Bernie Sanders — politician with roots in the Russian Empire
Bernard Sanders was born in Brooklyn on 8 September 1941, the younger of two sons of Elias Sanders, a paint salesman, and Dorothy Sanders, née Glassberg. The family lived in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment at East 26th Street and Kings Highway.
His father's side came from Austrian Galicia, not from the Russian Empire. Elias Sanders was born in 1904 in Słopnice, then in the Austro-Hungarian crown land of Galicia and now in Poland, and emigrated to the United States in 1921, at seventeen. Many of the relatives he left behind were killed in the Holocaust.
The connection with the Russian Empire runs through his mother. Dorothy Glassberg was born in New York City in 1912 to Jewish immigrant parents from Radzyń in Poland and from Białystok, which was then in the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire, according to the family account published by the Sanders Institute. She died in 1960, at forty-six, shortly after her younger son finished high school; Elias died two years later.
Sanders attended James Madison High School, spent a year at Brooklyn College and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964 with a degree in political science. As a student he took part in civil-rights protests in Chicago, and in 1963 spent several months as a volunteer at Kibbutz Sha'ar HaAmakim in Israel. In 1968 he moved to Vermont. He ran for office with the Liberty Union Party in the early 1970s and in 1981 was elected Mayor of Burlington, serving four terms until 1989.
He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for Vermont's single seat in 1990 and served there from 1991 to 2007, then won election to the Senate in 2006. He has sat in Congress as an independent, the longest-serving in its history, while caucusing with the Democrats. He chaired the Senate Budget Committee from 2021 to 2023 and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee from 2023 to 2025, and sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. He married Jane O'Meara Driscoll in 1988; his son, Levi, was born in 1969. His elder brother, Larry, settled in England and was active in British politics.
"Maternal grandparents from Białystok and Radzyń to New York; father from Słopnice (Austrian Galicia) to New York, 1921"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Białystok and Radzyń (Poland)
His mother's parents were Jewish immigrants from Radzyń in Poland and Białystok, then in the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father's family came from Słopnice in Austrian Galicia.
His mother, Dorothy Glassberg, was born in New York in 1912 to Jewish immigrant parents from Radzyń in Poland and Białystok, then in the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father, Elias Sanders, came from Słopnice in Austrian Galicia.
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Białystok and Radzyń (Poland). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
""My father came to this country from Poland at the age of seventeen without a nickel in his pocket.""