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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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Is AIPAC a ‘monster’ that decides Congressional races? The data shows otherwise
At a rally for progressive candidates last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called AIPAC “monsters.” The pro-Israel lobby, he told the crowd, uses “millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another.”
This is not an insulated idea. Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee, was proud to stress that he was a candidate AIPAC would never endorse starting with one of his very first online ads.
On the left — and, more quietly, the right — versions of the “monster” narrative are spreading, suggesting that AIPAC is an electoral force with bottomless pockets that decides who serves in Congress.
The truth is quite different. To find it, I pulled both primary and general election outcomes for every Congressional candidate that AIPAC’s traditional PAC backed in 2022 and 2024 — 788 candidates across the two cycles — from the Federal Electoral Commission. I ran the same exercise for 17 peer single-issue PACs, including the NRA and Planned Parenthood.
The data shows that while AIPAC has an impressive operation, its electoral results do not outperform those of any other major single-issue lobby. AIPAC itself cites a 95% win rate on endorsed candidates as evidence of its political muscle, but that high level of success is partially attributable to the fact that, according to my sample, some 86% percent of AIPAC’s endorsements go to sitting members of Congress. And incumbents win about 95% of general elections — regardless of who funds them.
What’s more remarkable than the number of elections AIPAC wins is how often it gets credit or blame — depending on your politics — for deciding races.
When former Rep. Cori Bush lost her 2024 primary against an AIPAC-backed challenger, AIPAC was widely cited as influencing the race — even though even though Bush spent much of 2024 fighting a federal investigation into her campaign-fund spending, and lost to Wesley Bell, a former St. Louis County prosecutor with the kind of district-wide name recognition no PAC can buy. That same year, Rep. Summer Lee, who had been at least as outspoken on Israel’s conduct in Gaza as Bush, beat AIPAC’s preferred candidate in the Pittsburgh primary by more than 20 points.
Somehow, the narrative that AIPAC rather than voters decides Congressional races wasn’t overturned by Lee’s win. It’s almost like people who want to believe that Jews control politics in the United States have a bias toward seeing instances that on the surface may appear to confirm that belief — and toward ignoring those that contest it.
When the group’s main PAC supported candidates who were not yet sitting members of Congress, their picks won about 91% of primaries. This sounds high, indeed, but other major lobbies do even better. For instance, lobbies including the NRA, Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood all boast success rates over the same period of more than 95%.
AIPAC is, in this context, indistinguishable in terms of its win rate than all other lobbies.
Perhaps an even more important test is tight races — primaries decided by 10 percentage points or fewer. Here, AIPAC wins about 79% of the time. This is comparable to the win rate of all other lobbies I saw, but not by far the largest. For instance, the NRA’s win rate in these tight races is 84%, the Sierra Club 88%, and Planned Parenthood 83%.
So it is true that AIPAC plays a real role in American politics. What gets missed amid the excess scrutiny on AIPAC: that role is, in effect, no different from that of any other lobby. In fact, AIPAC is in practice often slightly less effective than many of its peers.
That truth helps make clear how dangerous the disproportionate attention AIPAC receives from the media, and from candidates opposed to its priorities, can be. To single out a well-funded lobby with many Jewish members, and to cast it as the secret hand behind every contested race, isn’t just wrong on the data. It rhymes with the oldest antisemitic trope there is: that Jews quietly run the world.
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Feds open antisemitism investigation into National Education Association
(JTA) — The Trump administration is launching an antisemitism investigation into the National Education Association, the influential public school teachers union, over purported employment discrimination.
The probe is based on allegations that Jewish members of the NEA were harassed and “physically intimidated” during the organization’s 2025 annual convention, including a reported case of NEA members appearing to cheer at mention of the 2005 attack on a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.
The complaint, based on the accounts of several Jewish NEA members, also spotlighted recent controversies, such as materials from the union that labeled a map of the state of Israel as “Palestine” for Indigenous People’s Day and a handbook that failed to identify Jews as the primary victims of the Holocaust. They further alleged that the union’s diversity hiring guidelines harmed its Jewish members.
The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a legal group that has brought several other such antisemitism cases to the Trump administration, filed the complaint that triggered the NEA investigation. The case is being handled through the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose authority to investigate employment discrimination also extends to union membership.
“We really appreciate the EEOC’s decision to open this investigation,” Marci Miller, director of legal investigations at the Brandeis Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In a statement to JTA, the NEA said, “We take concerns like this seriously and are reviewing the matter through our established processes.” The union added that it “does not tolerate antisemitism in any form and is committed to ensuring that all members and students, including Jewish members and students, can work and learn in a safe and welcoming environment.”
The NEA has previously said its map labeled “Palestine” “does not meet our standards,” and updated its Holocaust handbook in response to the pushback.
Jews in public school education have expressed concern about tensions over the last few years. In 2021, many Jewish groups rallied against NEA proposals to oppose Israel; the measures did not pass. At its 2025 convention, the NEA had voted to boycott the Anti-Defamation League, though its executive committee rejected the vote following pushback from Jewish groups.
The GOP-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce is also investigating the union over antisemitism, citing several of the same instances later outlined in the Brandeis Center complaint.
The EEOC’s NEA case is part of an expansion of the Trump administration’s antisemitism investigations beyond college and K-12 campuses. Last week the U.S. Health and Human Services Department opened its own probe into the American Psychological Association, also based on a Brandeis Center complaint.
