Bernie Sanders Progressive Movement Names Board Members
Identity politics? Bernie Sanders has some thoughts. Image by Getty Images
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.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
