kibbutz he volunteered at. We might be interested in contacting our fellow countrymen who knew him to find out what he was like during that period. Many of us can vote in the US, and we would like to be able to get a better idea about the man and his attitude toward our country and issues that are important to us.

What kibbutz was Sanders on? Google it! What you will discover is that nobody knows. Not Google. Not Wikipedia. Not even his only sibling, an older brother named Larry, who himself was a kibbutz volunteer, although not at the same time or on the same kibbutz.

What a Google search does reveal is that you are not the first to wonder what kibbutz Sanders was on. A wide range of journalists, bloggers and others have already tried – fruitlessly – to uncover this information, which has become one of the most intractable secrets about one of America’s most public personalities.
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But the intractable question remains: Where did Sanders volunteer? Not willing to give up without a fight, I, like other investigative journalists before me, emailed the question to every Sanders legislative and campaign address that I could find online.

No response was ever received.
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Hmmm.... Why the big secret?

[NurseJackie]

1. Am I correct in understanding that a kibbutz is like a commune?

Interesting. I'd never heard the term before.

[Alfresco]

2. Yes. A communal settlement in Israel, typically a farm.

[Thinkingabout]

3. There are some lapses in the young history but probably is

Facts which would be included in the history books.

[Alfresco]

4. People are curious. It's a great mystery. :-)

My Quixotic Hunt for Bernie Sanders' Kibbutz
http://forward.com/news/320344/my-quixotic-hunt-for-bernie-sanders-kibbutz/

Israeli Facebook Campaign Seeks to Crack Mystery
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/.premium-1.682249

Mission Impossible? Finding Bernie Sanders' Kibbutz
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/.premium-1.674364

Israel Matzav: On which Kibbutz was Bernie Sanders
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2015/10/on-which-kibbutz-was-bernie-sanders.html

[dlwickham]

5. Weird

[Hekate]

6. Like being a Peace Corps Volunteer when young, you'd think he'd be very proud of his service

Yes, this is rather strange.

[Alfresco]

7. Bernie Sanders’s Kibbutz Found. Surprise: It’s Socialist.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/us/politics/bernie-sanders-kibbutz.html?_r=0

By STEVEN ERLANGERFEB. 5, 2016

JERUSALEM — Senator Bernie Sanders volunteered on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1960s, but he has always been vague about the specific location. Now, the mystery about the Democratic presidential candidate’s past appears to have been solved, in the archives of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Yossi Melman, a longtime Haaretz writer, remembers an interview he did with Mr. Sanders in 1990, the year he was elected to represent Vermont in the House. Haaretz dug up that clip, in which Mr. Sanders said he had spent several months in 1963 working on Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, near Haifa in northern Israel, as a guest of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement.

The movement, whose Hebrew name translates to “The Young Guard,” was a socialist, Zionist secular Jewish youth group founded in 1913 in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, and shared the name of a workers’ party in pre-1948 Palestine. The original 1990 article was titled “The First Socialist” and said that after spending time on the kibbutz with his wife at that time, Mr. Sanders seems to have lost his connection “to Israel, Zionism and Judaism,” Haaretz reported this week. Mr. Sanders has long described himself as a democratic socialist.
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The kibbutz was founded in Romania in 1929 and established in pre-state Israel in 1935. It saw the Soviet Union as a model, and often flew the red flag at outdoor events.

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http://forward.com/news/332946/revealed-at-last-inside-the-kibbutz-where-bernie-sanders-lived-and-learned/

Revealed at Last! Inside the Kibbutz Where Bernie Sanders Lived and Learned Socialism

Sanders’ time on the kibbutz, where he lived for a few months with his ex-wife, Deborah Messing (born Deborah Shiling) is referenced in virtually every profile of the candidate.

But the Sanders campaign has been tight-lipped about name of kibbutz, leaving journalists in Israel and the U.S. searching fruitlessly for months. On February 4, national security journalist Yossi Melman unearthed a 1990 interview with the candidate in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper, where he revealed that it was Shaar HaAmakim.

On Friday, the typically sleepy kibbutz in the shadow of the Carmel Mountain was swarming with Israeli journalists searching for memories or photos of the presidential hopeful.

“The kibbutz was a full commune,” said Irit Drori, a 72-year-old former secretary of the kibbutz. Typical of the time, children were raised in a dormitory apart from their parents, who lived in small apartments.

The kibbutz founders had a strong admiration for the Communist system in the Soviet Union.

[BlueCaliDem]

8. If YOU were able to find this, Rove would have no problem. This will kill it

for Sanders in the G.E. God, I can already envision the hundreds of millions of attack ads in all States against Sanders should he win the nom.

No wonder Rove and other Republican strategists are spending millions to attack Hillary Clinton now and promote the "unreliable and untrustworthy" lie (which Sanders is embracing, by the way) while leaving Sanders completely alone. They're keeping their aces close to their chest should they successfully get Sanders to win the primaries.

For me, it's just another reason NOT to support Sanders.