There’s less than a week until the election that will give Chicago its first new mayor in 22 years, and Rahm Emanuel is sitting pretty, leading in the polls by 30 points. But the winner on February 22 needs to score at least 50 percent of the vote, plus 1 vote, to avoid a run-off and another two more months of the shrimp-cocktail circuit. So, there’s campaigning to be done

At a mayoral forum on Valentine’s Day, the moderator asked all the candidates if they thought the mayor of Chicago needed to be a Boss, a word that conjures up visions of Old Chicago. Emanuel has positioned himself during the campaign as an anti-Boss, visiting hip online startups. I have yet to accompany him to an event at a meat-packing plant or a slaughterhouse.

This week, he visited Threadless, a company that makes T-shirts, lunchboxes, thermoses, and iPad cases with rainbow and heart designs and sells them over the Internet. In the lobby, there was a red beanbag chair and two vintage airstream campers. Cool music blared from speakers. No child laborers or illegals here; this was a hip, multicultural work force. The male staffers were geeky emo hipsters, the kind that break your heart and then hold your hand to say they’re sorry. The girls were pretty with long hair, the kind who believe style means layering vintage aprons over skinny jeans.

Only one brief eruption between the campaign and the press at Threadless suggested the gritty Back of the Yards neighborhood more than The Social Network: The press area had been set up in the back of the room, and a few reporters surrounded a short campaign staffer—almost all the staffers I’ve met are short—to protest. “It’s not like we’re going to rush him,” one reporter said, looming over Rahm’s munchkin, who stood her ground. The disgruntled scribes took it upon themselves to pick up their chairs and move them closer to the podium. “We staged a coup,” one said.

But in the end, as in the case of so many attempted worker coups in the stockyards, management triumphed. Emanuel instead did his question-and-answer session in the lobby, answering questions about the Rahm Tax (will save working families $200) and his role in the Blagojevich trial (none) while standing between the beanbag chair and the air trailer. Doing things his way, without being the Boss.

The Un-Rabbinical Master of Nine-Fingered Sign Language

“If elected, Emanuel would become Chicago’s first Jewish mayor. That’s a potent lure for the city’s Jewish voters, usually a reliable liberal swing constituency,” lamented Laura Washington in In These Times, as if identity politics alone explained why Jews are not voting for so-called progressive candidates in this race.

Sorry, but the reason the progressives are not an alternative is that they are not an alternative. On Sunday, at a forum with Cornel West, one of them, Carol Moseley Braun—the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate—made a joke invoking Hitler and Emanuel in the same sentence. (She later apologized, and Emanuel accepted.) The other progressive, Miguel del Valle, is widely considered too nice to be elected in Chicago.

Among conservatives, the consensus is that Emanuel has become a sage of our fathers. The septuagenarian Joseph Epstein, a former Northwestern University lecturer, in the Weekly Standard cast Emanuel as Maimonides, describing the candidate’s recent tolerance as “positively rabbinical,” and at the same time claiming that his being elected will prove that Jews can produce a candidate as mediocre as that of any other group. A few days earlier, the New Republic’s John Judis, who, like Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and David Brooks of the New York Times, had parachuted in to Chicago for a day, described Rahm as an “aging rabbinical student.”

These guys may be savvy political commentators, but they are not fashion gurus. Emanuel is way better dressed than the other candidates, not to mention the rabbis and rabbinical students with whom I’m acquainted. I have not seen him once rotate what is apparently an enormous collection of beautiful silk ties. He prefers tasteful, expensive, well-cut suits to faded jeans.

And Rahm is un-rabbinical in another way. In debates and forums, he lacks magnetism. His diction, which is not crisp, is chopped up by long pauses every two or three words, especially when he is presenting an agenda. A mayor. Is a person. Who will. Lead. And lay a vision out. And listen.

When Emanuel recites these haikus, his face often settles into a mask, like a Noh actor. His ramrod-straight posture adds to the robotic effect, which is rarely softened by the naughty wit or charisma that peeps out in unscripted appearances. (He never gets tired of teasing reporters.) And although Rahm moves his hands more than any other candidate—listing his position points on his nine fingers is a favorite—these gestures just add to his human-hand-puppet-like quality.

At the Threadless event, Emanuel made a finger-steeple while talking about cutting enormous chunks out of the city budget. At another, similar event, he made a big globe and then a small one with his bowed fingers while he talked about “growing the economy.”

