Anderson Cooper, moderating the March 2016 presidential debate, voiced the “disappointment” of Jewish leaders with Sanders’ keeping his Jewishness “in the background.” I’m no Jewish “leader,” but as a Jewish New Yorker, I find Cooper’s question to be a shame or shandeh, if you will.

But I also found it unintentionally amusing. Sanders couldn’t hide his Jewish identity if he tried. (See, for example, the way he removes Rs from the ends of words that end in R and adds them to words that don’t end in R so that terror becomes terra and idea becomes idear. Or the finger-wagging, which some have misdiagnosed as scolding sexism, even though it’s equal opportunity, is an example of what I like to call jewsticulating.)

Cooper wasn’t the only one questioning the integrity of Sanders’ Jewishness in 2016. An ultra-right-wing Israeli newspaper declared “Bernie Sanders is not a Jew.” And Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post warned, “If you are Jewish, don’t vote for Bernie Sanders.”