My Quixotic Hunt for Bernie Sanders' Kibbutz
t’s a constant of virtually every profile written about Bernie Sanders: Shortly after college, the Vermont senator now running for president volunteered at an Israeli kibbutz.
Depending on the writer, this detail might speak to Sanders’s Jewish identity, his stance on Israel, or his socialist values. Were any or all of these honed in the communal agrarian idyll of 1960s Israel? No reporter or analyst has been able to fully address this question because no one has been able to pin down which kibbutz Sanders volunteered at for several months in 1964, after his graduation from the University of Chicago. Including me.
On my part, it’s not for lack of trying. Not even his brother, Larry Sanders, knows, despite the fact that he himself volunteered at two kibbutzim in Israel — Matsuva in the North and Yotvata in the South — and even met his first wife in Israel. Larry Sanders never visited Bernie Sanders on the kibbutz, but he said that it was a formative experience for his brother.
“I think the kibbutz reinforced Bernie’s view that people can run things for themselves,” Larry Sanders wrote me in an email. “They don’t need a long chain of bosses. It also gave flesh to his view that equality made for a pleasant life for all.”
He also said that the kibbutz “didn’t so much introduce Bernie to new ideas as confirm and give substance to views he had already
developed.”
The name of Sanders’s kibbutz might seem like a minor detail, but it’s important. Among other things, it could build on our understanding of his formative years before he became a populist firebrand filling stadiums across America as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s main challenger in the Democratic primary race. Was it one of the hard-left kibbutzim of that era affiliated with the Marxist political party Mapam? Or was it one of the more moderate socialist communities affiliated with the ruling Mapai party?
If we knew which kibbutz Sanders volunteered at, we would no longer have to speculate about what he experienced there, because we could learn firsthand from the kibbutzniks with whom he volunteered.
Read more: http://forward.com/news/320344/my-quixotic-hunt-for-bernie-sanders-kibbutz/#ixzz3lIUFKdFH
= new reply since forum marked as read
I guess that Bernie made up his mind some time ago about Israel.
Surely he knows where he was. 
