You don’t need to know much about history to recognize that Brzezinski here is trading in a classic anti-Semitic trope. Why didn’t his Salon interviewer call him out on it? Why hasn’t anyone else? Where are the American elites—the intellectuals, writers, policymakers, and political activists—when it comes to vigilance against anti-Semitism?

The editors of magazines and newspapers have a responsibility as gatekeepers of polite society. It turns out the gatekeepers haven’t been vigilant. We live in a culture where the social taboo against anti-black racism is so fierce that violating the taboo means certain expulsion from polite company. But the very reverse process is taking place when it comes to anti-Semitism: The taboo is being rapidly eroded, and those who ought to confront it are enabling it.

***

Israel Firsters, dual loyalists, Likudniks, ziocons, neocon warmongers—in the wake of the Holocaust, such anti-Semitic rhetoric would have been unimaginable. Yet it became commonplace little more than half a century later at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. Midlevel George W. Bush Administration officials with Jewish-sounding last-names—Wolfowitz, Abrams, Feith, and the rest of their neocon cabal—were accused of dual loyalty, sending American boys to die for the sake of the country that had their true devotion: Israel. According to this theory, administration principals like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and the president—policymakers with actual decision-making power—were merely instruments in the control of vast Zionist networks that were also manipulating the media and financial industries.

This theory reached full bloom in 2007, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of America’s most esteemed publishing houses, handed the political scientists John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt a $750,000 advance for their book The Israel Lobby. As my colleague Adam Kirsch pointed out last week, the book’s impact was massive because it made it possible to say almost anything about Jewish money, and Jewish power, and the Jewish state. Walt and Mearsheimer’s thesis was praised as bracing, and to question their motives or their ideas was to traffic in McCarthyism. And so the book’s argument earned respect.

Today that discourse has made its way into a Washington-based think tank with close ties to the Obama Administration. Last month, the Center for American Progress found itself in the middle of controversy when some contributors to the organization’s Think Progress blog were accused of writing posts and Tweets that were out-and-out anti-Semitic. One blogger, Zaid Jilani, used the term “Israel firsters” to describe pro-Israel Obama donors. “Waiting 4 hack pro-Dem blogger to use this 2 sho Obama is still beloved by Israel-firsters and getting lots of their $$.”

American Jewish groups were incensed. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Washington Post that, “The language is corrosive and unacceptable.” Jilani left the organization and apologized for using the term, but his colleagues remain, only slightly chastened.

CAP’s chief of staff Ken Gude explained in response to the criticism that, “We have a zero-tolerance policy for racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, or any form of discrimination.” However, it would seem that Think Progress’ bloggers were well-suited to the general temperament of the organization. The problem isn’t just CAP-sponsored ephemera like blogs and tweets, but its more significant offerings relating to the Middle East, like its massive research project on Islamophobia. On Page 94 of that study, for instance, the authors take issue with the Middle East Media Research Institute, founded by Israelis. “MEMRI is respected in some circles for its work to combat hate language and anti-Semitism, but it is also criticized for its selective translations. The institute contends that it highlights moderate Muslim voices on its Reform blog. Yet MEMRI’s selective translations of Arab media fan the flames of Islamophobia.”

How do the Jews who run this translation organization promote Islamophobia, according to CAP? By translating the opinions of those who want to persecute and kill Jews. Try fitting this twisted reasoning into Gude’s zero-tolerance policy against any form of discrimination: Women’s rights groups stir up male hatred by collecting statistics of violence against women; the NAACP fans the flames of racism because it advocates on behalf of equal rights for African-Americans.

***

The root of this problem is not a twentysomething blogger writing something stupid on the Internet. Rather, it is that anti-Semitic rhetoric and logic are being protected and justified by those who are supposed to be gatekeepers. These people, often in the service of their larger political aims, are willing to apologize for or ignore what is obviously Jew-baiting and Jew-hatred.

Continue reading: This isn’t an intramural debate

Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States. Last week, for example, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald asked Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg about any loyalty oaths to Israel Goldberg took when he served in the IDF during the early 1990s. (On Tuesday, writer Max Blumenthal used a gross phrase to describe Goldberg: “former Israeli prison guard.”) The obvious implication is that Goldberg’s true loyalty is to Israel, not the United States. For months, M.J. Rosenberg of Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog group, has been throwing around the term “Israel Firster” to describe conservatives he disagrees with. One recent Tweet singled out my friend Eli Lake, a reporter for Newsweek: “Lake supports #Israel line 100% of the time, always Israel first over U.S.” That’s quite mild compared to some of the others.

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize.

Throughout my career, I’ve been associated with the Jewish left—I was to the left of the New Republic staff when I worked there, moved on to Talking Points Memo, hosted my blog at Firedoglake for years, and so on. I’ve criticized the American Jewish right’s myopic, destructive, tribal conception of what it means to love Israel. But it doesn’t deserve to have its Americanness and patriotism questioned. By all means, get into it with people who interpret every disagreement Washington has with Tel Aviv as hostility to the Jewish state. But if you can’t do it without sounding like Pat Buchanan, who has nothing but antipathy and contempt for Jews, then you’ve lost the debate.

This is tiresome to point out. Many of the writers who are fond of the Israel Firster smear are—appropriately—very good at hearing and analyzing dog-whistles when they’re used to dehumanize Arabs and Muslims. I can’t read anyone’s mind or judge anyone’s intention, but by the sound of it these writers are sending out comparable dog-whistles about Jews.

***

A bit of background for the uninitiated: Last month, Josh Block, a former AIPAC spokesman, pushed a series of talking points that targeted several liberal writers at the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank with ties to the Obama Administration. (Full disclosure: My personal blog was very briefly hosted by CAP in 2008; some of Block’s targets are my friends.) The effect was to suggest that CAP was hostile to Israel because it is to Block’s left. A plain reading of the think tank’s work refutes the accusation.

But buried in Block’s overbroad invective was a kernel of truth. Some at CAP, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, and beyond deployed the “Israel First” smear, calling the Americanness of their political opponents into question. Predictably, right-wing Jewish writers took their shots at CAP, Media Matters, and the rest—never wanting to miss an opportunity to indict the left. And the Washington Post revived the contretemps last month in an article that effectively asked if CAP was anti-Israel.

The response to this controversy, and related ones, was ugly. Many toyed with the idea that denigrating someone’s American identity wasn’t so bad after all. Left-wing polemicist Philip Weiss wrote that he considered the term “Israel firster [to be] a perfectly legitimate term in a wide-open American discourse.” Time columnist Joe Klein noted that he’s used the term himself before, weighing in on “Americans who are pushing for war with Iran”—as the question of attacking Iran lurks in the background of this entire debate—and who “place Israel’s national defense priorities above our own.”

Even more disappointingly, the term got a nod of approval from the head of a lobbying organization that represents the Jewish left. Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace organization that I’ve written favorably about, told the Washington Post he was cool with the throwing “Israel Firster” around. “If the charge is that you’re putting the interests of another country before the interests of the United States in the way you would advocate that,” he said, “it’s a legitimate question.” So, Ben-Ami’s response to years of getting baselessly attacked for not caring about Israel is to turn around and say his attackers don’t care about America? (Ben-Ami later clarified that, “The conspiracy theory that American Jews have dual loyalty is just that, a conspiracy theory and must be refuted in the strongest possible way.”)

If what Rosenberg and the others on the left want is a debate—by which I understand them to mean a debate about the wisdom of a war with Iran, and about the proper role of the U.S.-Israel relationship—great. The left, I think, will win that debate on the merits, because it recognizes that if Israel is to survive as a Jewish democracy living in peace beside a free Palestine, an assertive United States has to pressure a recalcitrant Israel to come to its senses, especially about the insanity of attacking Iran.

But that debate will be shut down and sidetracked by using a term that Charles Lindbergh or Pat Buchanan would be comfortable using. I can’t co-sign that. The attempt to kosherize “Israel Firster” is an ugly rationalization. It shouldn’t matter that the American Jewish right proliferates the term “anti-Israel.” The easiest way to lose a winnable argument is to get baited into using their tactics. I don’t fetishize false civility; bullies ought to get it twice as bad as they give. People disagree, so they should argue. Shouting is healthier than shutting up.

Call me a squish or a sellout or a concern troll. Whatever. But if you can’t be forceful without recalling some of the ugliest tropes in American Jewish history, you’re doing it wrong.

• A J Street founder and board member allegedly met with Hamas officials while reporting on smuggling operations in Gaza. [Washington Jewish Week]

• In 1980, Richard Brody ran into Woody Allen at Mott Street restaurant Sam Wo’s. Absurdity ensued. [New Yorker]

• In other Allen-family news, 23-year-old Ronan Farrow—child of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow—won a Rhodes Scholarship to study international development at Oxford. Another winner was Princeton senior Miriam Rosenbaum, who will study bioethics at Oxford. [Jewish Journal]

• The Times takes a bike tour through Tel Aviv. [NYT]

• Marvin Hamlisch sold his Park Avenue apartment and moved out of New York City. [Observer]

• Zuccotti Park-related police barricades led to a drastic decline in business for a popular Lower Manhattan kosher eatery, which had to lay off one-third of its workforce. [Fox News]

• Turkey continues to toughen its stance against its neighbor and former ally Syria. [FT]

• After publishing an issue “guest edited” by the Prophet Muhammad, a satirical French weekly’s Paris offices were firebombed. [NYT]

• Since it’s how Rabbi David Nesenoff seems to define himself entirely, he shall heretofore be referred to as the Helenthomaser Rebbe. [Three Village Patch]

• Though officially unaffiliated, yesterday’s Occupy Wall Street-related “Statement Against Smears” was circulated by a senior J Street staffer. [Forward Thinking]

Dig this here now.

The other strikes me as a bigger deal, especially as we enter an election year early next month. The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee jointly issued a “National Pledge for Unity on Israel” in order “to encourage other national organizations, elected officials, religious leaders, community groups and individuals to rally around bipartisan support for Israel while preventing the Jewish State from becoming a wedge issue in the upcoming campaign season.” The Republican Jewish Coalition responded to the statement with a strong rejection. “Allowing the American people to see where candidates stand, pro and con on critical issues, is the hallmark of our free and democratic political system,” said head Matthew Brooks. “For this reason, the RJC will not be a signer to this pledge. This effort to stifle debate on U.S. policy toward Israel runs counter to this American tradition.” Yikes!

Given President Obama’s political missteps when it comes to Israel, it seems undeniable that a call to prevent Israel “from becoming a wedge issue” is pro-Democratic in effect, and so likely in intent. The last time somebody prominently played the “Israel should be nonpartisan” card, it was Democrats bickering with Republicans in front of Prime Minister Netanyahu in May.

At the same time, much of the statement reads as “politics stops at the water’s edge”-type boilerplate, and indeed the Jewish establishment has historically been especially adept at instilling a view of Israel that crosses party lines; even Commentary, which takes the RJC’s position (and which, I can’t resist adding, was for most of its life published by the AJC), admires much of the pledge’s sentiment for that precise reason.

Moreover, the AJC and especially the ADL are not the first two organizations you would peg as Democratic or Obama shills. The ADL is a group seen as centrist or even center-right on Israel and likely has funders that reflect that. If this is the sort of thing it is calling for, then it could reflect a genuine backlash at the recent hyper-politicization of the Israel issue at the hands of groups like ECI that surrounded events such as the U.N. General Assembly and the special election in New York.

For pro-Israel Americans of a right-wing, Republican bent, the conundrum is this: You don’t want to so successfully cast President Obama as Israel’s foe and then have him win re-election. Because then the American people will have elected an anti-Israel candidate; in that scenario, the president owes you nothing; worse, he would have been elected despite being who you say he is, and therefore his mandate, if anything, would be to do all the things the right says he secretly wants to do, like divide Jerusalem, support the terrorists, etc.

I sense the pledge is a warning shot: At some point, it says, politicization of Israel could cross the appropriate line. At the same time, the RJC’s easy dismissal of the pledge proves that we haven’t even approached that point yet. If and when it’s AIPAC pushing the “water’s edge” line, that’s when you’ll see GOP backtracking.

UPDATE: After J Street Declares War, ECI Punches Back [Washington Jewish Week]
National Pledge for Unity on Israel [ADL]
RJC Rejects ADL/AJC Pledge: ‘We Will Not Be Silence’ on Israel [RJCHQ]
Earlier: Why Israel Makes For a Lousy Partisan Issue
N.Y.-9 Voters Think Obama ‘Not Pro-Israel’

For a 92nd Street Y crowd that is known to boo and hiss, the calm was pretty steady. Ben-Ami’s positions are well-known, but even for first-time listeners, there wasn’t much by way of verbal glowering thrown his way. One tuning in to the peanut gallery on the way out of the event could hear the following muttered: “I still don’t buy it.” And: “He is Mr. But. He always says ‘I understand this, but … .’”

There were also a number of moments that elicited more than just scattered applause from the crowd. Ben-Ami spoke of the progress he believes his organization is making, citing the rising number of political candidates who took J Street’s endorsement and won office from 2008 to 2010. Following the event, young and bright-eyed J Street members bearing name tags fanned out to continue the conversation with anyone willing. The 92nd Street Y bookseller estimated that she had sold ten copies of Ben-Ami’s new book.

The only real diversion from the script came during the Q&A as Ben-Ami was describing his feelings about the Jewish attachment to religious sites in the West Bank. In the context of their importance, he also mentioned the importance of sites to Palestinians and Muslims that lie in pre-1967 Israel. It was at this moment that the conversation was interrupted by a man who shouted to ask if each side’s attachment to religious sites were equal in Ben-Ami’s view (the man’s wife quickly elbowed him in embarrassment). Beinart, not wanting to allow the breaking of the fourth wall (or the conversational security fence, if you prefer), quickly ushered the conversation away from there.

