Jewish presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Sunday hit back at a TV host who asked him if we was intentionally downplaying his Judaism on the campaign trail.

Mr Sanders told CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper that he was “very proud of being Jewish”.

He said: "I am very proud to be Jewish and being Jewish is so much of what I am. Look, my father's family was wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust. I know about what crazy, radical and extremist politics mean.

“I learned that lesson as a tiny child when my mother would take me shopping and we would saw people working in stores with number so on their arms because they were in Hitler's concentration camps. I am very proud of being Jewish, it is an essential part of who I am as a human being."

Mr Sanders has previously been criticised for hiding his Jewish roots, for example when he described his parents as “Polish immigrants”. However, he did say in an interview in October last year that growing up in a Jewish family instilled in him the idea that politics mattered.