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That time Allen Ginsberg wrote a Socialist poem — about Bernie Sanders
Last June, while digging through 50 boxes of archival material about Bernie Sanders’s four terms as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a reporter for the British newspaper the Guardian found a poem by Allen Ginsberg. Written by hand on a 1986 visit to the city, “Burlington Snow” didn’t name Sanders, but he was clearly the populist muse that inspired it.
Ginsberg wrote, “Socialist snow on the streets / Socialist talk in the Maverick Bookstore / Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops.” Then he turned outward, questioning with almost Elizabethan wit: “—aren’t the birds frozen socialists? / Aren’t the snowclouds blocking the airfield Social Democratic appearances?”
After Ginsberg shares the city’s governing idea, the poem itself is shared: “Isn’t this poem socialist? It doesn’t belong to me anymore.”
The iconic Jewish-American poet was writing about the Jewish-American socialist almost exactly 30 years ago, on a February day in snow-covered New England like the one on which Sanders won in New Hampshire. Spreading online, the poem has delighted both poetry people and Sanders loyalists. No one combines those two groups like Eliot Katz; a leading “post-Beat” poet and Ginsberg protégé, Katz has spent 20 years, on and off, working on a book caled “The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg.” Published by the independent Beatdom Books in December 2015, it addresses both Ginsberg’s career as a poet and life as an activist.
Absurdly, the unearthing of the Sanders poem from an overlooked archive came after Katz’s manuscript was ready for print, too late for him to write about it. But it reflects his thesis about Ginsberg and his pleasure in Sanders’s success. Katz has written seven books of poetry, including “Space and Other Poems for Love, Laughs and Social Transformation” (1990) and “Unlocking the Exits” (1999), but I hadn’t heard of him in 2005, when an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle asked me to review a collection of essays about “Howl.” I pretty much panned it, saying too many pieces presented facile claims by Ginsberg admirers about his relevance in the 21st century.
Katz, whose readable book expands on his insightful essay, says Ginsberg’s forward looking focus defines how he “challenged the boundaries” of poetry’s political potential. After years of digging into “Howl,” “Kaddish” and “Wichita Vortex Sutra, he was startled a few weeks ago when he found “Burlington Snow” online, recognizing a vivid example of how a Ginsberg poem could illuminate political changes long before they happen.
“Ginsberg told me that prophetic poetry doesn’t work like someone making a prediction,” Katz said when I visited him in his Hoboken apartment. “Instead, he would say that political poetry ‘touches a common key,’ allowing the reader to feel something that somebody will feel in a hundred years. Here, he wrote a poem that praised the democratic-left tradition we’re seeing in Bernie Sanders. No one could have predicted that Sanders would be waging such an effective campaign to move the Democratic Party in more progressive directions.”
A frequently smiling man with shaggy, graying hair, the 59-year-old Katz lives amid countless books on Ginsberg and progressive politics. Taped to one wall is a newspaper clipping about his late mother, Toby Katz, an Auschwitz survivor who went on to hold elected office for 12 years as a councilwoman in West Orange, New Jersey, where Katz grew up. She helped to inspire his work as an activist, including jobs with organizations for the homeless in New Jersey and Washington, DC. He displays posters of readings he gave with Ginsberg, and his book combines his personal feeling for the poet with critical analysis of his work.
Of a poem called “Why I Sit,” Katz writes that Ginsberg used a technique learned from Greek poetry called anaphoric repetition, the rhythmic echoing of a word to “sew together” his personal and political concerns. He quotes from the poem:
“I sit because the Dadaists screamed on Mirror Street / I sit because the Surrealists ate angry pillows… / I sit because Lunacharsky got fired & Stalin / gave Zhdanov a special tennis court I became a / rootless cosmopolitan / I sit inside the shell of the old Me / I sit for world revolution.”
“Why I Sit,” Katz writes, highlights how “Stalin’s deplorable actions caused [Ginsberg] to become a citizen without solidly existing roots.” Katz said the poet’s attraction to socialism transcended his disillusionment with Soviet communism, and that ”Burlington Snow” reflects his lifelong contemplation of counter-pulling influences of his youth, his troubled communist mother and his socialist poet father. “Allen appreciated democratic socialism,” Katz told me, when we spoke. “But he opposed the kind of authoritarianism of the Soviet Bloc. Czechoslovakia is a country he got kicked out of.”