I contacted Ben-Ami to ask him the question that the man had shouted. Not because it was any more valid than all the other unanswered queries, but because this question of whether Ben-Ami (and, by extension, J Street) is more devoted to the Jewish spiritual and historical connection to the Levant than any other religious or ethnic group is a question that will continue to transcend (or even interrupt) any amount of intelligent discourse for many in the pro-Israel camp.

“Both peoples have an attachment to the land they have to share,” Ben-Ami replied. “Each is different and personal, and there is nothing to be gained by attempting to weight their relative connection. There is everything to be gained through mutual acknowledgement of and respect for the feelings of each other.”

The natural follow-up: Are you ready to buy it?

Related: The Failure of the American-Jewish Establishment [NYRB]

Heilemann cites my case that Gov. Rick Perry and other Republicans fervently and frequently proclaims his support for and love of Israel because Israel (and Iran) are where Obama is most vulnerable, national security-wise—among not only Jews but everyone. He calls this “perfect bullshit,” and just in case it’s not clear enough, I’m pretty sure—I hope!—he is referring to the Republican argument that Obama’s Israel policy reveals him to be a blame-America-first ultra-dove, and not, er, my argument that the Republicans will try to use Israel to pin that label on Obama. (Here is the post Heilemann quoted from. I also made it clear here that I consider Obama’s policies to be pro-Israel. And I interviewed Tevi Troy and Matt Duss about it.)

Heilemann’s piece surely went to press before Perry published his op-ed chastising Obama on Israel; and before Perry announced a $2500-a-head kosher fundraiser in New York; and before (yikes) Perry announced he would be holding a press conference Tuesday in New York with MK Danny Danon, the politician most closely associated with the plan to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank; and before (yikes!) Netanyahu’s people mentioned the prime minister might make a side trip to New York’s ninth congressional district, site of last week’s Israel-heavy special election. Stuff like that vindicates people like him and me, and I’d like to submit a corollary: Israel’s relevance in the United States is going to embolden the right on both sides; they are feeding off of each other at this point, and the thing is going to take on a momentum all its own.

That rumor about Netanyahu is a good segue back to the article, which contains plenty of evidence that Bibi’s chief concern is and has always been Bibi, at the expense, certainly of the U.S.-Israel special relationship and, arguably, at the expense of Israel itself. You should read the whole thing. What follows are a few things that especially caught my attention:

• Heilemann defends Obama: “His role here is not that of the callous assailant but of the caring and sober brother slapping his drunken sibling: The point is not to hurt the guy but to get him to sober up.” Americans can know what’s better for Israel than the Israeli government: this is exactly the J Street line. J Street is not mentioned in the piece. To me, that is a sign that J Street has not succeeded in making itself prominent enough to be an effective “blocking back” for Obama.

• A man named Barack Hussein Obama received four percent more of the Jewish vote than John Kerry did. That tells you that the 78 percent Jewish-vote figure was unusually inflated, likely by both the general decisiveness of Obama’s victory and the presence of Sarah Palin on the other ticket. It would be insane to expect Obama to get 78 percent again, eve if he hadn’t pissed off the Jews.

• Obama has pissed off the Jews. “The perception of Obama as harboring antipathy to Israel, they argue, makes 2012 a ripe opportunity for the right Republican to swipe a larger than usual share of Jewish votes and/or pick the Obama campaign’s pocket,” Heilemann argues. “Skeptical? I would be, too, except for one thing: the sight of the Obamans scrambling to make sure it doesn’t happen.” Hiring Ira Forman as the new director of Jewish outreach, he adds, “is a tacit acknowledgment that the White House has badly handled the continual care and feeding required to keep major donors sweet.” Heilemann is especially worth listening to here: he wrote the seminal early story about how Obama was outraising Hillary Clinton.

• “Within the Republican donor class, Romney is the strong favorite.” Makes sense.

• “Regarding the call for a settlement freeze, the Obamans defend the decision without a trace of apology.” That is disturbing. The settlements are illegal and an obstacle to peace; they also weren’t the prime problem, and from a pragmatic perspective, were exactly the wrong thing to bring up.

• A crucial line from former chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, one of the few former Obama officials to go on the record (which tells you he also helped shape the story): “We had an obligation—and this is where we deserve a yellow card—to explain what we were doing with the Palestinians or Arabs, to put more air in the tires on that side. Not tone down what we said on settlements, but work harder so there was more recognition of the parity that existed with the Arab violations.” It’s a great point, except I believe he means that they deserved a ten-yard penalty, because we do not make soccer metaphors in this country.

• Obama should have gone to Israel when he was in Cairo. “‘We made a mistake,’ admits one senior administration foreign-policy adviser. ‘Nobody thought of it as a big deal at the time, but, I mean, you’re in the neighborhood, you’re right down the street, and you don’t stop by for coffee?’” We already knew this, of course. But now the Obama people know it. It may, however, be too late for them.

The Tsuris [NYMag]
Earlier: Perry’s Ascent Heralds Israel’s Rise as Issue
The Problem With Perry

Gil Kulick, communications director for the local J Street chapter, told me that the group planned to walk across 42nd Street to Third Avenue, and thence to the offices of Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand to deliver postcards signed by 3,000 New Yorkers. “We’re here to demonstrate that President Obama has a lot of support for his move to make a two-state solution,” he said (blocking back!). Kulick was middle-aged, as were most of the more than 100 attendees. “I’ve been doing this all my life,” he sighed, noting, among other stints, three years he worked at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. “I fear for the future of democracy in Israel if the occupation doesn’t come to an end. Occupation and democracy aren’t compatible in the long run.”

Kate Press, J Street’s New York City regional director, was first to the megaphone, calling for the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps—the formula long tacitly understood to be the way to two states, which Obama formally stated as the U.S. position in May, to much controversy. And then she introduced the keynote speaker: “He shares our sense of urgency that now is the time to achieve two states,” she proclaimed. “Many of you will know him from his seminal article.” I don’t know their exact ages, but Press and the speaker, Peter Beinart, may well have been the only two thirty-somethings in attendance. The rest were older, or young(er) adults.

Wearing a white oxford shirt and jeans, Beinart’s thin, hard-edged voice sounded through the megaphone not unlike Bobby Kennedy’s (through a megaphone). He spoke without notes, though he had some in his back pocket. He began by bringing up last week’s attacks: “We come here not because we take lightly the murder of Israeli Jews, our brothers and sisters in Israel. Quite the opposite.” He moved onto Tisha B’Av, the holiday commemorating the two destructions of the Temple, which this year was observed earlier this month. In the story of the Second Temple, he related, “The Romans are almost bit players.” It is the Jews who bring destruction upon themselves, he argued, and the lesson of the holiday is that “ethical collapse preceded physical collapse.” Hint, hint. To that effect, Beinart closed by politely suggesting that the “blocking back” needs to step into his own. “Barack Obama’s most important priority is his own re-election,” he argued. “Barack Obama will not have to be the one who has to tell his children that he stood by.” It is rather “Jewish honor,” Beinart insisted, that is at stake, and it is up to Jews, and nobody else, to uphold it—a classically Zionist formulation.

Not a half-hour had passed before the crowd was moving down 42nd Street. In the other direction, sad that prior obligation prevented him from joining them, went Peter Beinart.

“I give support to any organization that I feel is fighting for Israeli democracy,” he said, mentioning B’Tselem and the New Israel Fund, and noting that he has also spoken in front of the American Jewish Committee and AIPAC. Addressing groups with rigid agendas that he may not share in full is “something I’ve wrestled with,” he added.

Like J Street, Beinart would prefer that the two sides in the conflict be directly negotiating right now rather than preparing to face off in Turtle Bay. “Benjamin Netanyahu deserves the bulk of the blame,” he said, continuing: “Obama offered him a life-raft [with his May speech]—it was right before Obama went to Europe, you remember, so he could say, ‘Here, we’ve got something.’ And you know what Netanyahu did with it.”( Netanyahu responded in anger, rebuffing the president, although he has now moved toward quietly pledging to accept the ’67 borders as a negotiating premise.) “There was eagerness among a lot of people on the Palestinian side to get off this train,” Beinart added.

Also unattended was the happy hour, planned for 3:30 at a local watering hole, because, as Press put it, “being pro-Israel and pro-peace makes you pretty thirsty.” Sure, but it must be difficult to quench that thirst knowing that the others sides have the more fun toasts. Can you raise a glass and say, “two states!”?

Related: The New Israel Lobby [NYT Magazine]
Earlier: Beinart Speaks to Tablet

• U.N. nuclear inspectors got nowhere in talks with Syria over the facility, allegedly an illicit reactor, that Israel destroyed in 2007. [AP/WP]

• Adam Kredo has the most comprehensive breakdown of J Street’s new poll on American Jews’ attitudes toward Obama. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Archaeologists are making major strides in unearthing the ancient city of Shekhem in what is now the West Bank. [WP]

• Myra Kraft’s funeral was held. [Providence Journal]

• Speaking to the group, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren compared Christians United for Israel to Righteous Gentiles. [Arutz Sheva]

• A new, peer-reviewed, scholarly article finds that the media disproportionately focus coverage on Israel. [Contentions]

• Eli Valley’s latest has a helluva punch line. [Forward]

• How a pilfered painting by the Jewish artist Amedeo Modigliani led to the capture of a Serbian war crimes suspect. [ArtInfo]

• Bartenura wine can be seen in Drake’s latest video. Um, gross! [Heeb]

• The former longtime American Jewish Committee representative in Washington, D.C., impeccably named Hyman Bookbinder, died at 95. [JTA]

An homage to black-Jewish couplings and offspring (and, more implicitly, a celebration of Los Angeles).

The question is: do the law’s Israeli supports care? A few months ago they were bringing J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami before the Knesset to be harangued as anti-Zionist. Now he finds himself sharing an issue with unlikely fellow travelers lie Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, and Jonathan Tobin at Commentary.

Indeed, it is those conservative opponents who are being put in the tightest spot right now: Forced into a stance that the bills supporters call “scaremongering,” forced to legitimize political opponents who similarly opposed BDS, and even find common cause with BDS supporters.

When the dust settles, the question isn’t just whether Israel will be delegitimized, but which viewpoints will become consensus.

From Left to Right, American Jews Are Criticizing Israeli Anti-Boycott Law [JTA]
New Law Protects Democracy [YNet]
Israeli Boycott Bill Furor Misses the Point [Contentions]
Earlier: Israel Deligitimizes Itself
Unruly

There’s Jeremy Ben-Ami’s A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, July), which offers the philosophy and personal story of the JStreet founder in a format that his most passionate opponents (hi, down there in the comments!) will find conveniently burns when exposed to open flame. And for those, in Israel and in America, who regard JStreet as a villainous, self-hating, anti-Israel cabal (hi, members of Knesset!), there’s even more aggravation to be found in Jack Ross’ Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism (Potomac, June), which comes complete with a blurb from John Mearsheimer and locates a precedent for lefty Jewish anti-Zionists in a mid-century Reform rabbi. And if that’s not enough, there’s also What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters (Columbia, June), which offers the single-state-solution wit and wisdom of Israeli-American filmmaker Udi Aloni, which comes with endorsements and engagements from such celebrities of academic critical theory as Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek (who it turns out probably isn’t friends, or friends-with-benefits, with Lady Gaga). How could such paradox-loving dialecticians not support Aloni, who opposes “all forms of boycott against arts,” but also, at the same time, is among the most vocal supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement?

***

It’s not that publishers want to sell books only by infuriating AIPAC devotees; they’re happy to sell to just about any constituency. In No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation (Columbia, June), Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan situate the debate about a Palestinian “right of return” alongside other cases of “people displaced from their homes, regions, and countries as a result of political violence.” In this context, they argue, it becomes clear that “not only is return not the preferred solution for these minorities … but attempted return is unlikely to resolve the problem,” and, so those who really do care about the suffering of displaced minority populations should concentrate on “resolving refugee suffering in the short term rather than hiding behind eschatological promises.”

***

Zionism does raise tough questions—even the most iconic genius of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, struggled with them. As Ze’ev Rosenkranz demonstrates in Einstein Before Israel: Zionist Icon or Iconoclast? (Princeton, June), the great physicist was a card-carrying Zionist, but what with his opposition to nationalism, he didn’t always agree with the movement. In one fascinating letter to the editor of a Jaffa Arabic-language newspaper, in 1930, Einstein noted his opposition to “aggressive nationalism,” and that he could “only imagine the future of Palestine in the form of peaceful cooperation between the two peoples residing there.”

***

On a visit to Palestine in 1923, Einstein visited a kibbutz in the Galilee, where he found the colonists “extremely congenial”; it might (or might not) have been Degania Alef, the first kibbutz, which is where One Hundred Years of Kibbutz Life: A Century of Crises and Reinvention (Transaction, July), starts. The collection, edited by Brandeis professor Shulamit Reinharz and Michal Palgi of the Institute for the Research on the Kibbutz and the Cooperative Idea, offers an overview of the achievements of kibbutzniks and suggests that despite all the challenges to the movement, a renaissance of Israeli collective farming remains possible.

***

Kibbutz life in the 1980s gets the arty comic-book treatment in the aptly cooperative Farm 54 (Ponent Mon/Fanfare, May), by the poet Galit Seliktar and her artist brother Gilad. While the excerpt in Words Without Borders focused on the protagonist’s first night in the army, in which she attends a Palestinian house demolition, most of the rest of the book concentrates on tense everyday moments of life on the farm, from afternoon family barbecues to shifts inspecting eggs.