But it wasn’t until last Wednesday, when I saw Rahm twice—once at a mayoral debate sponsored by the historical black weekly, the Chicago Defender, and then on a webcast of Chicago’s first-ever mayoral forum sponsored by gay-rights groups that had occurred earlier that evening—that the full complexity of his hand gestures and body language hit me.

First, some background: There has been a lot of self-congratulatory talk in the media here about how this is the first post-racial mayoral campaign in Chicago. The two events I watched on Wednesday evening told a more complex story.

Because of the storm, the Defender debate was rescheduled to conflict with the gay-rights groups’ forum, to the ire of forum’s sponsors. Rahm’s people assured me that he would attend both events and that he would arrive on time at the Defender debate, which started at the DuSable Museum in Hyde Park at 6:30. When I got to the museum, which is located on the westernmost edge of that neighborhood, signs for Carol Moseley Braun and William “Dock” Walls, a fringe candidate whose main experience is that he worked for former mayor Harold Washington, were stuck in huge piles of snow . A crowd of schoolchildren was ramming themselves into the building.

Inside, it was freezing. There was chaos. There was also a lot of time to sit around and chit-chat. A man sitting in front of me who had pinned the buttons of all the candidates to his lapel and wanted to be identified as John Q. Public asked about Emanuel: How did he make so much money? He was talking about the $18 million Emanuel earned in two years as an investment banker. “I would like to make that money,” he said.

At 6:30, the debate started. At 6:41, Gery Chico, another candidate, attacked Emanuel in absentia for threatening to take away city workers’ pensions. At 6:47, Rahm ducked through the curtain onto the stage. He began robotically talking about education. People in the audience began to boo, and Marion Brooks, the moderator, had to tell them to keep it down.

Emanuel was seated next to Dock Walls, who is his opposite in demeanor as well as politics. While Dock swiveled his body around when he answered questions as though his torso were connected to his legs by a spring, Rahm sat motionless, staring forward when he spoke. In contrast to Rahm’s minimalist diction, Walls made the most of every word. Rahm swiveled and cocked his head to look at his rival while keeping his body facing forward. This gave him an air of incredulity, as if he could not believe he was sitting there.

This was the first time I had seen all the candidates together, and Emanuel was the only one sitting with his legs crossed, which gave him a feline air. He made many of his trademark gestures—the steeple, the beach ball. But he also fidgeted. He stroked his chin. He looked at his tie. He formed his fingers and thumb into the shape of a gun.

The most contentious question of the evening came from the audience: “Are you willing to support reparations for descendants of United States slaves?

Rahm agreed with the other candidates that reparations were desirable. “I think we have to be honest and frank with ourselves,” he said. “We have a budget deficit that needs to be addressed. … Not only is the city facing a budget deficit, our schools are.” As he said the word city, he moved his hand from the audience to himself in a circular gesture as if to say that he was the city, and he at one with the audience.

The audience, some of whom held “I Heart Carol” posters in their laps, did not buy it. They began to hiss, boo, and heckle Rahm.

Later, when Patricia Van Pelt Watkins, another fringe candidate, attacked Emanuel, saying “this country was built on our backs” and talking about “doing right by the black community,” Rahm put his fingers to his lips. (Photographers captured this moment.)

When I got home that night, I watched the gay-rights groups’ forum on the web, to compare. There were about 200 people in the room. Clad in black, Tracy Baim, the publisher of the Windy City Times, a gay weekly, sat in a chair near the podium and read the rules.

“You will find the audience expectations set forth in the program; you will find the ground rules. Please review the expectations as failure to follow any of these rules may result in your being asked to leave.” She paused. “By the way, I’m reading these, I did not write them.” There was laughter, then more rules.

Then she welcomed the first candidate, Rahm Eman-u-el, as she pronounced it.

Rahm, wearing a fetching red tie, sprang to the podium.

“Those are incredible rules,” he said. “I could’ve used those in the White House.”

“Well, we know you set some strong rules there,” Baim replied.

“I think that’s a violation of rule three,” Emanuel joked, to laughter. “But I’ll let that go. For an extra moment on the podium.” More laughter.

And then there were some softball questions about gay rights.