“I don’t call Allen a democratic socialist in the book,” he added. “I think he believed more in being politically pragmatic than in holding any specific ideology — so that he supported anarchist movements when they were doing positive things, and trade union movements when he agreed with them. He remained a progressive his whole life, and he defied the conservative myth that radicals from the 1960s era all became conservative in their old age.”
Ginsberg’s “open support of Sanders,” Katz said, prompted him to give a reading to raise money for one of the Vermont politician’s congressional races in 1992. In fact, in a lengthy footnote, Katz says he helped to organize it. “It was at a restaurant called Nadine’s,” Katz told me. “I always thought I introduced them for the first time. Allen and Bernie talked, but I don’t know what they said, because I was too busy helping to coordinate things.”
Bob Rosenthal, longtime manager of Ginsberg’s office, says Ginsberg had Bernie Sanders on his radar through the years. “I always knew who Bernie Sanders was, and I had to know that through Allen, because Allen was where I got all my news,” Rosenthal told me. “I don’t think they hung out together, but Allen always had an awareness of him.”
The Allen Ginsberg archive at Stanford University holds a letter Sanders sent Ginsberg in 1989, thanking him for the “time, energy and creativity” Ginsberg gave “to me and the City of Burlington throughout my administration,” citing an art auction with which Ginsberg helped in some unspecified way.
With the resurrection of “Burlington Snow,” Ginsberg’s friends wonder if the poet and the politician actually met for the first time when Ginsberg visited Burlington in 1986.
Huck Gutman is pretty sure that didn’t happen, and he should know. Gutman is one of Bernie Sanders’s closest friends, serving for years as his chief of staff in Washington. He’s also a professor of English at the University of Vermont, where he often teaches “Howl,” and he spent recent days getting ready to give a class on how the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky influenced Ginsberg.
Asked about “Burlington Snow,” he replied in an email: “Ginsberg, as you know, grew up in a socialist milieu (I guess I am clear about this mostly from his poem, ‘America.’) and would have been interested in, even entranced by, the fact that Burlington had a socialist as its mayor.”
Still, he wrote, “I do not think Allen and Bernie met at that time. That they might have met at a NYC fundraiser years later — in 1992 he was running for his second term in the US Congress — could certainly be possible.”
In a telephone interview, Gutman said he himself spent memorable time at the university talking with Ginsberg about poetry during the 1986 visit. Gutman didn’t attend the bookstore reading but heard that the poet wrote the poem (with 14 lines, it is an informal sonnet) “quickly,” and immediately read it to an audience. Did Sanders ever see it? Gutman didn’t know, but said Bernie Sanders generally doesn’t read poetry: “He reads biography, history, novels — not poetry.”
Based on his observations of Ginsberg and Sanders, though, he says they share a lot.
“Ginsberg was writing in a way that a lot of people were not writing, and he had to believe in his own vision and his own voice,” he said. “I think Bernie has that. He understands that the test of what one says is not the political pundits and the political base — not what the critics and professors said, in Ginsberg’s case — but whether one speaks one’s own way and in a language that reaches people.”
Recently, Grove Press published “Wait Till I’m Dead,” a new gathering of Ginsberg’s uncollected poems. It doesn’t include “Burlington Snow.” Bill Morgan, a Ginsberg biographer and archivist of his papers, edited the volume and says the poem “came too late,” explaining that “Grove had the (finished) book for about a year.” Morgan, who lives in Vermont and “would vote for Sanders for anything,” says he believes the poem “wasn’t strong enough” to make it into the book.
Morgan worries that the poem’s visibility could hurt Sanders, though he said that isn’t why it got left out. “I worry that people will see that line — ‘It doesn’t belong to me anymore’ — and will read that to mean, ‘I have to give up something,’ the second car or something, that Bernie wants to take their possessions away.”
Eliot Katz believes that the way Ginsberg animates socialism as a form of sharing in “Burlington Snow” could have a positive effect. “I think it can help educate younger voters that democratic socialism, as Sanders practices it, is a form of inclusiveness, of expanding democratic rights, not taking them away, which would be the view of an older generation raised in the Cold War. Everything in the poem is shared — even the environment, something Sanders talks about a lot — and that message can only be helpful.”