Meanwhile, Dalkey Archive Press continues its Hebrew Literature Series, which is doing its best to make the richness of contemporary Israeli literature more accessible to those Americans who can’t read Hebrew. The two latest titles are Asaf Schurr’s Motti (Dalkey Archive, May) and Gabriela Avigur-Rotem’s Heatwave and Crazy Birds (Dalkey Archive, June). The former is a self-reflectively narrated tale about a loner who takes the blame for a friend’s car accident and winds up in prison, while the latter concerns a woman’s return to the country, to inquire about the death of her father’s friend, after a quarter-century abroad. Like Farm 54, these novels demand that readers attend to them as aesthetically innovative projects, rather than as reflections of current events.

***

That’s worth emphasizing, because, as has been frequently pointed out, readers often insist on reading every Israeli novel, no matter how fictional and psychological, as a gussied-up Op-Ed essay about the political situation. Then again, there’s often good reason to view Israeli cultural products as representing national and political concerns. That’s what Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg’s anthology Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion (Texas, July) does, collecting essays from Israeli and American scholars who analyze classic and recent Israeli cinema “as a prism that refracts collective Israeli identities”—or, in other words, as a means through which a global audience gains insight into how Israelis understand themselves. Better that, perhaps, than the pro- and anti- propaganda that seems ever more ubiquitous, not only on the news and in the speeches of ideologues, but also on bookstore shelves.

• This is probably partly because both sides are independently, secretly talking to the Americans. [Haaretz]

• The Turkish foreign minister advised the flotilla organizers to hold off until they see the situation in Gaza. This may be what the U.S. gets in exchange for giving Turkey a role in the peace process. [Haaretz]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu refused to meet with a J Street delegation of Democratic congressmen. [Ynet/Vos Iz Neias?]

• In the strangest press conference like, ever, Rep. Anthony Weiner admitted to communicating innappropriately with six women over Facebook and Twitter over the past three years. And then he took a lot of questions. #TMI [CNN]

• Gus Tyler, longtime author of the Forward’s Der Yiddish Vinkl column, died at 99. May his memory be for a blessing. [Forward]

• Nextbook Press author Deborah Lipstadt spoke last week about the importance of “contemporary Jewish creativity” on the occasion of the awarding of the Sami Rohr Prize. [Jewish Book Council Blog]

Leonard Nimoy writes a letter for Americans for Peace Now in support of a two-state solution. His work here is done.

Concerning the tax revenue—without which, according to Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, 150,000 P.A. employees will not be paid for the first time since 2007—the State Department criticized the Israeli decision as “premature.” Said a spokesperson, “We are looking to see what this reconciliation agreement looks like in practical terms, before we make any decisions about future assistance.” Which of course leads to the second question. On Sunday, P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas told a visiting delegation from the dovish American group J Street that it is crucial that the U.S. continue aid; he flatly denied “that Hamas will be in the West Bank, or that it will share any authority here,” adding, “The new government will comply with my policies, and I am against terror and violence.” Yet, also over the weekend, 29 Democratic senators—joining Republican colleagues—urged President Obama to withhold P.A. aid pending assurances that Hamas will not join the P.A. (as it will do if reconciliation is followed through upon). “The United States should stand by its refusal to work with any Palestinian government that includes Hamas,” their letter argued, and it cited Hamas’s criticism last week of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

But even that is something of a more complex question: As I suggested at the time—and I don’t mean to sugarcoat Hamas, whose head, Khaled Meshal, said over the weekend, “Unfortunately, nonviolence doesn’t work against the Israelis”—part of the reason Hamas took the position it did on Bin Laden was to shore up what is, believe it or not, its even-more-jihadist flank. And indeed, on Saturday, Hamas police broke up a pro-Bin Laden rally run by Gaza Salafists (the same folks whom contributing editor Nathan Thrall warned about last week).

And you are seeing a lot of talk—from Meshal and from activist Mustafa Barghouti, who it turns out was fairly instrumental for getting the deal done in Cairo—that Hamas will make decisions in concert with its new partner, which would require committing to a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines and renouncing violence (policies that violate Hamas’s rightly infamous charter). If, as Israel’s strategic affairs minister Moshe Yaalon suggested, Hamas has not given up its ideology for good but has agreed to temporary compromise due to its own circumstantial weakness, now could be a good opportunity to hold Hamas to its word: Either Hamas will stick to its word, and there could be chance for real progress; or, at the very least, Hamas would betray its word, and the whole international community could see good faith on Israel’s part and bluffing on Hamas’s.

U.S.: Israel’s Decision to Withhold P.A. Funds ‘Premature’ [Haaretz]
Democrat Senators to Obama: Cut P.A. Aid [Ynet]
Abbas Urges Continuation of U.S. Aid Despite Agreement with Hamas [NYT]
Hamas Leader Nods to New Partners [WSJ]
An Insider’s View of the Palestinian Unity Deal [FP]
Earlier: Fatah Chooses Hamas
Diplomats’ Report: Deal Could Prove Useful

• So why is the Western response nothing like what it was to the Libyan regime’s violent oppression? [WP]

• During lunch with a J Street delegation, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said he hopes U.S. aid still comes in and insisted Hamas will not share West Bank authority. [NYT]

• “By lifting the heavy hand of the Mubarak police state, the revolution unleashed long-suppressed sectarian animosities that have burst out with increasing ferocity.” Coptic Christians especially have been targeted. [NYT]

• Recently departed Mossad chief Meir Dagan called the notion of bombing Iranian reactors “the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” prompting rebukes from Defense Minister Barak and others. [Haaretz]

• The CUNY executive board will likely reverse the CUNY board of trustees and Tony Kushner will be offered an honorary doctorate. More at 10. [NYT]

At the end of Palin’s speech, an Orthodox rabbi named Robert Shechter stood up to give a closing benediction on behalf of a year-old group called Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, whose supporters had bought three tables at the 300-person dinner. Like Palin herself, the group piggybacked on Heroic Media’s event to stage its own Washington moment: a Shabbat retreat, or shabbaton, for Jewish supporters of Palin. Ten participants gathered at an Aish HaTorah center near the Marriott for a kosher dinner and lunch accompanied by freewheeling discussions about the Obama Administration moderated by the group’s founder, Benyamin Korn.

Korn—who is known to his oldest friends as “Buddy,” but sends his emails as “Bert,” short for Bertram, his English name—is a host on Philadelphia’s conservative WNTP talk radio station, an affiliate of the behemoth Christian broadcaster Salem Communications. At a Friday night service before the retreat, his rich baritone carried the uneven chorus of the regular Aish membership. Korn, who is 55, chanted from memory with his prayer book closed in his hands.

Korn appears to have few direct links to Palin herself—in public, he deferentially refers to the head of her political-action group, Michael Glassner, as “Mr. Glassner”—and he admits he has limited financial resources, though he says he has received support from Saul Fox, a Bay Area private-equity investor who donated last year to Tea Party candidates Sharron Angle and Tom Campbell. (Fox, en route to the Palin event from his California office, was not available for comment.) To the shabbaton participants, Korn insisted that he was not in the market for a job with Palin’s political-action group, or in a future Palin campaign. “I don’t need that tsuris,” he said. But over the past few months, Korn has become a go-to Palin soldier for cable news shows. Federal campaign records show he has never given money to Palin, but he runs a website devoted to aggregating news about her, which he says gets upwards of 10,000 hits a month, including a few dozen from Wasilla, Alaska. (“It could be Joe McGinniss,” Korn says self-deprecatingly, referring to the journalist who spent last summer living next door to the Palins while working on his book about them.)

But Korn has a long history of trying to add a Jewish voice to political movements that seemed closed to some Jews—starting with his work in the left-wing solidarity movements of the early 1980s, which frequently adopted anti-Zionist positions in sympathy with the Palestinian cause. Korn became more observant as he grew older, and in the Tea Party he sees a movement that speaks to the broader cultural concerns of a generation of newly conservative Jews who feel “mugged by reality,” following Irving Kristol’s famous formulation. “I started Jews for Sarah to create a link to a wider community,” he told his group and described his dream of building a network of Jews for Sarah chapters on the back of local Tea Party organizations around the country.

Unlike most conservative Zionist activists, Korn says he respects Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of the dovish group J Street, with whom Korn worked in the mid-2000s during a stint as associate director of the nonprofit David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. (Ben-Ami is on the group’s board.) “These people, they want to fit Israel into a left-wing paradigm but they don’t want to fit their worldview into a Jewish paradigm,” Korn said. “I know it because I lived it.” In some ways, Korn is attempting to engineer the political mirror image of what Ben-Ami has spent the last two years building: a political home for a group of conservative Jews who feel that no one speaks for them.

***

“Buddy” is the son of Bertram Korn, the former rabbi of Philadelphia’s Keneseth Israel, one of the oldest and largest Reform congregations in the United States, and a well-known historian of Jews in the Civil War era. His mother, Rita, was an heir to the Pep Boys auto-repair fortune; her father, Emanuel Rosenfeld, was better-known as the chain’s mascot, Manny. As an undergraduate, Korn studied journalism at Temple University and began learning Mandarin in hopes of going to China after he graduated—a nod to his father, who served as the Navy’s only Jewish chaplain in North China during World War II. But visa restrictions were still in place five years after Nixon’s landmark 1972 trip, and as a devoted Maoist—“Oh, how I long to carry manure up the mountain, and all that,” as Korn now puts it—Korn decided to forgo either Taiwan or Hong Kong and followed his Indian girlfriend to New Delhi, where he enrolled in a master’s program at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “My dad had to defend me to the congregation, that I wasn’t losing my mind in an ashram,” Korn said, in one of several phone conversations.

He was still in Delhi in 1979, when his father, only 61, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Korn returned to Philadelphia and enrolled in a doctoral program at Temple. In his off hours, he volunteered with Central American solidarity movements, going on missions to Cuba and hosting radio shows featuring radical music from throughout Latin America.

At the same time, Korn says, he began feeling his way back toward Jewish observance. For a while, his leftism coexisted peacefully with his Judaism—he launched Jews Concerned for Central Americans during this time, he says—but then, in 1985, found himself disillusioned after Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega went to Moscow immediately after the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted down President Reagan’s request for funding to the opposition Contras. “I said, ‘How can this man go to Moscow the day after we saved his neck in the U.S. Congress?’ ” Korn said. (It is a story he tells often, according to people who have known him for decades.) “So, I said, if he will betray his own people, I am finished with this, I am going to learn Hebrew and go to Israel.”

Within a few years, Korn had married an Israeli woman and fathered four children. (The pair eventually divorced; Korn, who describes himself as Modern Orthodox, has since remarried.) He established the Philadelphia chapter of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, but he then became a journalist himself, first as editor of three Jewish papers in South Florida and then, in 1994, as executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. Four years later, he left to join the conservative Zionist Organization of America. “I often wonder to myself if I had come of age now rather than when I did if I would have gone off the derech,” Korn said, using the Hebrew word for “path.” “The Reform movement has now embraced Zionism, but it was not like that in the 1980s.”

At the retreat, Korn steered the conversation away from Israel toward an array of anti-Obama Tea Party staples: energy policy, health care, even Michelle Obama’s effort to reduce consumption of high-fructose corn syrup. He invited Tea Party activists Teri Adams and Adrienne Ross speak. Later, in a phone conversation, he repeated his frequent assertion that his admiration for Palin stems in part from what he sees as her ecumenical outlook, which he believes is demonstrated by the fact that her husband, Todd, is part Native American. “We want to break through some of the baseless charges made against her, separately and against the Tea Party movement, that they are racist, narrow, and bigoted, or that they come from some kind of cultural place that is hostile to Jews, blacks, and other minorities,” Korn told me.

Korn has been criticized, most recently in Salon, for being a party of one, engaged in a quixotic effort to try and lure his fellow Jews away from their well-established liberalism. But he is operating in a religious Jewish world that is more open to “values” conservatism than it once was—a universe apart from the secular Jewish world. “The earlier generation of secular Republican Jews were à la carte Republicans, making common cause with evangelical Christians on issues like foreign policy,” said Ami Eden, the editor of the JTA, who got his start working for Korn at the Exponent. “These Orthodox Jews are buying the whole conservative program, from health care on down—it’s a unified front against what they see as a secular-socialist worldview.”

And Korn isn’t shy about making use of his political journey. It’s just the kind of redemption narrative that characterizes successful conservative rhetoric today. He delighted in telling those gathered for dinner on Friday night, over brisket and chicken, that he was once a fan and follower of the late community organizer Saul Alinsky, a favorite punching-bag of the right-wing blogosphere. Mark Young, a physical-rehabilitation specialist from Baltimore, interjected, “You’ve done teshuva!” (Teshuva is Hebrew for repentance.) The group laughed. Korn gave a brief, sad smile and replied quietly, “I guess you could say that.” Then he picked up where he had left off.

• Earlier, Gates was in Egypt, urging the interim military leaders not to hold elections too soon. [WSJ]

• There are more anti-regime protests in the southern Syrian city of Daraa, where 15 were killed yesterday. [AP/WP]

• The Knesset subcommittee had its hearing into J Street’s pro-Israelness. Group head Jeremy Ben-Ami was there, and it was about as productive as you’d expect. [WP]

• Israel is considering criminal charges against Uri Blau, the Haaretz journalist in the Anat Kamm affair. [Haaretz]

• Reuters pulls some B.S. in describing yesterday’s terrorist attack at a Jerusalem bus station. [Goldblog]

Here’s some video about the attack.

The foreign ministry criticized the initiative, arguing that uniformed officials should steer clear of political questions. It certainly raises several serious questions. Even if one overlooks the problematic nature of involving the army in a thoroughly non-military matter that should be addressed by the proper civic authorities, and even if one is willing to ignore the inherent risks associated with snooping on organizations operating according to the law in Western, friendly countries, one is still likely to come up against the unsolvable conundrum of just what sort of activity qualifies as sufficiently anti-Israeli. “We ourselves don’t know exactly how to define delegitimization,” a foreign ministry source told Haaretz. “This is a very abstract definition. Are flotillas to Gaza delegitimization? Is criticism of settlements delegitimization? It’s not clear how Military Intelligence’s involvement in this will provide added value.”

