In 2016 Bernie Sanders became the first Jewish American to win a major party presidential primary election (New Hampshire). If he wins the Democratic presidential nomination next year, he will be the first Jew in US history to do so. If he wins the general election — well, you get the idea.

Sanders prefers to run on a message of universality, but his identity is impossible to ignore in the press, so it makes sense that he addressed the issue himself in a recent essay in Jewish Currents entitled “How to Fight Antisemitism.” The press reaction to the piece, however, has been just another example of how Sanders’s Jewishness gets weaponized against him. It’s not that mainstream attacks on Sanders are antisemitic, but rather that whether he is “too Jewish” or “not Jewish enough” are being used as cynical tools against him.

Sanders’s essay starts off by discussing last year’s Tree of Life massacre, the deadliest act of antisemitic terrorism in US history. Then, after reflecting on his experience with collective farming in Israel, Sanders invokes a discomfort some Jewish socialists have felt in left spaces — a sense that antisemitism is seen as separate from other oppressions, when it should be considered part of the white supremacy and racism the Left aims to defeat. As Jewish protesters point out the parallels between ICE’s concentration camps and Nazi roundups of Jews, and we watch Jewish anti-Trump activists form protective circles around their Muslim counterparts, Sanders’s call couldn’t be more timely.