Allan M. Jalon won two 2015 Simon Rockower Awards for his Forward feature stories, “My Opa’s Story of World War One’s Other Fight” and “A New Jersey Tale of Two Alfred Doblins.”
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Pro-Israel Democrats battle to take on vulnerable Republican Rep. Mike Lawler
(New York Jewish Week) — Voters in New York’s Hudson Valley on Tuesday are choosing a Democrat to challenge the staunchly pro-Israel Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in a heavily Jewish swing district.
Two candidates have emerged as frontrunners in the Democratic primary in New York’s 17th Congressional District, a suburb of New York City that includes about 30,000 Orthodox Jews.
Cait Conley, a military veteran and former national security adviser, leads by double digits in polls this month and prediction markets over Beth Davidson, a member of the Rockland County Legislature who has highlighted her Jewish identity. A poll from Tavern Research last week found that 28% of voters were still undecided as the election approached.
Both are appealing to residents anxious about the cost of living, housing, healthcare and foreign conflicts. The winner will also aim to claw back moderate voters who supported Lawler, one of the most vocally pro-Israel members of Congress and a representative who has forged close ties with Orthodox Jewish voters.
Davidson and Conley have both said they support the United States alliance with Israel while opposing actions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. During a candidate forum in April, they distanced themselves from Democratic efforts in the Senate to block certain military sales to Israel.
Polling far behind Conley and Davidson is Effie Phillips-Staley, a progressive who says Israel is an apartheid state that has committed genocide in Gaza.
Conley and Davidson say they are marrying pro-Israel views with a liberal agenda, including fighting President Donald Trump. Davidson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she wants to create a political home for “Jews that have felt lost in the Democratic party.” She previously served on the board of her White Plains synagogue, Beth Am Shalom, and has touted Jewish values as driving her public service, including tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and welcoming the stranger.
Conley has presented her military experience as an advantage. A former national security adviser in the Biden administration, she has said that she supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and views Israel as a critical national security ally.
The winner will face off with Lawler, who has become so closely identified with the district’s Jewish community that he was recently attacked in comments by Sen. Rand Paul’s son, William Paul, who accused the lawmaker of being one of “you people,” although Lawler is not Jewish.
Often working with Democrats, Lawler has proposed a spate of legislation aimed at supporting Israel since he entered Congress in 2023. He co-sponsored the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, a move championed by major Jewish groups and criticized by progressives for classifying some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic. The bill passed in the House in 2024 but stalled in the Senate amid free speech concerns and was reintroduced in the House last year.
Lawler also introduced in 2024 the bipartisan Stand with Israel Act, which seeks to halt funding for United Nations agencies that “expel, downgrade, suspend, or otherwise restrict the participation of the State of Israel.” His bipartisan 2025 Bunker Buster Act seeks to equip Israel with massive bombs to target Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
This year, Lawler has partnered with Democrats on two new measures that he says will combat antisemitism. The Jewish American Security Act introduced this month proposes expanding federal security support for Jewish institutions, and a House resolution from April condemns leftist streamer Hasan Piker and far-right podcaster Candace Owens for “antisemitic hate-filled rhetoric and content.”
Phillips-Staley represents the rising progressive wing of the Democratic party that is sharply critical of Israel, differentiating herself from Lawler as well as Conley and Davidson. Phillips-Staley has said that her views solidified after she traveled to Israel and the West Bank in February. She was criticized by some Democratic officials for doing an interview with Piker.
She told JTA in March that many Jewish residents supported her belief that Israel has committed genocide and the United States should sever military aid.
“I get the most encouragement, from lots of people, but a lot of encouragement from Jews who really challenged me, especially in the beginning, to be brave and say it like it is,” said Philips-Staley.
Republicans are suspected of jumping into the late stage of the race by funding a shadowy new group called Progressive Champions PAC, which mirrors GOP efforts to influence other Democratic primaries nationwide. Davidson publicly disavowed the PAC, which has spent $1.5 million on ads attacking Conley for her contract work for an AI company that works with the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Cook Political Report.
The primary winner will quickly rocket to national prominence in the general election, as Lawler’s seat is considered one of the most likely to flip in November. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district, which former presidential candidate Kamala Harris won by less than one percentage point in 2024.