Under this thinking, it is bad enough that the Knesset is considering a law to defund groups considered insufficiently supportive of Israel and that it is holding hearings (opposed by many groups, including the Anti-Defamation League) into J Street’s pro-Israel bona fides.

To involve one of the world’s greatest armies in such intractable questions, though, is even worse. Some anti-Israeli criticism is legitimate, and some is not: It’s a fine line to draw, and without drawing it clearly the new, military department is left with a wide-open mandate to act against civilian, non-combatant targets—a premise that should be unacceptable in a democracy.

Military Intelligence Monitoring Foreign Left-Wing Organizations [Haaretz]
Related:Knesset Set to Vote on Law To Determine if a Group is Pro-Israel [Haaretz]
J Street Head in Israel to Lobby Knesset Over Group’s Commitment to Israel [Haaretz]
Earlier: Honest Abe

Unlike the notorious Knesset probes into various left-wing groups accused of delegitimizing the IDF, which seek to uncover their sources of funding, the J Street investigation is about determining whether J Street really is pro-Israel. “If they don’t love and support Israel, then they should not present themselves as pro-Israel,” said one MK. That’s just, like, your opinion, man.

Foxman is an American Jew who cares about Israel, and so he recognizes this investigation for what it is: An attempt by the Jewish state to dictate the terms of debate for all Jews and strip the diaspora of any right to have a say—much like the push to give a small coterie of ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbis the power to define who is Jewish and who isn’t. Critics who see the ADL as too right-wing or too beholden to the Israeli government—and I’ve been one of them—may laugh at this notion, but I would bet that Foxman sees, correctly, that while today it is the Knesset investigating J Street, tomorrow it will be the Knesset investigating the ADL. He is acting, at least in part, out of self-interest. Concerned progressive Jews should be pleased nonetheless.

Knesset Hearings on J Street Up the Ante in Debate About ‘Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace’ Lobby [JTA]
Related: The Diaspora Need Not Apply [NYT]

• J Street ain’t kosher. [New Voices]

• A history of the Anti-JAP campaign. [Forward]

• Bibi told his party that despite “making efforts to maintain the existing [settlement] construction… we must understand that we are [faced with] a very difficult international reality.” [Haaretz]

• Susan Sontag: Awesome writer, fascinating human being, kangaroo mother. [T Magazine]

• @Mayor Emanuel revealed! His name is Dan Sinker, and he has “a heart made out of Chicago and balls of punk rock.” Awesome. [Atlantic]

• Pro-Gaddafi forces are waging a large-scale counter attack. [NYT]

• In similarly depressing news, the UN Human Rights Council—the one that approved sanctions like 5 seconds ago—plans to adopt a report praising Libya’s human rights record. [Commentary]

• Iran has allegedly kidnapped opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi in secret from their two-weeks of house arrest and brought them to Heshmatiyeh jail in Tehran—The day before a nationwide rally. Oy. [Newser]

When the world seems unfriendly, turn to science and Auto-tune.

On last year’s list, Jews accounted for only four of the top eleven; Bloomberg was sixth, not second; and Soros was fourth, not first, having given “only” $150 million. In 2010, Soros gave an estimated $332 million, and (unlike in 2009), I don’t think any of it went to J Street.

Jews Take 5 of 6 Spots in Annual List of Top U.S. Givers [Jewish Journal/JTA]
The Philanthropy 50 [Chronicle of Philanthropy]

• J Street and Americans for Peace Now asked President Obama not to veto the Palestinians’ U.N. draft resolution condemning Israeli settlements. [JTA]

• After Rep. Steve Cohen, Democrat from Tennessee, compared Republicans to Nazis (specifically Goebbels) yesterday on the House floor, today he kept digging. [Goldblog]

• Israel’s streak of consecutive years with its entrant being nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar will end at three—this year’s nominee fell short. [JTA]

• An hour after taking his oath of office, the new Alabama governor said, “Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.” Sucks to be us, I guess. (He since apologized to Jewish groups.) [Salon]

• Natalie Portman reports that she’s “very superstitious” about her pregnancy. Why? “I’m very Jewish that way.” [People]

America’s Next Top Jew, with your host, Toyrah Banks. C’mon, would I—could I—make that up?

• Obama administration officials clamored to have their ideas heard over what the United States’s next step vis-à-vis the peace process should be. Their deadline is tonight, when Secretary of State Clinton is set to give a big speech expected to lay out the new strategy. [LAT]

• Columnist Jackson Diehl blames the failure of the latest round of talks on Palestinian President Abbas—who, he reports, has a history of declining good deals—and on the administration for failing to recognize this. [WP]

• Roger Cohen’s column is about an activist-y young American Jew who went to Israel, was spat on by haredim, and then joined J Street. [NYT]

• Hadassah will pay back $45 million of Madoff-related money as part of Bankruptcy Court proceedings. [eJewishPhilanthropy]

• A WikiLeaks cable revealed U.S. plans to try to get Spain an underwater treasure in exchange for a Camille Pissaro painting, now in Spain, that the Nazis confiscated from a Jewish family. The ploy failed. [ARTINFO]

I made a similar joke about Kristol’s serial founding (without the reporting and the coherent argument and that other rigorous stuff) several months ago when he co-founded the Emergency Committee for Israel. The article brings up a question raised during the campaign season: Is ECI (and J Street, for that matter, but if J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami has a Kristol-esque pattern, I’m not aware of it) designed primarily to advance certain policies regarding Israel, or to help a certain American political party?

TNR doesn’t mention ECI, and I haven’t seen ECI comment on the article (and it has not answered my inquiry). But the group is not exactly building a strong reputation for issue advocacy with its nominal non-stance on the START missile treaty. Most clear-eyed observers recognize that START, which Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitriy Medvedev signed, would, by bringing the United States and Russia closer together, make life tougher on Iran, in turn making life better for Israel; which is why pro-Israel groups of numerous stripes (J Street, yes, but also the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee) support it.

Most congressional Republicans oppose the treaty, for reasons that have at least as much to do with politics as policy (an assumption I make based on the fact that several prominent Republicans who are less electorally engaged support the treaty). Which, you know: They’re politicians, so that explains that. On the other hand, ECI is nominally an interest group. Yet its refusal to take a stand on the treaty, and its castigation of Jewish Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Carl Levin—who quite logically connected the treaty to the Israel issue in an effort, so far unsuccessful, to get AIPAC to endorse it—makes the most sense not if ECI wishes to advance its vision of a strong Israel and a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship, but if ECI primarily exists, well, “to serve the GOP’s immediate political interests.”

Bill Kristol’s Think Tank Fetish [TNR]
START, K Street, and Short Memories [Capital J]
Earlier: How Does Kristol Do It?
In an Election Month, Everyone’s a Hack

“People tend to see a fantasy version of themselves in her,” Sher remarked of Obama, recounting the many letters she receives from children around the country. (Obama needs the children as much as they need her: When the First Lady has a particularly grueling day, Sher said, her staff will deliberately schedule an event with children and physical activity, because those two things give her the most energy.) Sher spoke about her boss’s main legislative initiative, a reauthorization and modernization of the school breakfast and lunch program. They are down to the wire, and Obama may have done all she can: “It now has to do with things that have nothing to do with childhood nutrition,” Sher remarked, a hint of frustration peeking out of her staid, tasteful-power-suit exterior. Next up on the First Lady’s policy docket? More stuff with military families. Sher, who will head home to Chicago at the end of the year, will not be around for that.

“You were Michelle Obama’s boss, and now she’s your boss,” Kantor remarked at the beginning. Sher and Obama first met in 1991 at Chicago’s City Hall; Sher referred to her Valerie Jarrett, who hired her there. Several years later, as chief counsel at the University of Chicago’s hospital, Sher hired her. The word “boss” came up a lot, and it was difficult not to notice that Sher pronounced it with a certain accent: “Buhwahhs.” We learned near the end of the evening that Sher does, indeed, originally hail from New Jersey.

As for the Jewish community and Israel? Sher was careful to note that she is neither a policymaker nor an expert on policy. When Kantor asked what happens when a hypothetical angry, powerful rabbi calls the White House demanding to know why the president’s Mideast policy is so confoudingly naïve—“First of all, I can’t say that’s never happened,” Sher said, in the night’s biggest laugh-line—Sher said he is usually referred to a national security staffer. But on a personal level, Sher reassured: “I’ve known them so long, and I know what is in his heart, and how supportive he is, and how he gets the Jewish community, to the extent that anyone can.” Tea-leaf-readers will be mildly interested to know that when she reached for a hypothetical Israel organization and suggested “AIPAC,” she paused for a few seconds and then reached for, “or J Street,” as though the latter were the former’s peer and alternative.

In terms of the First Lady, I got the sense that she is an unusally good administrator, and consciously thinks of herself as a manager of people (as good administrators do): “Our job,” Sher said, paraphrasing her boss, “is not to solve Afghanistan, it’s to add value to the administration. And if we’re not doing that, then we should just stay home.”

The night’s final audience question was: Do you think you will live to see the first Jewish president? Sher offered a tentative yes. Referring to the president, she argued, “The longer view is that when that one barrier came down, many others will now follow.” Under this formulation, the first Jewish president will owe something to the first black one.

Not that the debt doesn’t travel both ways: “The number of people I have met,” Sher observed, “who have said, ‘I am the first Jewish person to support Obama.’ Legions!”

Related: The Obamas’ Marriage [NYT Magazine]

The biggest saw the campus Hillel pressure the Manhattan university’s J Street affiliate into cancelling its co-sponsorship of a talk that John Ging, the head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency’s Gaza operations who is an outspoken critic of the blockade, gave at Barnard, the university’s all-women college, even as J Street U’s national director introduced Ging at the event. (Part of the issue—and I cannot stress enough that this sort of technicality is de rigeur at Columbia—is that the affiliate is actually under the Hillel umbrella.) Via New Voices, some Columbia/Barnard alumni, including several rabbis, wrote the Hillel director protesting the withdrawal of the co-sponsorship.

On a lesser and lighter note, Bwog, the campus blog, reports that Columbia University Students for Justice in Palestine set up a mock Israeli checkpoint on the steps of Low Library in the center of campus last week, complete with “Israeli guards” with cardboard guns and blindfolded “Palestinians.” Several Hillel groups protested, and handed out a flyer entitled, “It’s Complicated, Let’s Talk,” which ought to be Columbia’s official motto.

Columbia Student Groups Drops Sponsorship of Gaza Talk Under Pressure [Forward]
Checkpoint on Low [Bwog]
Related: Columbia’s Own Middle East War [NY Mag]

Ari Y. Kelman, a professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis, is one of the study’s authors. He joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss his findings, including the fact that the Internet is weakening denominational differences among Jews, that “non-establishment” young Jewish leaders come from surprisingly “establishment” backgrounds, and that the economics of Jewish life deserve a closer look. [Running time: 16:40]

So, how did J Street do? Well, all three of the Senate candidates it endorsed—all of whom went into Tuesday with the odds against them—lost, though Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pennsylvania) ran a tighter race than expected. On the House side, where J Street endorsed 58 candidates (all Democrats), 11 lost, all in races projected to be tight.

In other words, J Street showed that its money—$1.5 million raised this cycle through its PAC—isn’t toxic, as its opponents sometimes suggest. “There is political support for politicians who take pro-Israel, pro-peace views,” J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami said on a conference call earlier today. “They will win, and they will win with the support of Jewish voters.”

However, J Street’s own polling data also shows, and has repeatedly shown over the past two years, that only a tiny number of American Jews—seven percent, according to this latest data—rank Israel among even their top two concerns when they go to vote; the most frequent top two concerns are the economy and health care. Sure, 83 percent said they support the United States playing an active role in helping resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and a solid majority of those support putting pressure on the Israelis to reach a deal; sure, Prime Minister Netanyahu received a lower favorability rating (49 percent) than Obama (51). But it is not the issue most of them are voting on.

Maybe just as problematically, the survey respondents were overwhelmingly unaffiliated as Jews: Fewer than half belong to a synagogue, participate in Jewish community organizations, or give money to Jewish charities; two-thirds have never been to Israel, and almost as many don’t discuss Israel with friends or family more than a few times a year (eight percent said they never talk about it).

Come January, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), a Cuban-American who has been a staunch hardliner on Israel, will take over as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; it’s hard to imagine her playing nice with members who sign on to J Street’s letters, let alone insert provisions urging pressure on the Israelis to settle with the Palestinians into foreign-aid bills. It’s harder still to imagine members of the new GOP caucus who will be willing to side with the group, which just before the election lost the support of its only Republican endorsee, Rep. Charles Boustany, a Lebanese-American Christian who ran unopposed in Louisiana. Finally, it’s not clear whether the Obama administration, beset with a host of pressing concerns heading into the 2012 campaign, will have the bandwidth to wade much deeper into the donnybrook of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

As I reported last week, J Street has an identifiable base of support among wealthy, liberal Jewish donors, many of whom are seasoned Democratic operatives with significant pull in the party. But the question remains: Can J Street mobilize the unaffiliated Jews into a real peace movement? Or will the much-touted J Street majority choose to remain silent?

