Bernie Sanders Progressive Movement Names Board Members
Identity politics? Bernie Sanders has some thoughts. Image by Getty Images
By Ron Kampeas August 31, 2016
WASHINGTON — A prominent Jewish union leader and one of Bernie Sanders’ oldest friends and advisers are on the board of a movement launched by Sanders to drive the Democratic Party toward more progressive values.
Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont and the first Jewish candidate to win major party nominating contests, launched “Our Revolution” last week after conceding the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton last month.
Larry Cohen, who will be chairman of the 11-person board, according to a release sent to reporters on Monday, was until recently the president of the Communication Workers of America. Cohen also has appeared at a Jewish Labor Committee event.
Huck Gutman, an English professor at the University of Vermont, was for a period Sanders’ chief of staff in his Senate office. He and another Jewish professor at the university, Richard Sugarman, are Sanders’ closest friends in his home state. Gutman has written about the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
Also on the board is Jim Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute and a Sanders appointee to the committee that drafted this year’s Democratic Party platform. Zogby led an unsuccessful effort to include criticism of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in the platform.
“Our Revolution” will mobilize “progressives across the country to transform American politics,” the release said.
Also included on the board are leaders from the African-American, Native American and Latino communities, as well as Shailene Woodley, an actor and an environmental activist.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