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Primary battle between rabbi and Jewish lawyer is a referendum on Mamdani and buffer zones
(New York Jewish Week) — A primary race on New York’s Upper West Side for a state legislative battle pits a rabbi against a Jewish lawyer in a referendum on where Jews stand on Mayor Zohran Mamdani and on the right to protest outside houses of worship.
Stephanie Ruskay would be the first female rabbi elected to state office in U.S. history. Her opponent is the Mamdani-endorsed Eli Northrup, a public defender and the grandson of a Jewish civil rights lawyer who worked on Supreme Court cases to combat antisemitism and racial segregation in the 1950s.
The hotly contested Democratic primary is for the State Assembly’s District 69, which covers much of the Upper West Side and all of Morningside Heights, including the Columbia University campus roiled in 2024 by pro-Palestinian protests over Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Endorsements tell a story of two New York establishments vying over prime legislative real estate: Mamdani’s Israel-critical progressives facing off against the city’s storied Jewish liberals.
Along with Mamdani’s blessing, Northrup has won prized endorsements from left-wing icons who ran now legendary insurgent campaigns: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose energetic presidential primary run in 2016 helped doom Hillary Clinton’s presidential run; and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose ouster of top Democrat Joseph Crowley in a 2018 primary paved the way for the youthful congressional “Squad.” Mamdani has roiled this election season with endorsements of democratic socialists challenging incumbent congressional Democrats.
Ruskay has been endorsed by leading Jews in New York politics, such as City Council Speaker Julie Menin, City Comptroller Mark Levine, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal and former Borough President Ruth Messinger. She also has the backing of ActJew, a nonprofit focused on combating antisemitism, and the New York Solidarity Network, a pro-Israel group.
Ruskay and Northrup, who both identify as progressives, are battling in a neighborhood where nearly one-third of households are Jewish. The Assembly seat opened in the fall when current Assembly member Micah Lasher, who is also Jewish, decided to run for Congress.
The district overwhelmingly supported Mamdani in the 2025 mayoral race, when his sharp criticism of Israel broke with the city’s Democratic establishment and fomented ongoing tensions with segments of the Jewish community.
Northrup is a full-throated supporter of the mayor who volunteered for his campaign. Ruskay has voiced more tepid views on Mamdani, acknowledging that many Jewish New Yorkers disagreed with his views about Israel.
“When we agree, I’ll be very excited to work together, and when we don’t agree or when I know that I represent people who have a very different perspective from what’s happening, then my job is to bring that into the room,” Ruskay told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in December.
Ruskay joined New York’s annual Israel Day Parade in May, which Mamdani skipped. She said on X that she was “proud” to attend the gathering, which she described as a reminder of “the deep bonds between New York’s Jewish community and Israel, and of the strength, resilience, and vibrancy of Jewish life.”
Northrup has resisted the long tradition among Jewish Democrats of identifying as a Zionist. “I don’t know that it’s serving us to be categorizing people as Zionist or anti-Zionist,” he told JTA last month. “I certainly don’t see myself in those terms.”
Both candidates have cited their faith and Jewish values as driving their politics. They agree on building more affordable housing, filling the district’s many vacant storefronts, supporting unions and enforcing labor laws. Both have also voiced their commitment to fighting President Donald Trump and his crackdown on immigration.
One of their rare areas of disagreement is the fight over “buffer zones” to insulate synagogues from protests, a flashpoint in New York politics. The city and state both recently passed legislation that restricts demonstrations outside houses of worship. Some Jewish leaders and lawmakers championed the measures in the aftermath of a string of pro-Palestinian rallies outside synagogues, which were hosting events that promoted migration to Israel and real estate sales in Israel and the West Bank.
Ruskay supports the buffer zones. She has argued they are necessary to protect Jews from intimidation, saying during a candidate forum in May, “In the world as we wish it was, I don’t think that you should have [to] have a buffer zone. But in the world that we actually live in right now, I think that we do need one.”
Northrup, meanwhile, said in the forum that outlawing protest within a certain distance of an institution “wouldn’t pass constitutional muster,” citing Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. He told JTA that buffer zones were more symbolic than effective in addressing rising antisemitism, and that he instead supported multifaith education and building alliances across communities.