How Did J Street Fare In the 2010 Midterm Elections? [The Jewish Channel]
Related: Heads Up [Tablet Magazine]
The Pulse-Taker [Tablet Magazine]
Why Are Jews Liberals? [Tablet Magazine]

The Senate’s Jewish composition went mostly as Dan Klein predicted a week ago: A gain in Connecticut (Democrat Richard Blumenthal, the newest Jewish senator, defeated Republican Linda McMahon); a loss in Wisconsin (Republican Ron Johnson defeated Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold); holds in New York, California, and Oregon (Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer, Barbara Boxer, and Ron Wyden). In the competition to replace Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pennsylvania), former Republican Rep. Pat Toomey beat Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak, in a proxy war between the Emergency Committee for Israel and J Street. Though how big a role Israel played is debatable, it is indisputably a big, albeit close, victory for Republicans in a bellwether state (and mazel tov to Toomey’s press secretary, Nachama Soloveichik, whom Allison Hoffman profiled). However, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado), who is of Jewish descent but does not identify with any religion (but does note that his mother was a Holocaust survivor), is too close to call in his bid for a come-from-behind victory over Republican challenger Ken Buck. (UPDATE: See 12 pm post.)

A final note on the Senate: While it was thought that Schumer had the inside line over Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) to lead the senior chamber’s Democratic caucus, that may change now that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nevada) pulled off an upset.

In the House, we now have a second Jewish Republican federal legislator: Meet future Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-New York), from upstate. [UPDATE: Hayworth is not Jewish, but considers herself an "honorary Jew" because she is married to one.] (There is also a new Democrat in Rep. David Cicilline (Rhode Island).) J Street-endorsed Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) easily brushed off Republican challenger Joel Pollak, who had made Israel a major issue in the race; just how the voting there breaks down is more telling than the result itself, which was all but foreordained. Perennial Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) faced a closer race than usual but nonetheless won convincingly. Rep. John Adler (D-New Jersey) lost to, of all things, a former Philadelphia Eagles offensive lineman (the Eagles may have a House seat, but they’re still waiting on that Lombardi Trophy). Rep. Ron Klein (D-Florida), of Boca, lost his seat after three terms. Outspoken Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Florida) was unseated after one term; the over-under on when he starts a semi-regular MSNBC gig is five weeks. Finally, Tablet Magazine favorite Shelley Berkley secured an easy seventh term; Democrats are celebrating in Vegas.

JTA has a complete list of the 27 Jewish congresspersons and 12 senators who will serve in the 112th Congress. Warning: It includes Bennet, who you could consider not Jewish, and anyway may not in the end hang on to his seat (truthfully, it looks like recount territory there).

Though several key Tea Party candidates went down to defeat—Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine “I’m You” O’Donnell in Delaware—Rand Paul, one of the first and most prominent and most explicitly Tea Party politicians, won the Kentucky Senate seat. James Besser called the result “bad for Jewish Republicans”: “The Republican Jewish Coalition conspicuously spurned Paul as being outside the GOP mainstream,” Besser reported. “This is the Republicans’ version of the Democrats’ Jesse Jackson problem, it seems to me. Embracing Paul won’t go over well with the RJC’s core constituency—mainstream Republicans. But rejecting him could cause problems with other—and possibly ascendant—elements of the party.” Of course, this is the microcosm of the larger narrative: After it is established that the brake has been put on President Obama’s agenda, the new storyline will follow the tension within the Republican Party between its establishment, much of which still keeps the Tea Party at arms’ length, and this powerful insurgent force.

Oh, and finally: Prop. 19, lost. Only outlaws—and anyone who puts in the minimal effort to get a prescription—will continue to smoke dope in the Golden State. No matter: Governor Moonbeam will figure it out.

• Jerusalem:Ankara::Tel Aviv:Istanbul. That is the only hope for salvaging the Turkish-Israeli alliance, writes Aluf Benn. [Haaretz]

• For four miles, the Washington, D.C., Beltway also serves as an eruv. [Historian for Hire]

• A J Street poll shows that attacks on Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), who is favored to defeat challenger Joel Pollak, have backfired among her own Jewish constituents. [J Street]

• Apropos Peter Balakian’s essay last week, today is Hug an Armenian Day. So, you know, get on that. [Facebook]

• Spook fans will love Tablet Magazine contributor Yossi Melman’s (very) inside look at how Israeli intelligence works. [Haaretz]

Don’t make Abe Foxman angry. You wouldn’t like Abe Foxman when he’s angry.

Abraham Foxman from Blue Pilgrimage on Vimeo.

The WJW article notes that former Rep. Pat Toomey, the Republican running for (and likely to win) the Pennsylvania Senate race—in other words, ECI’s chosen candidate in the midterm elections’ biggest proxy fight between it and J Street—has a history of voting against foreign aid, including for Israel (Toomey apparently said that he “feels Israel no longer needs economic aid, and should simply receive military assistance”). A “Democratic Hill operative” and J Street policy director Hadar Susskind both seized on the discrepancy, with the operative noting that, despite the fact that ECI will tell you it is nonpartisan, “If they’re anything more than a right-wing organization, they haven’t showed it yet.”

But of course ECI is a right-wing organization! It was founded by Bill Kristol; if you believe he is anything other than a Republican hack, then I’ve got a Weekly Standard subscription to sell you. But who cares? The way a two-party democratic system works is that individuals with idiosyncratic views get herded into one of two gigantic tents, and are then in turn forced, due to structural dynamics way beyond their controls, to go along with certain policies. (For example: Sen. Pat Toomey is going to vote for foreign aid on Israel, because he will have owed some of his election to ECI, which is itself an outfit highly connected to GOP institutions.) I am by no means attempting to single out the Republicans: J Street, too, is nominally nonpartisan, but, as Allison Hoffman reported today, the only Republican on their list of endorsees, Rep. Charles Boustany, backed out after the Soros revelations. J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami worked in the Clinton administration; its main pollster, Jim Gerstein, worked for the Democratic National Committee.

There is nothing wrong with this. If it didn’t work this way, our politics would probably operate less efficiently, and most people would have genuinely no idea whom to vote for. Susskind of J Street and Noah Pollak of ECI probably aren’t a priori hacks: They both, I don’t doubt, have deep-seated, well-thought-out, and earnest reasons for believing what they believe on Israel. But having formed those beliefs, they have then gone to work for organizations where circumstances require them to sound like hypocrites, and have journalists—we pure souls who are immune to this sort of thing—jump on them by taking what they say at face value (Pollak says that Toomey gets a pass because he voted against foreign aid “as a matter of larger fiscal principles,” not out of “a particular animosity toward Israel—far from it,” which, as Chait points out, is indeed a patently hypocritical thing to say given the candidates ECI opposes). What journalist should be doing is simply treating the groups as extensions, to at least fairly substantial extents, of the two major political parties.

The most interesting point Chait makes is not pouncing on Pollak’s contradiction; it’s when Chait concludes, “One thing you can say about the neocons: They’ve disproven the slur that everything they do is just cover for protecting Israel.” Well, yes and no. I have no doubt that most of the people at ECI do what they do primarily to protect Israel. But the most effective way to do that—particularly fewer than two weeks before Election Day—is to act like partisan hacks. If everybody just admitted this, we would actually, paradoxically, be more free to debate the actual issues.

Group’s New PAC Targets Candidates As ‘Anti-Israel’ [Washington Jewish Week]
Neocons Disprove Dual Loyalty Charge, Confirm Partisan Hackery Charge [Jonathan Chait]
Related: Head’s Up [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Emergency Committee v. J Street

In the two-and-a-half years since J Street launched, under the banner of “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” two competing narratives have emerged about the group. One is that by channeling the energy of the anti-war, anti-Bush Jewish left into the cause of Middle East peace, using grassroots organizing tactics borrowed from the playbook developed by MoveOn.org and put to good use by the Obama campaign, Ben-Ami and company have given voice to the inchoate frustration of many American Jews with the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians and their frustration with hawkish pro-Israel organizations, namely AIPAC, which was so famously expressed earlier this year in an essay by Peter Beinart of the New America Foundation. The opposing view is that J Street is a front for Democratic political operatives aligned with Obama, and potentially to his left on foreign policy, who hope to exploit the naive sympathies of liberal Jews for the political purpose of undermining the existing Washington consensus on Israel, thereby weakening AIPAC and other Jewish groups whose power depends in part on the perception that they speak on behalf of American Jewry.

Both versions are, to a greater or lesser degree, true. Last month, using an unredacted tax return that appeared on a public website, the Washington Times reported that J Street receives funding from the billionaire investor and social activist George Soros, a longtime critic of Israel, Zionism, and the American Jewish establishment. Though insiders had already assumed as much, the controversial revelation showed that Soros and his family gave J Street $245,000 in fiscal year 2008 as the first installment of a three-year, $750,000 commitment. Critics pounced on Ben-Ami, accusing him of repeatedly lying in interviews about Soros’ involvement, and intentionally obfuscating on the group’s website, which in a section titled “Myths and Facts about J Street” denies claims that Soros was a founder or “primary funder” of the group. “J Street’s Executive Director has stated many times that he would in fact be very pleased to have funding from Mr. Soros and the offer remains open to him to be a funder should he wish to support the effort,” the website said. In an update posted after the scandal erupted, the organization reiterated that Soros did not found J Street—though his senior Washington adviser, Morton Halperin, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration and a longtime critic of Israeli policy, was deeply involved in J Street’s inception and continues to serve as one of three members of the lobby’s executive committee.

Yet it remains the case that Ben-Ami has managed, in a remarkably short time, to build something unprecedented in the decades-long history of leftwing American Jewish activism: an organization with the capacity to raise millions of dollars to win political support for ideas about Israel and the peace process that are frequently at odds with the positions articulated by organs of the Jewish establishment. Whatever one thinks of J Street’s policies—which, among other things, include support for East Jerusalem becoming the capital of a future Palestinian state and firm opposition to new construction in the settlements until negotiations are complete—the group has succeeded in provoking a tremendous amount of debate about the political and emotional relationships of American Jews to Israel. “They have built up this thing, which is just this side of miraculous,” said Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.

Ben-Ami and the other progenitors of J Street stepped into the political vacuum left by the perennial inability of established leftwing groups—Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Ameinu, and a long list of long-defunct predecessors—to transcend policy disagreements, clashing egos, tiny budgets, and, according to many veteran activists, a general unwillingness to pick public fights with other Jewish groups. “I tried over the years to get the left to coalesce, and you’d be better off herding cats,” said Charney Bromberg, the former director of Meretz USA, the American branch of the leftwing movement also represented by an Israeli political party of the same name. “We were being totally outgunned by the right, and we consoled ourselves with the idea that we were in the right.” Now, Bromberg went on, “J Street has totally eclipsed the other organizations combined.”

The result is that Ben-Ami is now the de facto leader of the American Jewish left, and his counterparts at other organizations working on peace-related issues feel compelled to support him. “J Street has to succeed, and it has to grow,” said one member of the “peace camp” in Washington. “Now that it exists, we can’t afford to let it fail, because that would be seen as the failure of the left.”

***

J Street’s supporters are quick to point out that despite its meteoric rise, which was helped along by a generous 2009 profile in the New York Times Magazine, its budget is still just a fraction of the $60 million AIPAC attracted in the fiscal year 2008, the most recent for which documents are available—about $5 million this year across all operations, according to Ben-Ami, including a $500,000 grant from Jeff Skoll, a former eBay executive, who has partnered with Soros on recent initiatives in the Middle East. It’s harder for J Street to claim the role of scrappy David to AIPAC’s financial Goliath in light of Soros’ financial commitment, anchored by Halperin’s active role in the group. “He’s not in the office every day, poring over stuff,” Ben-Ami told me last week, in the last of a series of conversations this summer and fall, of his relationship with Halperin. “Basically we email, definitely every day.”

Indeed, according to Ben-Ami, the germ of the J Street idea sprouted in discussions with Halperin during the 2004 presidential election, when both men worked on Howard Dean’s campaign. “From day one I’d been talking to him,” Ben-Ami said. “He was almost the first person I talked to about this.” The vision that emerged from those conversations, and in other conversations with the marketing strategist David Fenton, the former Rolling Stone PR man and social activist for whose firm Ben-Ami worked after the campaign, bore obvious hallmarks of lessons learned from Dean’s run. The most important was the decision to abandon the humble fundraising attitudes of the left. “It’s a self-defeating world outlook that says, ‘We’re some poor minority backwater that will never raise money,’ ” Ben-Ami told me earlier this year. “We said, $10, $20, $30 million. You’ve got to have ambition.”

Ben-Ami set out asking for $1 million from initial donors—at around the same time that Benjamin Netanyahu was trolling the ranks of wealthy American Jews for contributions to his 2007 election campaign for the Likud leadership. Netanyahu’s target list, published last week by the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth, included pillars of established Jewish groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents: Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, Ronald Lauder, Ira Rennert, James Tisch, Leslie Wexner, and Mortimer Zuckerman. The hidden contributors revealed on J Street’s tax return show that Ben-Ami tapped instead into a parallel establishment with a great deal of influence both in Democratic politics and Jewish life. J Street received $25,000 from S. Daniel Abraham, the billionaire founder of Slim-Fast who is a longtime Clinton supporter and advocate for Middle East peace; $75,000 from Alan Sagner, a real-estate developer and former head of New York’s Port Authority whose daughter, Deborah, herself a progressive political activist, is on J Street’s board; and $25,000 from Robert Arnow, a major contributor to New York’s Federation who also helped found the Jewish Week. “I’ve been a radical all my life, somewhat, and I was imbued with the idea of another organization challenging the policies,” Arnow, now 86, explained in a phone interview. “I still have faith—I’ll give them a year or two and then we’ll see.”

J Street’s tax filing also included a $25,000 donation from Martin Bunzl, a Rutgers philosophy professor with long involvement in the political side of the peace movement, and $10,000 from Alan Solomont, a former Democratic National Committee finance chair who was a board member of the Israel Policy Forum during the Clinton years and is now the U.S. ambassador to Spain. There was also a $5,000 contribution from Hollywood heavyweights Phil Rosenthal, the producer of Everybody Loves Raymond, and his wife, Monica. And there was Elaine Attias, a feisty 86-year-old Democratic activist from Beverly Hills whose parents, Edward and Anna Mitchell, were such active and early donors to Israel that they became, according to the Los Angeles Times, the first Americans to have a square named in their honor in Jerusalem. “I’ve been involved with the Israeli situation for a long time,” Attias explained to me. “J Street was an opportunity to voice our concerns and express our support for the kind of Israel we want it to be.”