In addition to alleged harassment of Jewish members at the convention, Miller said the center’s NEA complaint also involved diversity-based hiring practices at the union: “Jewish members in particular have been harmed by this policy because they have not been recognized as a racial or ethnic group worth counting for purposes of this policy.”
The EEOC has tackled antisemitism cases against other institutions, but its role in such investigations is controversial. The agency’s chair, Andrea Lucas, is currently demanding that the University of Pennsylvania turn over a list of Jews affiliated with the university as part of the commission’s antisemitism investigation into the Ivy League school. Several Jewish groups, as well as the university itself, have argued that such a demand will make Jews less safe.
Some Jewish groups have alleged that the administration has used antisemitism allegations as a pretext to undermine institutions it considers ideologically unfriendly.
One of Lucas’s defenders in the Jewish community is Kenneth Marcus, the Brandeis Center’s founder. Lucas herself is not Jewish but recently defended her legal strategy to Jewish leaders at a campus antisemitism conference.
Asked about this, Miller said the Brandeis Center was providing “dozens” of Jewish witnesses to the EEOC for consensual interviews.
“There’s no demand for anybody else,” she said. “We have plenty of information.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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New York primary tests Mamdani’s pull and Israel as a campaign issue
New York City Democratic voters are going to the polls today in congressional primaries that are doubling as a referendum on U.S.-Israel relations, as candidates allied with Mayor Zohran Mamdani test whether his brand of democratic socialism and criticism of hardline pro-Israel money in politics will translate into broader electoral success.
Mamdani has endorsed Columbia Gaza war encampment leader Darializa Avila-Chevalier and former City Comptroller Brad Lander in challenging sitting members of Congress, and Assemblymember Claire Valdez for an open seat.
All have campaigned using the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank, and Mamdani himself has singled out Israel and its champions as adversaries.
At a Brooklyn campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.”
The statement drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some of Mamdani’s supporters. And it comes as Democratic infighting over Israel nationally has intensified, with candidates across the political spectrum increasingly treating support from AIPAC as politically toxic.
All three of the Mamdani-endorsed congressional candidates have made Israel or AIPAC a central part of their campaigns, though each in different ways. AIPAC backs candidates aligned with continued U.S. support for Israel military aid and has spent upwards of $38 million nationally this election cycle, a Politico analysis found — though exact AIPAC contributions are difficult to track due to its use of shell PACs and tactic of funneling money directly to campaigns.
In the 10th Congressional District in lower Manhattan and western Brooklyn, Lander is challenging incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman, zeroing in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to AIPAC. Lander opted not to take part in New York City’s annual Israel Parade, while Goldman used his participation to appeal to Jewish voters.
Earlier this month, Israel and Gaza consumed roughly 15 minutes of a one-hour debate between the candidates. Goldman expressed a desire to move on, arguing that “Israel is not the most important issue in this district,” while Lander countered that Gaza represents “one of the significant moral and humanity challenges of our time.”
Goldman has defended his support for Israel as consistent with his values. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in February that there is “an undercurrent of antisemitism in the degree to which AIPAC seems to be vilified.”
The heat boiled over on Sunday when a Brooklyn coffee bar chain, Poetica Coffee, declared on social media after Goldman and his young daughter stopped by that it would have turned Goldman away from the cafe had staff known who he was, posting to Instagram that they don’t serve “genocide enablers.”
Next to a picture of Goldman taken outside the shop after he had ordered a coffee, and another image showing $9.82 refunded, the post added: “Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice? Or are you still having a hard time telling the difference?” (The account has since been disabled.)
Lander, who identifies as a liberal Zionist, had acknowledged the potential for anti-Israel passions in the race to get out of hand — telling an interviewer that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
Goldman has not commented on the incident, other than to reply on Instagram: “The barista could not have been nicer to my 7-yr-old daughter and me.” Lander criticized the coffee shop’s response, telling the Forward, “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.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Avila Chevalier attended a rally held in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023 widely condemned for condoning Hamas’ violence. She has said she attended in anticipation of an Israeli military response, citing “a pattern in which whenever there is an incident, the state of Israel engages in a response that is often disproportionate and creates a greater loss of life.”
And she told the New York Editorial Board last week that Zionism “is an ideology that is looking to create a political system where one group of people has more standing before the law than another group of people.”
She faces AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in NY-13, which covers Upper Manhattan and portions of the Bronx.
“To know that my opponent takes AIPAC money is something that, for a lot of people, is just disqualifying. It is [about] Palestine at the heart of it, but it’s also what it says about someone’s inability to stand up against something that is so blatantly horrific, someone who refuses to name a genocide,” Avila Chevalier told the Nation. “Can you trust someone who won’t even say that word to fight for you on the most basic of issues?”
Addressing AIPAC’s support for him in a primary debate, Espaillat said “no one dictates or tells me how to vote, my constituents do that.”
Meanwhile, in NY-7, which includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens, Valdez has sought to make Israel and AIPAC a campaign issue in a race where AIPAC is not involved and the candidates have broad agreement on Gaza.
Valdez faces Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, whom she has critiqued for not using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions until after he announced his candidacy. She also accused Reynoso of benefiting from secretive pro-Israel money, despite no evidence that AIPAC has supported his campaign.
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