My opinion was that Bernie was wanting to get away from a minority alright, the Jews.

There were over 2.5 million of them in New York in the mid 50s. He married Deborah Shiling in 1964, the daughter of the head of surgery at Mt Sinai, another Jewish girl. She was probably another Jew that wanted to break free of the mold. And they moved into the house together. Maybe the money came from her parents. They divorced after 18 months. She still lives in Vermont and is very much the Jewish Vermont organic Birkenstock liberal. I imagine Bernie was sort of Jewish beta, sort of small and short, and he sexually bored the crap out of Debbie. In many pics, Bernie looks like a Woody Allen Nebbish guy during that period. One account says they never really stayed at the “sugar shack” much but they “traveled through Europe as the Vietnam war was heating up.” Again, the money for that must have come from the wife’s family. Maybe they were sort of down on Bernie’s prospects and talked a lot of crap about him to their daughter. By 1968, it was done and over and she had a new guy and she “bought out Bernie’s share of the property”.

I would say Sanders is very much like a character from a Philip Roth novel, one of the Jews that is a little annoyed with being Jewish, that wants to be like everybody else, and went all 60s, rejecting standard Jewish American life of being a dentist, marrying a nice Jewish girl, moving to Great Neck. That was the motivation for so many Jews to have embraced Socialism, to rip down the prevailing power structure so they could “be a man on the street and a Jew in the home.” Sort of self-loathing Jew.