Continue reading: Breira, Clinton, and the J in J Street. Or view as a single page.

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to apartheid, called on a South African opera company not to perform in Israel, comparing the situation there to South Africa before reforms. [Arts Beat]

• Why the NBA’s new rule against arguing with the refs is un-Jewish. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• “Jeffrey Goldberg: animal lover.” [Jewish Journal]

• Meet the Israeli Tea Party! Because the world needed another. [JPost]

• Ron Kaplan notes that Dick Miles, the biggest ping-pong champion in American history, is a member of neither the International nor the National Jewish Hall of Fame. I smell a cause célèbre. [Kaplan’s Korner]

Igor Olshansky: You are a defensive lineman; tackling Ahmad Bradshaw is your job, so there is no need to celebrate so elaborately. Stop being a shanda and start getting your 1-5 team off the home-field schneid.

Two weeks ago, I predicted (with Nate Silver’s indispensable aid) that of the ten Jewish Senate races, the Tribe would hold onto seats in New York, California, and Oregon while gaining a seat in Connecticut, losing two in Wisconsin and Colorado, and falling short in Arizona, New Hampshire, and Ohio. The Pennsylvania seat, which currently belongs to Democrat Arlen Specter, is already lost. But two weeks is forever in politics, and the races in Colorado and Pennsylvania (which remains Jewish-related) have become competitive.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado), who is of Jewish descent, wants this to be about social issues, I said, since Republican Ken Buck tends to be to the right of most Coloradans on those issues. Bennet decided to listen to me and hammer Buck on Buck’s opposition to abortion. Then, playing on the same court, Buck made an unforced error on Meet the Press, comparing homosexuality to alcoholism (he walked back his comments afterward). Somewhere, Yehuda Levin was choking on a pastrami and salami sandwich. Keep a close watch on this one, which is basically a dead heat.

The Pennsylvania race between Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak and Republican former Rep. Pat Toomey (neither of whom is Jewish) has also narrowed. Sestak was even up in a few polls last week, for the first time in months. I said last time that this race is weird, and I’ll say it again. Nobody, Silver included, knows why the polls that changed did so, and Toomey will still likely win. (In fact, a tracking poll updated late last night showed him up 48-40) I can only assume that the J Street and Emergency Committee for Israel ads are finally having an effect. Or not.

Earlier: Jews in the Senior Chamber
Carl Paladino’s Betrayal of Reason

The New York Times’s Chicago News Cooperative reports that the main reason America’s Israel policy has become a leading issue in the race—or, more precisely, the main reason that Pollak was successfully able to make it a leading issue—is that the debate really concerns the president, who hails from the city to the south; received much of his early support from the Jewish community in the city’s north and north of the city; whose adviser, Alan Solow, a Chicagoan, is now arguably the most powerful man in American-Jewish institutional life; and whose ex-chief-of-staff, also an Orthodox Jew, is about to run for mayor of that city. Put it all together, and it makes sense that Pollak has been able to gain some traction by constantly bringing up the Jewish state and questioning Schakowsky’s support for it, among other ways by tying her to J Street; nevermind that Schakowsky has long been a staunch supporter of Israel by nearly anyone’s metric (AIPAC is a fan of hers).

Or has Pollak been able to gain traction? Attention might be the better word. Despite the heavily pro-Republican trends, Schakowsky will win re-election. Which is yet further evidence that when we’re talking about Israel in the 2010 elections, what we are really talking about is Israel in the 2012 elections.

Israel Becomes a Big Issue in Ninth District Race [NYT]
Related: The Go-Between [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Israel Unmentioned in Sestak Profile
Emergency Committee v. J Street
Dershowitz Endorses First Ever Republican

• Walter Russell Mead argues the problem with J Street isn’t whose money it took but its flawed view of who controls what happens in Israel. [American Interest]

• Nearly all American Jews believe a future Palestinian state should be required to recognize Israel’s Jewishness, according to the new AJC poll. [Rosner’s Domain]

• Christopher Hitchens traces and bemoans Hezbollah’s rise to prime player in contemporary Lebanese politics and life. [Slate]

• The kippah you bought in Jerusalem may have been made by West Bank Palestinians. [JTA]

• Tony Kushner, public intellectual. [NY Mag]

Last night, Lesley Stahl reported on the politically charged archaeological site at Silwan, an Arab neighborhood near Jerusalem.

The “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization looked on the ropes last month. It had, at best, obfuscated about having received roughly one-third of its revenue—some $245,000—for the period between July 2008 and July 2009 from controversial left-wing donor George Soros. It further turned out that Mort Halperin, a Soros confidante and senior adviser to Soros’s Open Society Institute, had been one of J Street’s unrevealed officers and directors—which critics seized on as the smoking-gun evidence that Soros wished to substantially influence the group.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the woodshed. J Street honcho Jeremy Ben-Ami apologized to the group’s board, and the board decided to stick with him. Ben-Ami apologized to supporters. It’s not a month later, and despite—because of?—calls from the right for candidates like Joe Sestak and Robin Carnahan to return J Street funds, J Street is back to raising money for its preferred candidates: Earlier this week for two New York Democrats; now for Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), who is facing a tough challenge from Republican Joel Pollak. In fact, Schakowsky is using calls for her to return J Street’s money—calls predicated on the Soros revelations—as fundraising leverage: “I reject calls by my GOP opponent to return campaign contributions from JStreetPAC,” she said, “and his cynical attempt to turn Israel into a partisan wedge issue at this delicate and potentially historic moment.”

J Street’s so-far successful strategy has been to change the conversation from whose money it took to what it and its opponents respectively stand for, and trust its opponents, who might have been feeling a touch of vindication from the Soros news, to overreach. Ben-Ami concluded his original apology, all the way back in September, by going on the offensive: “Those who attack J Street over the sources of its funding are not good government watchdogs,” he argued. “In reality, our opponents are on the other side of a broader ideological battle over American and Israeli policy, looking for any excuse to avoid debating the merits of the issues. They are defending an indefensible status quo and would lead us to a future that ensures perpetual conflict and violence, not long-term security for Israel or the United States.”

And it has worked. Kudos to James Besser for predicting all of this, also several weeks ago:

The ongoing, over-the-top opposition to J Street by so many Jews on the right—and even some Jewish leaders seen as centrists—may ultimately help limit the damage caused by the group’s inexplicably ham-handed actions on Soros.

J Street will “probably be saved by enemies who greatly overstate their case,” [former J Street legislative director Doug Bloomfield] said. “That hysteria is part of what put J Street on the map in the first place, and overreaction of those same enemies may save them from more damage.” …

J Street isn’t just wrong on the issue of the best route to peace for Israel, these critics say, it’s anti-Israel, it’s comprised of self-hating Jews, it’s a shill for a president who is determined to punish an Israel he despises and an apologist for Islamic terrorists.

And George Soros isn’t just a very rich guy who’s pretty far on the left and lacks warm fuzzies about Israel but a vicious Israel hater and probably an anti-Semite to boot.

We’ve heard this stuff since J Street was created in 2008, and if anything it’s just gotten more extreme in the past year. It’s a good bet it’ll be ratcheted up still further in the wake of the new revelations.

Such rhetorical overkill plays well with a lot of Republicans and with the Jewish right—but among Democrats it could very well produce a sympathetic backlash for a group that acted really stupidly by lying about Soros’ donations—but will be seen by many progressives as the victim of extremist rhetoric from the right despite that.

It would be wrong to call this a failure of Republican Jewish forces. They have assuredly raised a pretty penny from all of this themselves. The Emergency Committee for Israel is still getting its footing, but it will be around; its prime candidate, Rep. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, will probably defeat Sestak in their Senate race. But I do think the right’s pushback against J Street, and its broader pattern of misconstruing J Street’s agenda, actually gave J Street something to lean on as the winds of scandal raged. If that pushback hadn’t existed, would those winds have topled J Street? We’ll never know.

J Street Raises Money Off Raising Money Off J Street [Capital J]
Related: Will The Jewish Right Save J Street From Itself? [Political Insider]
Earlier: Soros Funding of J Street Revealed

Given his first-hand experience with how terrorism can shape political reality, Aznar more than any other European official is capable of deep sympathy with Israel. This partly explains why he is now using his name and reputation to found the Friends of Israel Initiative, which includes includes other world leaders, like Alejandro Toledo, the former president of Peru, and Czech playwright and one-time President Vaclav Havel, as founding members. “My conviction,” Aznar told me in a phone interview this week, “is that the best strategy to defend the West is to defend Israel.”

Israel, Aznar said, is not a Middle Eastern country but a Western country in the Middle East—the West’s first line of defense in the battle with Islamist radicals who seek to destroy Western freedom and terrorize whomever tries to stand in their way. “The harm done to Israel is damage done to the West,” Aznar said. “And delegitimizing Israel is a delegitimization of the West.”

While Aznar’s pro-U.S. sentiment was obvious to Spanish voters, his support of Israel was more muted. “There wasn’t that much opportunity to express this conviction in government,” Aznar told me. “But now I’m involved in a battle of ideas.” To express unequivocal support for the Jewish state is not the soundest political move in a country that historically has not been particularly friendly to Jews, from the Spanish Inquisition to the present day, when it has played host to massive public rallies in support of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Aznar admitted that “the majority of Spanish are extremely critical of Israel.” Radical Muslims, he explained, “help shape public opinion of Israel in Spain. And Europe is a kingdom of relativism. Our work is in convincing both the people of Europe as well as some of its leaders—and this is true even in the U.S. We are aware that there’s a long way to go, we’re at the beginning, but it’s a conviction we share with different people across the world.”

In the last few months, Aznar’s work has taken him to Israel, throughout Europe, and to the United States, where he also teaches at Georgetown University. In this full schedule of travel, he raises support for his international lobbying campaign to combat the global effort to delegitimize Israel.

The point of his organization, Aznar explained, is that it rallies the support, and solicits the membership, of non-Jews. His members are those who care deeply for both the living Israel and the biblical nation on which Western civilization was built. Unless one understands the history of the Jews and Judeo-Christian values, he said, “it’s impossible to understand the history of the Western world and Europe and where we come from.”

If many European (and American) elites believe that the world has moved beyond nationalism and toward a post-modern, multicultural utopia in which Jewish nationalism is a dangerous anachronism, Aznar will have nothing of it. For him, the evil that befalls Israel will eventually happen to the rest of us. Failure to defend Israel will only make all Western democracies more vulnerable.

The global left has shaped the debate on Israel in its efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state, leaving American liberals with a center that is skewed toward Israel’s murderous adversaries. Today’s Democratic party mainstream believes that the failure of Oslo is the exclusive responsibility of the Israeli right and has nothing to do with Arab terror, because that’s the political spectrum that the Western far-left and its Arab comrades-in-arms have framed for them—the same way that extremist groups in the Middle East regularly skew the regional political debate in the direction of their mad ideas.

Over the last decade, few have played a more public role in tilting polite opinion against Israel than George Soros. So, perhaps last week’s news that Soros is one of the main financial sponsors of J-Street shouldn’t come as a surprise—even though he and J-Street founder and director Jeremy Ben-Ami have denied since the group’s inception two years ago that the billionaire had provided any backing whatsoever. Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew, is considered by many in the Jewish community to be toxic, not least for arguing that anti-Semitism is the effect of Israel’s policies, rather than the polluted mental state of anti-Semites. Nonetheless, Soros has in the past funded some Jewish organizations, while others have said they’d be happy to have his support. J-Street’s leaders could have explained their decision to take money from Soros—or simply stated that they do not reveal the identities of their benefactors. Instead, Ben-Ami and his organization lied. Why J-Street chooses to operate in the shadows is perhaps less important than the fact that it does.

It is hard to see what credibility J-Street has left in light of the clear evidence that the organization consciously intended to manipulate and deceive the public, the press, and its own members to advance an agenda that was quite different than the one that it promoted in public statements. The fact that J-Street made Soros’ foreign policy guru Mort Halperin, an uncompromising opponent of Israel and vice president of the Open Society Institute, one of its five officers and directors suggests that the organization was not just taking the billionaire’s money but also following his political line.

Yet for these self-proclaimed friends of Israel it was rarely about Israel anyway. For them, Israel is a mirror image of those aspects of American culture that make them uncomfortable: nationalism, exceptionalism, and a muscular foreign policy. Scarier yet, Israel’s most uncomplicated supporters are Evangelical Christians and those American Jews who believe strongly in both American and Jewish nationalism, and among those who are strongly attached to religious practice. However little some self-conscious liberals may know about the particulars of the Middle East conflict, they know what side their domestic enemies are on.

The other side gets it, too: The Israeli flag Sarah Palin kept prominently displayed in her office as governor was not intended to secure Alaska’s Jewish vote but to fly her colors in the U.S. culture wars. Support for Israel can mean many things, some of which are affiliated, and others contradictory—saying no to terrorists and bullies, believing in Western values, accepting the truth of God’s promises in the Bible, feeling affinity for Jews, or just showing loyalty to allies. Israel is a cultural signifier of great power among all sorts of people, even in congressional districts where there are very few Jews and where Israel is only a tiny abstract fleck on a map.

However, as the former Spanish prime minister understands, this is not just a war of symbols. It’s a real war in which the fate of families and entire peoples is at stake, not just Israel but Europe, too—which is why he has chosen to take a stand. Jeremy Ben-Ami also has an inkling that the conflict is larger than policy debates in Washington and Jerusalem, that it’s a real war, which will shape the politics of the West for the next generation—and that’s why he lied.

