Larry King, Bernie Sanders, Fran Lebowitz. The Biden era begins, weirdly, w/ungentrified unreconstructed old school New York Jewishness schlumping back onto center stage & to grab the zeitgeist w/mittened hands.

Despite differences in age & avocation, King & Bernie & Fran are all variations on a theme: the New York Jew who can/will never be assimilated, who sticks out like a sore thumb & on some fundamental level just ain't having it

Said my piece in this article but in short: King was a vaguely disreputable old weirdo who by rights should have been kibbitzing in a cafeteria, not quizzing world leaders in primetime. Fact that he commandeered a major cultural pulpit is bizarre/awesome https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/t-magazine/larry-king-internet-afterlife.html

Bernie meme is obv hilarious as a sight-gag. But IMO it also speaks to the psychic whiplash of the inauguration: the jarring segue from Trumpian fascism to an orgy of patriotic pieties, complete w/symbolic "bipartisan" rapprochement—those toads McConnell & Pence on the dais etc.

Bernie in his mittens & mask & fashion-backwards parka is the bullshit-allergic refusenik, a lovable (& to others, I guess, loathsome) Jewish type we all know from pop culture & some of us know from the family Seder table.

One other thing: all three are awesome fashion plates. Obvs Lebowitz self-consciously so, w/her Saville Row suit jackets & cowboy boots. But then you have King, The Last Suspender Man, & now, justice prevailing at last, Sanders enshrined as the God of rumpled anti-chic