Various civil rights groups and Jewish progressives, such as Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, have said that buffer zone laws infringe on free speech and assembly. JFREJ has endorsed Northrup.
Northrup’s skepticism of the laws aligns with Mamdani’s views. The mayor resisted signing the City Council’s buffer zone bill pertaining to houses of worship, though it became law with a veto-proof majority, and he vetoed a separate bill implementing buffer zones around schools.
Ruskay has received $25,000 from the American Centerpoint PAC, which was formed on June 11, according to City and State. The PAC’s sole contributor was Adeena Rosen, a key figure in the Solidarity PAC that boosted pro-Israel candidates in 2024 state races.
In a race lacking publicly available polls, fundraising is a significant indicator. The candidates were neck-and-neck in fundraising on Election Day, with Ruskay gathering $436,381 and Northrup raising $443,522, according to Transparency USA.
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DOJ investigates coffee shop that banned Rep. Goldman as his support for Israel threatens to topple his reelection bid
(New York Jewish Week) — The Justice Department is investigating a Brooklyn coffee shop that banned Rep. Dan Goldman over his support for Israel, as tensions over the Middle East fuel a rival’s surging bid to unseat him in Tuesday’s New York Democratic primary.
Poetica Coffee, a local chain, posted a photo of Goldman at its Williamsburg branch on Instagram with a caption saying that it did not serve “racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers or anyone in between.”
Poetica added that Goldman would have been turned away if the staff had immediately recognized him. The shop said it had refunded Goldman his money, which was “probably coming from AIPAC.”
Goldman’s support for Israel has been at the center of his opponent Brad Lander’s campaign, which is much more critical of Israel. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose own broadsides against Israel have roiled segments of the city’s large Jewish population, has endorsed Lander. Goldman and Lander are competing over New York’s 10th Congressional District, one of the most progressive and Jewish districts in the United States.
Poetica’s post prompted a swift backlash from Jewish leaders and an avalanche of negative reviews on Yelp, along with death threats shared by the coffee shop, before its Instagram account was deactivated.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, announced on Monday that her office had opened an investigation into the coffee shop’s “denial of service taunts.”
“Federal law prohibits public accommodations such as coffee shops from discriminating against patrons based on their race, religion, or national origin,” Dhillon said on X.
Dhillon has led investigations of universities that the Trump administration says have facilitated antisemitism by not preventing pro-Palestinian protests. Civil liberties groups say the probes impinge on campus speech freedoms.
Goldman has previously criticized the Justice Department’s use of power, accusing the Trump administration last year of “weaponizing” the department to prosecute the president’s political opposition.
Goldman was not enthusiastic about this Justice Department probe, either.
“I would rather they spend their time and resources investigating antisemitism against people who do not have a platform that I do, who are not elected officials, who do not — in some ways — ask for this,” he told CNN. “I mean, I don’t ask for the antisemitism, but I’m a public figure and I can accept the criticism.”
Before Poetica’s account was deleted, Goldman replied in a comment that a barista had allowed his 7-year-old daughter to use the bathroom even though they had not purchased anything. “I made sure to buy a coffee in return for her kindness,” he said. “I hope you at least make sure she gets the tip that she deserved.”
Lander defended Goldman in a statement. “There are plenty of ways to lobby elected officials and express outrage at the votes they’ve taken without turning coffee shops into places people don’t feel welcome,” he said. “I’m glad Poetica took down their post, and I thought Rep. Goldman’s reply was extremely gracious.”
Mamdani did not respond to a request for comment on the incident.
The race on Tuesday is likely to be one of the toughest of Goldman’s career, with the latest poll from Emerson College showing him trailing Lander by 34 percentage points.
Lander, the former city comptroller, is a progressive who has repeatedly criticized Israel and Goldman’s ties to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby. Goldman has been endorsed by AIPAC, though he has not accepted direct AIPAC funding in his reelection campaign. Goldman has consistently voted for military aid packages to Israel, while Lander supports a blanket ban on military aid, including for Israel’s Iron Dome defense system.
The two Jewish Democrats agree on many other issues, such as fighting President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration. Before running for Congress, Goldman, as a lawyer, was the lead counsel in the 2019 successful U.S. House of Representatives impeachment of Trump. The Senate acquitted Trump.
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