To put it a different way: anyone can find isolated anti-Semites at these occupations. And, as Michelle Goldberg and I have both written, Occupy Wall Street’s constitutional inability to condemn anti-Semitism is a limitation, though it is no more able to condemn practically anything else.

But, look, it’s really not. If you don’t believe me, consult this handy list of statements from both the usual liberal suspects as well as the Anti-Defamation League and even the Emergency Committee for Israel’s Noah Pollak, all denying that the movement is fundamentally anti-Semitic. And consult, too, this Statement Against Smears signed by J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami, Eliot Spitzer, American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten, and others. “It’s an old, discredited tactic: find a couple of unrepresentative people in a large movement and then conflate the oddity with the cause. One black swan means that all swans are black,” they declare. “It is disingenuous to raise the canard about Jews and Wall Street in order to denounce it.” At this late date, for a Weekly Standard blogger to write, under a video of a couple of Jew-hating assholes who appeared at an occupation, “This is a protest aimed at bankers with a certain element who perversely want to blame the Jews for all of this country’s problems,” is incredibly irresponsible and dishonest. Just, stop.

Jewish Leaders Denounce Right-Wing Smears of Occupy Wall Street [Occupy Judaism]
Putting the ‘OWS Is Anti-Semitic’ Meme to Rest [Occupy Judaism]
Related: One Percent [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Is Occupy Wall Street Anti-Semitic?
Who By Fire, Who By Drum Circle?

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]

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.

• 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.

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

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.

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]

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.

You know the old saw about how it’s always really hot on Jewish holidays? Apparently it applies to secular celebrations, too: A late-spring heat wave blanketed Washington, D.C., and while a few lucky guests bypassed the sidewalk security queue—Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols, we’re looking at you—for most of the 200 or so honorees, the weather turned out to be a great equalizer that left everyone just as damp as everyone else. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman panted his way down 15th Street, jacket slung over his shoulder, trailed by J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami. Chabad emissary Chaim Bruk, in from Montana, sweated it out with former Dallas Cowboys lineman Alan Veingrad. A lucky few clustered beneath the shade of umbrellas, which were originally packed for the predicted thunderstorms.

But never mind. There was air-conditioning in the grand hall behind the north Portico, and the Marine Band played a selection of Gershwin and Irving Berlin favorites from the (Jewish) American Songbook. There was a bar serving everything from club soda to Kedem, and waiters circulating with trays of kosher goodies. Press wasn’t allowed in to this portion of the day, but food writer (and Tablet Magazine contributor) Joan Nathan told The Scroll that the crew from Dahan Caterers put out an Israeli-inflected hors d’oeuvres smorgasbord that included eggplant salad, sweet couscous, and fresh tomatoes. Still, some people skipped it. “I stuff myself on my own time,” Gary Rosenbaum, a Democratic donor who is also the chairman and CEO of Empire Kosher Poultry, told us. “I like to talk to people at things like this.”

What people? Well, there was American-born Israeli ambassador Michael Oren and Solicitor General (oh, and U.S. Supreme Court nominee) Elena Kagan; author Judy Blume, and the Olympic swimmer Dara Torres; actor Theodore Bikel and a delegation from Hawaii, decked out in cheerful floral leis. “I really wanted to make sure it wasn’t only Jews at the event,” explained Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic Florida congresswoman. Along with forcibly outgoing Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pennsylvania), Wasserman Schultz spearheaded the legislation that in 2006 got May declared Jewish American Heritage Month. She said she’s been pestering to get an event at the White House ever since. “The point was to celebrate our culture and contribution with people who aren’t Jewish so they can learn about our community,” she explained.

There were notably few leaders of established Jewish communal organizations, though Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations chair Alan Solow (whom I have profiled) and Jewish Federations of North America head Jerry Silverman did show. The White House made an effort, according to several people familiar with the planning, to invite people who weren’t at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’s Hanukkah party in December, including younger Jewish innovators like Shawn Landres, of JumpStart, Rabbi Sharon Brous of Los Angeles’s Ikar religious community, and Aaron Bisman, of JDub Records, who is a noted FOTM (Friend of Tablet Magazine).

After an hour or so, the assembly was ushered into the ornate East Room, where two rows were reserved for attending members of Congress—a group that included Minnesota Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota). Specter sat in the front row, alongside Vice President Joe Biden and First Lady Michelle Obama, who floated in wearing a navy-and-white polka-dot dress and navy patent-leather pumps; joining them were Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had on a ladylike pair of black lace gloves with her black-and-white outfit.

Justices Ginsburg and Breyer; the Vice President; the First Lady.

Obama discussed the 350-year history of Jews in America, and repeated his promise that the bond between the United States and Israel is “unbreakable.” People clapped. As he stepped down to take his seat, a little boy—who turned out to be 8-year-old Logan Schayes, grandson of NBA Hall of Famer Dolph Schayes and son of former Orlando Magic center Danny Schayes and Olympic diver Wendy Lucero—ran up to present the president with a rolled-up photograph of the NBA’s 50 greatest players. “He’s such a basketball fan, I thought he’d enjoy it,” the eldest Schayes, now 82, said when Tablet Magazine caught up with him later in the afternoon.

