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  • 2015-09-21 (xsd:date)
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  • Were Bernie Sanders' Parents Holocaust Survivors? (de)
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  • On 29 August 2015, a Tumblr user re-blogged a note about Adolf Hitler and World War II (originally shared by another user), in the process appending to it a claim about the parents of Vermont senator (and Democratic presidential candidate) Bernie Sanders' parents being Holocaust survivors: That note gave rise to a spate of social media posts asserting that Sanders' parents were themselves Holocaust survivors: The original posts (which between them accumulated a quarter of a million comments) linked to an 11 June 2015 Christian Science Monitor article that focused on a then-current online rumor claiming that Sanders maintained dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship. In that article, Sanders mentioned that his father had immigrated to the U.S. from Poland, but he did not describe his parents as Holocaust survivors: Similarly, a 21 January 2007 New York Times magazine article on Sanders reported that Sanders' father Eli came from Poland and saw his family wiped out in the Holocaust, but it did not specifically state that Eli Sanders was himself a Holocaust survivor: On 25 July 2015, the Sanders for President campaign released a five-minute long video spot titled Progress, in which (at the 30-second mark) Sanders briefly stated that his mother was born in New York (not Poland) and had died at a relatively young age (: https://youtu.be/qyee_sxJpXcTablet magazine published an in-depth piece on Sanders on 20 August 2015 that provided additional detail about Sanders' parents, reporting that Eli Sanders immigrated to the U.S. in 1921, well before the outbreak of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust (although a number of Eli Sanders' relatives who remained in Poland perished in concentration camps years later): In late May 2015, Bernie Sanders covered the same biographic ground during a speech in Burlington, Vermont: So while Bernie Sanders' father, Eli Sanders, immigrated to the United States from Poland, he did so back in 1921 and thus could not accurately be described as a Holocaust survivor under even the broadest definitions of the term. Sanders' mother, Dorothy Sanders, was born in New York City and thus was neither an immigrant nor a potential victim of Nazi death camps. (en)
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