Bernie: Too Close for Comfort

Bernie Sanders simply cannot win, Vivian Gornick told me emphatically over the phone. Gornick, the acclaimed feminist writer and critic, grew up in the working-class Jewish Bronx of the 1940s and ’50s, enmeshed in her family’s Communist Party milieu. She speaks with the kind of old New York accent that is becoming increasingly rare; she is famously frank in conversation. Asked about Sanders, she did not mince words: “He’s old and he’s Jewish and he rants and he raves.” In short, he’s unelectable.