There Are No Children Here

The following evening, I drove to see Emanuel in a televised forum sponsored by Fox TV and the Chicago Urban League at Kennedy-King College, in the blighted Englewood neighborhood. New Yorkers often ask me what is it like to live in Chicago, and I try to tell the truth: I say that it is more segregated than any other American city I know. That it is more violent. That these things have had an effect on my life in ways I can’t even begin to talk about. The New Yorkers have probably read about it all, but they don’t hear me. What they say instead is that they really like Chicago and they wish that they lived here. At Kennedy-King, cops swarmed the building, acting as doormen, sitting in their squad cars, watching.

The forum was uneventful. It was also sparsely attended, maybe because it started at 9:30 p.m. Rahm was again positioned next to Dock Walls, but because they were both standing behind podiums, there was not a lot of telling hand gestures and body language to see.

The other candidates took tired swipes at Emanuel, who this week racked up endorsements from the African American community and the gay community. The master of nine-fingered sign language took the high road.

After the forum, the reporters waited for Rahm to appear to for questions. But, we were told, he had left the building. He was probably on the highway in his black SUV, speeding out of that isolated and lonely TV studio in the ghetto into his ideal of the city, which probably does not and will not exist, no matter who is mayor. Chicago has a past: the city that works and the city with big shoulders. It is not clear what kind of future it will have, whether under Mayor Rahm or anyone else.

Next week: This is the other candidates’ last chance to make a dent and force a runoff; Emanuel either has 49 percent of the vote or 54 percent of the vote, depending on which poll you believe. Perhaps putting some blind faith in the number 50—the percentage of the vote he’ll need to win outright—Rahm has started a tour of 50 wards in 50 hours. Will it put him over the top?

The first week of early voting in Chicago was also the first week since December that Rahm Emanuel campaigned without the residency debate hanging over his head, after the Illinois Supreme Court validated his status on January 27. It was also Snowmageddon—the week that the city staggered under 20 inches of snow, which stranded 900 unhappy motorists on Lake Shore Drive.

Some journalists compared Emanuel’s clever and successful handling of the storm to that of Cory Booker, the Newark mayor who heroically dug his city out a few months ago. But I wonder if Snowmageddon was a game changer, as political people like to say, in a more profound way, too: Maybe the mayoral hopeful’s encounter with Bad Weather was like that of King Lear on the heath, where the king comes to understand his own puniness and mistakes by confronting the elements: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!”

Of course it would be ridiculous to conclude that Snowmageddon transformed Emanuel from his fish-sending, swearing, former bad-boy self into a sober, reflective leader. But this was also the week when Good Rahm announced himself.

Good Rahm had made fleeting appearances before the storm, sure. At the residency hearings, for example, he sat for 11 hours of interrogation without uttering a single cuss word. In a January 30 feature in Newsweek, Jonathan Alter wrote that Emanuel’s stoicism showed “that the macher (Yiddish for big shot) didn’t have everything wired.” (Alter grew up in Chicago, and his book The Promise reported a line that is classic in the annals of pre-Snowmageddon Rahm: “Take your fucking tampon out and tell me what you have to say,” he supposedly told a staffer.)

Emanuel’s last pre-Snowmageddon campaign event was held in a two-story warehouse in an industrial wasteland on the south side—the soon-to-be Chicago headquarters of Growing Power, a national organization devoted to producing organic food locally. A day after he waxed poetic about bicycles and greening the city, Emanuel delivered a summa on “ending food deserts” and talked passionately to Erika Allen, Growing Power’s Chicago director and the daughter of the MacArthur-genius-grant-winning founder Will Allen, about composting and worms. In another room, where a group of young girls were learning about beekeeping, he hugged a woman he met at the 95th Street L stop. “The warmest place in America is at an L stop,” he said.

But in front of the cameras, the TV anchors poked at Good Rahm in the hopes that Bad Rahm would appear.

Could he comment on candidate Carol Mosley Braun’s most recent public gaffe, in which she called another candidate a crackhead (and which made her more like Emanuel than the man who has recently been campaigning for Mayor of Chicago)?

Rahm said: “I am here to attack the problems of the city of Chicago, not the other candidates.”

Another question returned to Emanuel’s tax cuts, which Gery Chico, another candidate, in the first attack ad of the campaign, derides as the “Rahm Tax.”

