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“Don’t know much about history” – the first line of the classic 1960 song “Wonderful World,” composed by Lou Adler and Herb Alpert and recorded by the great Sam Cooke – applies perfectly to Senator Sanders, his media biographers, and the thousands of suburban-reared young Jews who have moved to Brooklyn in recent years.
Sanders has the dubious distinction, shared by a number of other Jewish males who came of age in New York City in the 1950s or 1960s, of having an inflated sense of his intellectual and athletic abilities.
By contrast, Federal Reserve Chairperson Janet Yellen, who graduated from Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton High School in 1963, resembles the truly accomplished Brooklynites from the World War I, World War II, and Korean War generations. With a Ph.D. in economics from Yale and a husband, George Akerlof, who won the Nobel in economics, Yellen has an infinitely more sophisticated grasp of the world economy than Sanders, the socialist luftmensch who has spent most of his adult life on the government dole as a politician.
Like an old-time Coney Island carnival barker, Sanders travels the country and beguiles many Generation Xers and Millennials with pie-in-the-sky promises of free college tuition and a harsh comeuppance for the nation’s wealthiest one-percenters.
Perhaps Bernie should schedule a one-on-one economics debate, at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who grew up in Brownsville and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1971. Sanders and Blankfein, who swam for his high school team, could donate the proceeds to the PSAL, which would be greatly appreciated by the current generation of scholastic athletes.
