He didn’t know much about the history until he appeared on the PBS show ‘Finding Your Roots,’ hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday addressed perhaps the ugliest moment so far in his campaign for the presidency: a Nazi flag displayed Thursday at his rally in Phoenix.
Speaking to reporters ahead of another rally, Sanders said it was “beyond disgusting” that someone would display “the most detestable symbol in modern history.”
Given what Sanders (I-Vt.) has learned in recent years about his family’s Holocaust history, the event was probably deeply painful.
Sanders grew up in Brooklyn, a son of Jewish immigrants. His father, Elias, emigrated from Poland in 1921 at 17 to “escape the poverty and widespread antisemitism of his home country,” as Sanders recounted last year in an essay for the magazine Jewish Currents.
Like other immigrants who left Europe before the rise of Adolf Hitler, Sanders’s father wasn’t especially loquacious when it came to details about his struggles back home.