Emanuel, who has promised to cut taxes for working families by taxing luxury services, has thus far declined to provide a complete list of items that he will levy, tossing off suggestions that conjure fat cats: private jets, tanning beds, exclusive clubs, and limos. In the warehouse, Emanuel conceded that he’d work on his list together with the legislature. (Post-Snowmageddon, he added Botox.)

Finally, the TV anchors asked about the charge that Rahm’s campaign was bullying Chico, whose attack ad said the “Rahm Tax” would also hit bowling alleys and barber shops. (Emanuel has denied this.)

Good Rahm declined to answer, although communications director Ben LaBolt has said that anyone harassing Chico doesn’t work for the campaign.

Later that evening, as the snow began to drown the city, I sat on my couch and watched The Good Wife, the CBS series set in Chicago, starring Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick, the titular wife. Wendy Scott Carr, the black candidate running for mayor against Alicia’s husband, Peter, suspects him of producing a racist poster smearing her daughter. It turns out that these posters are being produced not by Peter’s campaign but by his PAC. “I can’t control them,” says Eli Gold (Alan Cumming), Peter’s chief of staff—the Rahm character—adding that if Peter cuts ties with the PAC, the campaign will go bankrupt. But by the end of the episode, Peter does exactly that.

Moral of the episode: It’s easier to play Good Candidate when you’ve got others to play Bad.

Post-Snowmageddon, the campaign promoted Good Rahm, releasing pictures of him pushing a Chicago Police Department SUV out of a snowbank, which caused some reporters to grumble that the pictures were staged, since no one was invited to witness the spectacle in person.

Since Snowmageddon, Good Rahm has continued to promote his vision of Chicago as a green, clean, bike-riding, crime-free, gay-friendly, wind-powered, gender diverse, violence-free, charter-school-friendly city.

Even a dis from the New York Times couldn’t bring back Bad Rahm. On Thursday morning, at the first campaign event after the storm, at a homeless shelter on an unplowed street in the dilapidated Uptown neighborhood, a TV anchor asked Emanuel about the city’s handling of the closing of Lake Shore Drive. Emanuel said mildly that a review would be a good idea.

The anchor brought out his biggest artillery. “The New York Times headline said the city couldn’t handle it,” he said.

Emanuel rolled his eyes and expressed a sentiment he repeated more forcefully that evening to the crowd of well-dressed professionals at a fundraiser held at the Thomas McCormick Gallery in the West Loop: “Typical. Yeah, we have thumbs here, too.”

By Friday, Rahm had been endorsed by several unions, the Sierra Club, and the two major papers. But other unions took offense at statements he released in which he says he will shun patronage in city hiring.

In front of a Thomas McCormick Gallery audience, some of whom had paid $1,000 to eat shrimp and drink Merlot, the well-behaved mayoral hopeful marveled that the Chicago police department would have bought cars with two-wheel drive in the first place. Then, for one brief moment, Bad Rahm made his first appearance of the week.

“This is Chicago,” he said, gesturing at the window, where outside, the curb was piled high with snow. “Criminals have four-wheel drive.”

***

Next week: Emanuel will attend his first (and the first in Chicago) event to be sponsored by a coalition of gay-rights groups, and on the same night appear in a debate sponsored by the Chicago Defender, the historical black weekly. Meanwhile, Gery Chico has topped Carol Moseley Braun as number 2 in the race. Will Rahm will be able to grab the 50 percent of votes necessary to avoid a run-off?

The move could be seen as no big deal, given that things were running late, but it was symbolic, nonetheless—a perfect illustration of Gerstein’s role as the consummate behind-the-scenes adviser. In the 18 months since J Street launched, it has attracted an enormous amount of attention—including a long, generous New York Times Magazine profile, the Hope Diamond of publicity—most of which has focused on founder Jeremy Ben-Ami, who birthed the organization from a loose coalition of longtime Jewish peace activists and philanthropists. (Some of the spotlight has been shared with his core staff, including chief of staff Rachel Lerner, political director Daniel Kohl, campaigns director Isaac Luria, and the newest addition, Hadar Susskind, a political hand who also boasts IDF service.) But no small amount of the credit for J Street’s rapid ascent into the political consciousness of American Jewry belongs to Gerstein, a veteran of campaigns in both the U.S. and Israel who has spent more than a decade figuring out how to sell voters in both countries on peace.