Having Soros as a donor isn’t ideal politically—whether it should or shouldn’t be, it isn’t—and J Street has been notable for wanting to be an effective political actor, not just an emotionally satisfying outlet. “Our No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back,” Ben-Ami told the New York Times Magazine. Taking Soros’s money, by itself, is manageable politically; appearing as though it was trying to hide it is a larger problem. (For one thing, I suspect this blocking back is about to be benched until at least after the midterms.) The point is, this screw-up should upset no one as much as J Street’s supporters.

Here is Ben-Ami’s explanation, which he offered only yesterday:

I accept responsibility personally for being less than clear about Mr. Soros’ support once he did become a donor. I said Mr. Soros did not help launch J Street or provide its initial funding, and that is true. I also said we would be happy to take his support. But I did not go the extra step to add that he did in fact start providing support in the fall of 2008, six months after our launch.

J Street’s commitment to Israel ought to be judged solely on its positions and actions. But it won’t be, and Jeremy Ben-Ami knows it won’t be, which strongly suggests that he made a conscious decision to hide the Soros connection. (In 2007, Soros wrote in the New York Review of Books, “AIPAC under its current leadership has clearly exceeded its mission, and far from guaranteeing Israel’s existence, has endangered it.”) Additionally, on its Website, J Street asked to be judged as an organization that had not taken Soros’s money (here is the essential reading).

Which leads to the real point: The group indisputably just lost a lot of credibility. Fair or not, fallacial critiques or not, when someone as high-profile and controversial as Soros gives you money—and when you accept it—you need to voluntarily disclose this, even if no one asks you about it. Moroever, given that people apparently did ask about it, only to be basically dismissed, why should we continue to believe J Street’s leadership about, well, anything? (Incidentally, reporter Eli Lake was able to access the relevant documents, which should have been private, due to an IRS error. But if J Street thought this would never come out, then which political/media system did it think it was operating in?)

Finally, Soros has a history of using his (substantial) political philanthrophy to advance his own agenda. Which does not prove that J Street went along with him in this instance; but it does add to the need for there to have been disclosure.

James Besser strikes the right note (while reminding us that there are several elections in November):

Why this is stupid: there’s no way this information wasn’t going to come out.

There’s no way this revelation, coming after two years of denials, will not be seen as confirmation in the minds of many that J Street is what its detractors say—a group that is something less than pro-Israel. The critics, it turns out, were right about Soros; isn’t that going to fan suspicion they were right about other things, as well?

There’s no way this isn’t going to make the politicians supported by J Street and those who may be considering accepting its endorsement incredibly nervous. Instead of providing protection for the politicians they supported, J Street essentially hung them out to dry—not by accepting Soros money, but by lying about their connection to the controversial philanthropist.

And there’s no way this doesn’t sow mistrust among commentators and reporters who write and speak about J Street, and who were repeatedly misled by its officials. J Street sought to create a climate of trust with a press corps that was being spun heavily by its opponents; this news undoes a lot of that effort.

Soros Revealed as Funder of of Liberal Jewish-American Lobby [Washington Times]
Explanation of George Soros & J Street Funding [J Street]
J Street in a Tough Spot Over Soros Funding Revelations [Political Insider]
J Street’s Half-Truths and Non-Truths About Its Funding [Atlantic]
Related: On Israel, America, and AIPAC [NYRB]

• Elif Batuman examines what is to become of Franz Kafka’s papers? [NYT Magazine]

• A private Israeli security guard shot a Palestinian dead in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Clashes have since ensued. Gulp. [LAT]

• Russia is nixing the planned sale of sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to Iran in deference to the U.N. sanctions. [JPost]

• J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami calls on Prime Minister Netanyahu to extend the freeze (and J Street is running a whole bunch of print ads backing him up). [JTA]

• American Jews’ outsize political influence runs headlong into disproportionately un-Jewish Iowa’s outsize political influence. [Jewish Week]

• Yesterday, former President Clinton fingered not only settlements but also Russian immigrants in Israel as obstacles to peace. [Foreign Policy]

• Harold Bloom on Isaac Bashevis Singer. [NYRB]

• President Abdullah Gul talks Turkey … and Israel and Iran. [WP]

• Matt Duss compares what Helen Thomas and Martin Peretz said, and contrasts their fates. [Boston Globe]

• A profile of JDub Records artist Clare Burson, whose new album is Holocaust-inspired. [NYT]

• Barry Gewen situates the Park51 controversy in the broader American historical context. [Entanglements]

• Support the (Jewish) troops! While there are plenty of military rabbis, there is a severe shortage of Torahs. [Arutz Sheva/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Israeli know-how + Chinese manufacturing = a lot of money for one Israeli private-equity fund (maybe). [WSJ]

• Fascinating first-person essay from a Jewish U.S. Marine. Reminded me of “Defender of the Faith”. [Commentary]

• A Serious Man lead Michael Stuhlbarg plays Arnold Rothstein in HBO’s new Boardwalk Empire. [Jewish Journal]

• Mayor Bloomberg opposed a state investigation into Park51’s funding: “I think it’s a terrible precedent. You don’t want them investigating donations to religious organizations.” [City Room]

• There’s a lot of tension between the Israeli government and private companies/investors over the new natural gas fields. [WSJ]

• The Emergency Committee for Israel-J Street spat continues. Only in August, folks. [Ben Smith/Ben Smith]

• Despite Jewish QB Sage Rosenfels’s awesome preseason play, Coach Brad Childress insists that mediocre Tarvaris Jackson will be the Minnesota Vikings’s second-string snap-taker. (#4 is starting.) [AP/NYT]

• Popular indie band LCD Soundsystem is getting Facebook wall-spammed because of its plans to play a Tel Aviv gig. [Negev Rock City]

Here’s my favorite LCD Soundsystem song, “North American Scum.”

Here is what is not mentioned in the piece: Israel.

And here is why that is notable: The Emergency Committee for Israel—the group, co-founded last month by William Kristol, whose explicit mission is to put strongly pro-Israel candidates into Congress (and, eventually, the White House)—made Sestak (who, like Toomey, is Catholic) its first and biggest target, arguing that he is weak on Israel, in turn prompting an angry response from the candidate and a war with J Street, which has endorsed Sestak and can generally be thought of, politically, as the Emergency Committee’s mirror image.

Within the Jewish community, and the broader community that places a high premium on the United States’s stance toward Israel, this is one of the biggest midterm races, precisely because of the Israel issue. And yet the Times Magazine—which isn’t exactly known for ignoring issues Jews tend to be interested in—did not think the issue even merited mention. (It is not that the piece is generally narrow: Even the gun issue comes up.) (Update: A J Street spokesperson and an Emergency Committee spokesperson said their groups were not contacted.)

You could argue that is a poor editorial decision, of course. But you could also argue, as the piece implicitly does, that Israel simply isn’t a widely resonant issue in an election year when voters are unusually worried about the jobs they have lost and the jobs they may lose. The fact that the issue is not seen as major in a classic toss-up state with a Jewish demographic (2.3 percent) nearly identical to the country’s, where several interest groups have gone out of their way to make it an issue, should tell us something about how much—which is to say, how little—impact it is thought to have on the populace.

Joe Sestak, the 60th Democrat [NYT]
Earlier: Emergency Committee v. J Street
Kristol’s New Group Draws Attention
How Does Kristol Do It?

Many have said that the notion of “support for Israel” should be redefined because, sometimes, the way for the United States to be Israel’s best friend is to criticize it; that, in the case of American backing of Israel, there is such a thing as loving not wisely, but too well. This is, broadly speaking, the J Street line: We are “pro-Israel,” it says, but part of that involves telling Israel that, say, continued settlement beyond the Green Line, combined with demographic trends, is actually bad for Israel.

Certainly you could find plenty of people to agree with that notion. But these Democratic talking points indicate that the alternate, tough-love definition of “pro-Israel” has not penetrated the broader domestic political consciousness. The Obama administration and national Democrats are still playing by the old “pro-Israel” rules, which almost certainly favor the other side. As far as the midterms are concerned, the government that supports Israel best supports it most.

Meanwhile, the newly formed Emergency Committee for Israel is working hard to make sure that Jews don’t again turn out in droves for the Democrats, as executive director Noah Pollak told Haaretz. Its attack on Senate candidate Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pennsylvania) is only the beginning. “We saw an effort to improve the image of the relationship,” Pollak said, referring to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s White House visit earlier this month, “but there is a big question about what happens after the midterm elections. It wasn’t long ago that the administration was openly questioning the very fundamentals of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Is Obama going to tack back to that stance?”

Shmuel Rosner has thoughts on the talking points, namely, that they show the Democrats are fine on Israel, but not necessarily as strong as the previous administration.

Ron Kampeas fisks them at length, and while he gives great credit to Obama on a couple subjects—including the administration’s funding of Israel’s “Iron Dome” rocket-defense system, which required millions of additional dollars, and taking a hard-line against Turkey’s recent official anti-Israel stance—for the most part, Kampeas notes that the administration’s touted “support” is really just stuff that any plausible administration, of whatever political stripe, would have done.

And yet, Kampeas makes this extremely valuable point: “Since some conservatives routinely accuse Obama of being ‘the worst president’ for Israel, ever, cross my heart, since before time, it’s worth yanking folks back into the reality that he is maintaining a broad pro-Israel protocol.” Truth.

As Vote Nears, Berman Stresses Dem Israel Support [JTA]
The Berman Notes—A Closer Look [Capital J]
U.S.-Israel Tensions Boost Conservatives Ahead of Midterms [Haaretz]
Earlier: How Does Kristol Do It?
Emergency Committee v. J Street

(By the way, for a great take on Kristol’s committee-forming-mania, read Jonathan Chait.)

Now, the New York Times has smartly compared and contrasted the two groups’ pro- and anti-Sestak ads (which you can find after the jump).

The Emergency Committee attacked Sestak’s 2007 praise for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has subsequently been accused of being a Hamas front. “The target audience,” says the Times, “is not really Jewish voters in Philadelphia and its suburbs—they tend to be a reliable Democratic constituency and an important source of campaign donations. Rather, the ad is aimed more at mobilizing the right and evangelicals in support of Mr. Sestak’s Republican opponent, former Representative Pat Toomey.”

J Street responded by depicting Sestak’s repeated insistences of support for the Jewish state. “It does not dwell on the finer points of the attack but goes big picture,” the Times notes, “casting Mr. Sestak as a defender of Israel. By featuring President Obama, the ad suggests that J Street, anyway, believes that the link will be a plus for Mr. Sestak in November, or at least for its cause.”

The Committee’s ad:

J Street’s ad:

A Punch and a Counterpunch in Pennsylvania Senate Race [NYT]
Related: J Street Defends Sestak [Ben Smith]
Bill Kristol Unwittingly Joins The Left’s Campaign Against Israel [TNR]
Earlier: How Does Kristol Do It?

• South Africa is sending its ambassador to Israel, whom it recalled in the aftermath of the flotilla raid, back to the Holy Land. [Haaretz]

• J Street cuts an ad defending Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pennsylvania), a Senate candidate, implicitly picking a fight with Bill Kristol’s new outfit, the Emergency Committee for Israel. [Ben Smith]

• Berlin’s Jewish Museum received approval to buy the necessary land for a $13 million addition, also to be designed by architect Daniel Libeskind. [JTA]

• A Greek-born Israeli had a doctor treat him for the first time in 65 years after having a heart attack. Why had he avoided medical professionals? Because he had been one of Josef Mengele’s “patients” at Auschwitz. [Negev Rock City]

• Woody Allen is predictably curmudgeonly (at best) explaining why he recorded audio versions of his four humor books. [Arts Beat]

Seinfeld goes the thriller route.

• Mort Zuckerman says he helped write one of President Obama’s speeches. It isn’t a very credible claim. [Ben Smith]

• Jerusalem was named Travel + Leisure’s “Best City” in the Middle East/Africa region. [Travel + Leisure]

• Brooklyn kosher fish company Dagim is donating 2500 portions of fish to New York’s Masbia kosher soup kitchens. [WSJ]

• David Berkowitz, a.k.a. the Son of Sam, who became a born-again Christian in jail two decades ago, has gained many admirers in the evangelical world. [NYT]

• Prompted by last week’s Times article, J Street has called for a U.S. Treasury investigation into pro-settler charities. [JTA]

My favorite Seinfeld Steinbrenner scene. Although, as Queens residents, wouldn’t the Costanzas be Mets fans?

| MySpace Video

Wexler, who arrived late, stood by himself through the hourlong presentation, leaning against a wall near the back of the room with his soft black leather Dell briefcase between his feet. At 49, he was at least a decade younger than most of the other men in attendance, though he sports similarly silvered hair, and he kept his hand pensively over his chin for much of the talk. Dayan expressed his opposition to the current U.S. effort to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations using 1967 borders as the basis for a future Palestinian state. During the question-and-answer session, Wexler raised his hand and asked, pointedly, “General Dayan, how could it be in any respect a smart strategy to treat in this fashion your most important ally?” Dayan looked surprised. “Rabbi Wexler,” he began, before someone at the front corrected him. “I’m not challenging the White House or the so-important friendship with the United States,” Dayan said. “I’m challenging how important borders are.”

Wexler may have been unfamiliar to the general, but others in the room knew exactly who he was. In his six months as president of Abraham’s Center for Middle East Peace, Wexler has adopted an unofficial role as ambassador to the organized American Jewish community. As a congressman, he managed to retain support from both J Street, the dovish two-year-old Israel lobby, and the more conservative AIPAC, which commended him earlier this year as “one of the stalwart leaders of the American-Israel alliance in Congress.” After last week’s luncheon, hosted by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Wexler stayed behind for a quiet tête-à-tête with the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dore Gold, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first premiership a decade ago, and who addressed the lunch gathering along with Dayan.

