On Tuesday, Bernie Sanders announced the hiring of Simone Zimmerman, an outspoken critic of Israeli policy and its prime minister, as his campaign’s national Jewish outreach coordinator. The appointment was met with near instantaneous condemnation by the American Jewish establishment. By Thursday, the Sanders campaign announced it was suspending Zimmerman to investigate an exceptionally critical Facebook post from March 2015 attributed to her that characterized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as sanctioning mass murder. “Fuck you, Bibi…” the post read.
Here’s more from the New York Times on the ideological divide that Zimmerman represents:
Ms. Zimmerman, who declined to comment, has been active in left-wing Jewish politics for years and came up in organizations such as J Street, but has also worked closely with Jewish synagogues in Los Angeles, and with young Jews on myriad trips to Israel. While the American Jewish establishment considers her and her allies radical, she and young Jewish activists argue that their disgust with the Netanyahu government’s policies is inching toward the mainstream.
The Washington Free Beacon dug up and published the original Facebook post.