Over the past two decades, Gerstein has stood, Zelig-like, in the wings of key political moments in Israeli, and Jewish, politics, starting with the iconic 1993 Rose Garden handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Two years later, he was in Tel Aviv at the rally where Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist, and he was close enough to hear the shots. In 1999, he acted as a translator for the American “dream team”—James Carville, Stanley Greenberg, and Bob Shrum—that orchestrated Ehud Barak’s victorious Labor campaign in Israel. But he is also a native Chicagoan, part of a generation of Democrats who grew up under Reagan but came of age with Clinton. His first campaign, as a new college graduate, was Carol Moseley-Braun’s historic 1992 race to become the first black woman in the Senate—winning the seat that would later be occupied by Barack Obama.

His chief role at J Street, according to Ben-Ami, has been to push the group to think of its core constituency—Jewish voters—as Democrats who care about Israel, rather than as “Israel voters” who tend to be Democrats. “The central idea that Jim brings to the table and continues to remind us of in every conversation is that the people whose voices dominate on Israel in the American Jewish community are not representative of most of the community,” Ben-Ami said. “In order to understand the real dynamics that affect politics in the American Jewish community, you’ve got to pull the lens back and not focus on Israel.” Which explains why J Street resembles, in many ways, a particularly focused political organization more than a parochially Jewish one—the Jewish wing of the progressive movement rather than the progressive voice of the Jewish community.

“As an American, you have a say in what your country is trying to do, and can try to affect its policy,” said Gerstein, in one of several wide-ranging interviews with Tablet Magazine ahead of the conference. “How do you get the people who are typical American Jews, who care about political causes and went out and volunteered for Obama, to engage on this issue? The question is how to translate the support Jewish individuals have for progressive issues in America and put that together with their views on peace.”

Gerstein—who is “a quintessential secular American Jew,” in the words of Sara Ehrman, a doyenne of Democratic Jewish politics—started thinking about peace when he was in his teens. As a kid growing up in a middle-class family in Highland Park, Illinois, a heavily Jewish Chicago suburb, he was more interested in watching Bears games than in going to Hebrew school at his Reform synagogue. His parents, a tax attorney and a stay-at-home mother who wrote for the local paper, sent Gerstein and his younger brother with their other Jewish friends to Camp Nabagemon, a boys’ wilderness camp in Wisconsin, rather than to Jewish summer camps. He made his first trip to Israel at 16, when his younger brother was bar mitzvahed at Masada as part of a mission organized by the Chicago-based Jewish United Fund. That first trip to Israel, Gerstein said, “was one of those trips that change your life.”

In 1991, as a student at Colgate University, Gerstein decided to spend his junior semester abroad in Tel Aviv—just in time for the Gulf War. “Three quarters of the program turned around and went right back home,” said Gerstein, who stayed despite his parents’ entreaties, partly because the Israeli-born parents of his American classmates told their children to stay. “They knew this wasn’t the annihilation of the State of Israel,” he remembers.

After graduating with a degree in political philosophy, Gerstein returned home to Chicago. His father sent him to meet the local volunteer coordinator for Moseley-Braun’s campaign, and within weeks, Gerstein was working for Heather Booth, a veteran civil rights activist who was running the field operation—one of the most sophisticated in the country. When the campaign was over, Gerstein went to Washington, where Booth introduced him to Ehrman, who was working at the Democratic National Committee handling Jewish outreach. “Some things are just meant to be, or bashert,” said Booth, now the executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, a group working on banking regulation. Ehrman hired Gerstein to work with her canvassing support for Clinton’s domestic agenda among Jewish groups like the American Jewish Committee, the Religious Action Center, the American Jewish Congress, and the three primary denominations. “These groups wanted to engage with the new administration,” Gerstein remembered. “They were really excited after 12 years of Republicans.” In September 1993, just a year out of college, he found himself helping choreograph the iconic Rabin-Arafat handshake—“the great event” of his early career.

