Bernie Sanders and the kibbutz conundrum [View all]

[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?