In March 2007, Wexler endorsed Barack Obama, breaking not just with other Jewish Democrats in South Florida but with his own long history as an early and fervent supporter of the Clintons, starting in 1992. Today, he is frequently mentioned as a potential ambassador to Israel—a position currently filled by James Cunningham, a career diplomat who went to Tel Aviv in the waning days of the George W. Bush Administration. “It’s a position he could have at the snap of his fingers,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who served under President Bill Clinton as a special envoy for Holocaust-era claims and is a special State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton on Holocaust issues. “He could do a world of good for the administration, because at the end of the day [the Israelis] have to have trust in the American administration, and there is no one better placed than Bob to make that argument.”

The visit to New York followed a high-profile dinner Wexler and Abraham hosted at Washington’s Newseum for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during his visit to Washington in early June. The guest list included the billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman and Lee Rosenberg, an Obama supporter who is currently the president of AIPAC, along with political heavyweights like Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, and Stephen Hadley, who held the job under George W. Bush, and his former deputy, Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Middle Eastern affairs under Bush. The center Wexler runs is “a meeting spot where people from all segments of the community can come together and hear reasonable points of view,” said J Street President Jeremy Ben Ami, who was also at the event.

Publicly, Wexler is probably best known for his 2006 appearance on Comedy Central’s satire show The Colbert Report, on which Stephen Colbert coaxed him into repeating the sentence: “I enjoy cocaine because it’s fun to do.” Wexler spent a dozen years representing Boca Raton, one of the most Jewish and most reliably Democratic districts in the House of Representatives. As a member of the influential Foreign Affairs committee, he was particularly active in establishing a congressional caucus on U.S.-Turkish relations and went out of his way to travel to places like Saudi Arabia and Syria, where, according to an account in Wexler’s autobiography, Fire-Breathing Liberal, President Bashar al-Assad gave him messages to carry to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Serving in government is an extraordinary honor, whether it’s in Congress or in any other capacity, but there are other ways to participate in a meaningful way as well,” Wexler said in an interview in late June. We were in his Washington office, on the fifth floor of a building overlooking the colonnaded Navy Memorial plaza along Pennsylvania Ave., where he keeps the bronze plaque from the entrance to his old House office leaning against the windowsill. Framed photographs of him posing with various leaders—Netanyahu, Sharon, Obama, King Abdullah—compete for space with framed newspaper clippings from his Florida political career.

Wexler, who was in shirtsleeves, favors blue ties that match his eyes and tends to rap his fingertips on tabletops when he is particularly emphatic about a point he’s making. He refused to say whether he had been offered the ambassadorship, formally or informally. (The White House declined to comment for this story.) But Wexler has publicly, and repeatedly, said his decision to leave Congress was motivated in part by financial concerns—he has three teenage children—and acquaintances speculate that his hesitance about returning to government service, even as an ambassador, stems from the same pressures. (Members of Congress are paid $174,000 annually; Wexler declined to disclose his current salary, which is not reflected in the Center’s most recent financial filings.) Over the years, Wexler explained, “Danny would joke with me and ask when I was going to leave Congress and get a real job.” The jibe turned into a real prospect after Obama’s election invigorated Abraham about the prospects for reaching a peace agreement—an irony, he added, since Abraham, a longtime supporter of the Clintons, had initially been sharply critical of his decision to back Obama. Now he shuttles around on extra-diplomatic excursions—Israel and the West Bank, Turkey, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan—aboard Abraham’s private jet.

Abraham, an 85-year-old World War II veteran, founded the Center for Middle East Peace in 1989, with Wayne Owens, a Democratic congressman from Utah who had served on the foreign affairs and intelligence committees, at its helm. Together, the pair met with Yasser Arafat in 1989, in Tunisia, then an extraordinary step, and went on to cultivate relationships with leaders across the Middle East. “They would come see us and the national security adviser and occasionally the president to brief us on meetings they’d had with various Israeli and Arab leaders and give us ideas,” said Robert Malley, who served on the staff of the National Security Council and as a special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton Administration. He recalled that Abraham had called the White House from Israel with both Ehud Barak and Arafat on the line after the failure of negotiations at Camp David. Of Abraham’s center, Malley said, “It’s not going to change history, but in his position you can’t hope to do more than that—he has access and he can bring people together.”

Owens died unexpectedly in December 2002 after having a heart attack on the beach in Tel Aviv during a trip with Abraham, who subsequently wound down the center’s $14 million operation. Owens was deeply beloved in official Washington, but as a Mormon, he never had Wexler’s entree into the official world of American Jewry. Wexler, a Queens native who grew up in South Florida, where his father owned a deli, made his first trip to Israel on his honeymoon, after his wife, Laurie, said she didn’t like the idea of marrying someone who hadn’t been to the Jewish state. He was elected to Congress in 1996 after six years in the Florida State Senate and was drafted onto the Foreign Affairs committee by Lee Hamilton, a veteran Democratic congressman from Indiana who subsequently served on the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group. “He was a natural,” says Hamilton, who is currently president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “He’s always been very close to the Jewish community and a very strong advocate for the Democratic Party, and I think he’s played a hugely important role in bridging the gaps that sometimes arise between the two.”

Now Wexler’s task is not just to maintain open channels among the Americans, Israelis, and Arabs—it’s to continue applying additional glue to the relationship between the Obama Administration and the American Jewish community. “My understanding with Danny was that I had only one red line, or only one rule, and that is that we would work in coordination and consistent with the Obama Administration,” Wexler said. “I believe the course that President Obama is pursuing is compelling in terms of what is in the best interests of the state of Israel.” He echoed recent administration talking points about the closeness of the U.S.-Israeli military and intelligence relationships and added another example to counter claims of anything like a rift between Washington and Jerusalem: phone calls made by George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, to voting countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development this spring encouraging them to accept Israel as a member.

None of that, though, speaks to the fundamental anxiety increasingly pervasive in some Jewish quarters about where the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is heading. Last week, Wexler met with Ehud Barak during the Israeli defense minister’s visit to Washington; he has extended an invitation to host a gathering for Netanyahu when the prime minister is scheduled to be in town next week. But, like everyone, Wexler is looking ahead to the expiration of the settlement-construction freeze in September, and like everyone, he can’t predict whether or not the current proximity talks will lead to a resumption of direct, Camp David-style negotiations. “The plan is to create the dynamic in which the Israelis and the Palestinians can engage in direct negotiations. That’s the plan. It’s tedious, it’s painful, and for every two steps forward there’s one step back, but that’s the plan,” Wexler told me. He deflected the question of whether he anticipated a grand proposal from the Obama Administration, in the event that the proximity talks fail to progress. “I don’t think it makes any sense to foreshadow what might happen four months from now, or five months from now, should there not be direct negotiations,” he said. “Because I am confident and hopeful there will be.”

That optimism is a hallmark of the style Abraham and Owens established two decades ago, during the hopeful era of the Oslo accords. “They had more fire and determination than anyone else on the block,” Malley said. “And Wexler shares this attitude of, ‘We have a vision, it makes sense.’ ” Obama’s election revived Abraham’s resolve to fight for the establishment of a two-state deal, Wexler said. “I think he felt that coming off the eight years of the Bush Administration, because of the Intifada and because of the two wars, the opportunity for negotiating a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians and an end to conflict was so remote, that the next two or three years were the best last opportunity for a two-state solution.”

Wexler said that Abbas, at the Newseum dinner, warned about the increasingly vocal campaign among Palestinians against continuing to pursue the two-state model. “People need to understand that while the two-state solution may seem difficult to attain—it’s riddled with uncertainty, it’s riddled with risks and painful compromises—but the alternative is not paradise. It’s not some golden status quo,” Wexler went on. “The alternative is the one-state solution, and the one-state solution will amount to a state that is no longer Jewish. And I for one am not for that.”

As Marissa Brostoff predicted yesterday, Goldberg both sat and positioned himself to Ben-Ami’s right. It was Ben-Ami’s home court: his “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group organized the event under the rhetorical title, “Who speaks for me?” But Goldberg was the agitating gadfly, prodding his interlocutor with questions on a broad range of topics, from J Street’s overall role to the sanctity of the Temple Mount. Ben-Ami revealed his experience as a communications pro, crafting his responses clearly and carefully.

The two departed significantly on the tactics and pragmatism of America’s Middle East policy, which Goldberg promptly put down in his blog this morning. But I found another point of contention in their dialogue far more interesting. Early in the discussion, Ben-Ami voiced his adamant concern that Israel was increasingly becoming “illiberal,” a shift he saw as a fundamental affront to “Jewish values.” Goldberg countered with a sharp critique that, essentially, called into question much of J Street’s work. “What if you, as an American Jew,” he asked, “don’t have a stake in Israel?” The reality, Goldberg asserted, is that critics here, thousands of miles away, would not directly “suffer the policy consequences” of certain proposals as viscerally as Israelis would. “I’m still not sure,” Goldberg said, “that it is the right of American Jews to lecture Israel.”

Later, Goldberg questioned Ben-Ami on the validity of Jewish claims to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The J Street founder responded firmly that the Israeli Jews should concede the religious symbol to neutral control. The “concept of ownership and sovereignty,” he asserted, is the kernel of the problem, and has led to unnecessary bloodshed. His claim that, in order to achieve peace, he would give up a “little bit of land” was met with thick applause. As it subsided, Goldberg demurred: “Unlike you, I defer to the Israelis.” A more scattered but still strong applause followed.

But Ben-Ami stood his ground, insisting on a “Zionist imperative to tell Israel the truth,” to “hold up a mirror” to the nation. And the men agreed that the reflection is not pretty. Ben-Ami stated, repeatedly, that Israel was swiftly becoming a “pariah state.” Their discussion about Israel’s further isolation in the region invariably turned to Peter Beinart’s recent claim of a serious departure of American Jews from Zionism. Contra Beinart’s narrative, Ben-Ami suggested that the true rift was “ideological and religious” and not national or generational.

The hour-plus dialogue veered in a host of interesting directions, including a spirited debate on the successes of and threats to Israeli’s hard-fought civil liberties. (One of my favorite moments was Goldberg’s description of his discomfort with living as a foreigner in Israel: He shortly learned the nation was not simply “Great Neck with sand.”) .

Unfortunately, most of the audience questions did not elicit fascinating commentary. Curated by a J Street board member, they were primarily sweeping, near impossible inquiries on the peace process (i.e. “What is the greatest single obstacle to peace?” “The settlement enterprise,” Ben-Ami responded.) One audience member asked about the best book on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The hosts listed a few but both agreed that there was, as Goldberg put it, a “striking lack of books” that include the sincerity and depth of their conversation. He just might write one, he offered. We’ll take you up on that, Jeff.

Me and Jeremy Ben-Ami Down By The Schoolyard [Atlantic]
Earlier: Boycotting Hits the Mainstream

No one on the panel—including the anti-BDSers, former Forward newspaper editor J.J. Goldberg and Kathleen Peratis, a J Street board member and onetime New Israel Fund vice president—felt uncomfortable asserting that after decades of administering an occupation, Israel has basically gone rogue. But this underlying assumption is treated in much of the Jewish world as an apostasy, which is why Goldberg and Peratis were by far the more mesmerizing side of the debate to watch. J Street, in particular, has been answering to critics from the right since its birth; in fact, that’s why it was born at all. (This evening, in a lovely bit of symmetry, J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami will be debating a different Goldberg—that would be Atlantic writer and Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey—who will, presumably, be sitting to Ben-Ami’s right.) But there are plenty of Jews, and Jewish organizations, to the left of J Street as well, albeit ones who are usually left out, and sometimes explicitly blacklisted, from talking to anyone in the community beyond themselves. Watching Goldberg and Peratis reorient themselves to define their positions when challenged from that, other side was fascinating and a bit vertiginous.

Goldberg and Peratis differentiated sharply between Israel-the-occupier, which they condemned—Peratis said she even supported boycotting products made in the settlements—and Israel-the-Jewish-state, even if this latter thing, which they support, is corroded, they said, by the former.

Their pro-BDS opponents—led by Hannah Mermelstein, a member of the pro-BDS group Adalah New York, and Yonatan Shapira, an Israeli-air-force-pilot-turned-left-wing-activist (and, from a show of hands, representing more than half the audience)—convincingly laid out the problem and, perhaps, illusion of the distinction between Israel-the-occupier and Israel-the-Jewish-state.

One of the smartest ripostes to the anti-BDS team came from a young Palestinian man in the audience (apparently one of a few non-Jews present) who asked Peratis why she’d agree to boycott the settlements themselves but not the government that supports them. In response, Peratis stumbled back to her main talking point, which was that the BDS movement wanted to boycott, divest from, and sanction such a large and unwieldy list of things that it would never be effective.

In a less effective tack, the pro-BDSers argued that Israel’s Jewishness and its mistreatment of Palestinians were inextricably linked—a familiar argument in leftist discourse, but one that painted them into a radical corner from which it was more difficult to make pragmatic arguments in support of their cause.

At one point, Shapira asked Goldberg whether he would support BDS if the occupation was still in place in 10 years, or if Israel “killed 14,000 Palestinians.” It was a mean, counterfactual question, and Goldberg could have ignored it. Instead, he said, “Then I would consider my life’s work a failure.”

By high school debate team standards, I’d say Goldberg and Peratis—who were, incidentally, a generation older than their opponents—won the argument: They were elegant, composed, consistent, and, perhaps most to the point, stayed on the topic of tactics rather than getting lost in the ideological mission creep that often hobbles the left. But in a different sense, their opponents won before the debate even started by getting mainstream Jewish community figures to engage them in a church basement at all.

An audience member named Meredith Tax put it best: “A meeting like this hasn’t happened in my presence since before I was born,” she said, to cheers and laughter from the crowd. Tax, it turned out, was born in 1942.