The next year, he returned to Israel, with Ehrman’s urging, for a graduate degree in Middle East history at Tel Aviv University. It was a choice that, coincidentally, took him far away from the his party’s resounding defeat in the 1994 midterm elections at the hands of Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America. “Other people probably knew where the politics were going, but I didn’t see it,” Gerstein said. In Israel, by contrast, the mood in the fall of 1994 remained buoyant post-Oslo. “Peace was on the rise, and there were a lot of Americans living over there, along with Canadians and South Africans, who were just loving it,” Gerstein recalled. But that heady time came to an abrupt end the next year, with Rabin’s assassination. “It was just like any Israeli rally, with singers and performers, and after it ended we were walking home, and he was coming down the stairs—and we heard the shots,” Gerstein remembered. “It was just devastating.”

Watching the campaign that followed, between Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, and Benjamin Netanyahu, was devastating on a professional level. “Watching this as someone who had one campaign under his belt, and understood campaigns at least at a basic level, it was so obvious [Peres] was going to lose,” said Gerstein, who spent Election Day working for the BBC. “It was just a bad, bad day, but it was one of the factors that contributed to my thinking about what I wanted to do.” When he was offered the chance to run the Clinton reelection campaign’s operation in Chicago, he decided to return home. But, as it turned out, the road would lead right back to Tel Aviv. Ehrman recruited Gerstein to be the executive director of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation (founded by Slim-Fast billionaire and Democratic donor Daniel Abraham), and he wound up traveling frequently to Israel to work with the student peace movement there.

By late 1998, it was clear that elections were on the horizon in Israel. Ehrman encouraged Greenberg to hire Gerstein to be a liaison—and translator—between the American crew and Barak’s people. “At the time, I was thinking about it in terms of the unfinished business of Rabin,” Gerstein said. “There was really a commitment to thinking this was truly going to change the world, and change Israel for the better.” But, however optimistic he felt, he knew the trick was to tap into that sunny sense of hope without repeating the same naive errors that had plagued the Peres campaign. Barak went on to win a landslide victory over Benjamin Netanyahu not by selling his vision for peace, but by following his American advisers’ strategy of going after the swing voters’ pocket books.

“Peace was the main reason to vote for Labor, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough,” Stanley Greenberg recalled. “We pretty quickly found that wasn’t the driving issue that would allow Labor to win over the people it needed—the central issue was the role of the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers and the need for unity.” The message the team settled on was a classic “change” message. “It was the Israeli version of ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’” Gerstein said. “The myth is that it was about peace.”

The collapse of Barak’s coalition prompted Gerstein to return to Washington, where his Democratic colleagues were beginning to organize for their time in the political wilderness. Rather than signing on with a Jewish or Israel-focused cause, Gerstein became executive director of Democracy Corps, a nonprofit public-opinion research operation Greenberg and Carville founded to provide polling data to unions and other progressive organizations. At home, though, Israel was never far from Gerstein’s mind—largely due to the influence of his new wife, Aliza, the Israeli-born daughter of Iraqi and Moroccan Jews who agreed to join him in America only a few months after they met. (They now have two young sons.) “When you’re married to it, it’s a permanent part of your life,” Gerstein said. “So I always had this tug of Israel in one direction and progressive causes in the other.”

Sometimes, he’s been able to combine the two, as with the polling he does for J Street. (Earlier this summer, conservative bloggers questioned the validity of these numbers, given his involvement with the group; but most political groups use friendly pollsters, and Gerstein, who released his polling methodology and questions, told Tablet the attack was “preposterous.”) After the 2004 election, Gerstein and his predecessor at Democracy Corps, Karl Agne, founded their own polling firm, which does work for a number of prominent progressive groups, including the Center for American Progress—work that lately has focused heavily on canvassing public opinion about healthcare policy. But Gerstein also helped establish a special project at CAP focused on the Middle East, called Middle East Progress, and continues to do polling on Israel for groups other than J Street.

Still, according to Agne—who isn’t Jewish—J Street occupies a special place in his partner’s heart. “He spends a disproportionate amount of time thinking about it—when I go home at night, it’s not J Street that’s at the top of my mind,” Agne said. “When he goes home, it is central.”

For the next couple of days, though, Gerstein will be spending his time closely watching J Street’s most enthusiastic backers—the seed of what he, and Ben-Ami, hope can grow into a grassroots network that can be mobilized both to pressure the Obama administration to hasten a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and to express American Jewish support for such a deal. “What I’m doing now is much more at the strategic message level, rather than at the grassroots level, but all these things are important to building a movement,” Gerstein said. Standing at the back of the ballroom, Gerstein joked that he didn’t need to do a formal poll to know where this particular crowd stands.