Then Alysa Stanton, the first female African-American rabbi, stood and read Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” (did we mention Nextbook Press has published a Lazarus biography by Esther Schor?) and singer/songwriter Regina Spektor nervously worked her way through her hits “Us” and “The Sword and the Pen.” More than a few people held up cell phones and video cameras, but not everyone was so thrilled. “I left the room because she was a woman singer—because of my faith,” explained Veingrad, the former Cowboy, who has become observant since his retirement from football. But his friend, Dmitry “Star of David” Salita, the Ukrainian-born, Brooklyn-trained boxer, seemed unfazed. “Here in the United States of America,” he said, “I can wear my yarmulke in the White House.”

• Toward a definition of JCall, which is (somewhat misleadingly) fashioned as the European J Street. [Foreign Policy]

• A former Israeli diplomat and consul general makes the case for a U.S.-imposed peace plan instead of proximity talks. [Politico]

• In Britain, Leeds University’s student paper was pulled from racks after publishing an interview in which a Palestinian journalist said of news outlets, “They are certainly pro-Israeli. I think you have to ask yourself who controls the media.” [Leeds Student]

• Model Naomi Campbell is having secret meetings (except apparently not-so-secret) with Madonna’s Kaballah mentor. [Page Six]

• “Unfortunately, we receive so many Holocaust teenage diaries composed in European attics that it is impossible to accept each one.” [McSweeney’s]

Mazel tov to Tablet Magazine columnist Josh Lambert, newly the father of Asher:

The premise of the piece—titled “The New American Jew on Israel”—is that “what it means to be ‘pro-Israel’ is changing, particularly among younger Jews.” And the corollary of this paradigm shift is that traditional definitions of “pro-Israel”—as represented, say, in polls—have not yet caught up, which could explain the meager 48 percent of Democrats who say they “support” Israel.

For Singal, the organization that epitomizes this New American Jew is, of course, J Street. He reports from a talk J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami gave at the Harvard Hillel:

fear of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wasn’t, for the most part, what had brought them to Cambridge on a rainy February evening.

Rather, they were worried about the grim prospects that face Israel if it can’t make peace with the Palestinians. Given the region’s demographic patterns, absent a two-state solution, Israel will soon have to choose between being a Jewish state and a democratic one.

While J Street does strongly oppose the possibility of Iran getting nuclear weapons, the demographic crisis, not an attack from Iran, is the greatest threat facing Israel, said Ben-Ami.

Some are skeptical about this logic, but: if you support the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish democracy; and you think that the biggest threat to Israel is the demographic problem; and you think that current Israeli settlement policies are forestalling a Palestinian state and therefore a solution to the demographic problem; then you could very well tell a pollster that you don’t “support” Israel in its refusal to freeze West Bank settlements.

Anyway, at some point the argument becomes one of semantics. But just as the Democratic Party would be foolish to tolerate opposition to Israel beyond criticism of specific policies among its prominent politicians, Republicans should be concerned with alienating the increasing number of Jewish voters who see unconditional support for Israel as no support at all.

The New American Jew on Israel [Boston Globe]
Earlier: Is the GOP The Pro-Israel Party?

Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman didn’t appreciate that, and he last night he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Eric Fingerhut that Ben-Ami’s statement was “the height of chutzpah.” See, Palin’s statements might have been a “simplistic effort to be supportive of the Israeli government” but they were “clear and well-intentioned,” and, anyway, “all politics is pandering.” As for Ben-Ami, Foxman accused him of “attacking a celebrity for supporting Israel, but not in the way they want her to support Israel.” This morning, Ben-Ami responded with a long, sharply worded letter accusing Foxman of being “willing to go along with the defamation of a world-renowned (and Zionist) jurist”—Richard Goldstone—“who has asked tough questions about the Gaza War,” and also of trying to hijack the designation of “pro-Israel.” “You of course have every right to disagree with us. It’s a free country,” Ben-Ami wrote. “But you have no right to decide who is and who is not pro-Israel based on whether they agree with your views.” We’ll let you know if Foxman responds.

Foxman Blasts J Street on Palin, Questions Its ‘Pro-Israel’ Slogan [JTA]
Ben-Ami Responds to Foxman [JTA]

On a few occasions at the just-ended event, this tendency was on public display: the booing Eric Yoffie, head of the Reform movement, received when he put down U.N. investigator Richard Goldstone; the semi-official convening of bloggers like Silverstein that the Weekly Standard took as evidence of J Street’s true left-wing nature; and the rumor(unfounded, as it turned out) that J Street’s college division had dropped “pro-Israel” from its motto. Far more commonplace, though, were participants who gave no indication—other than, perhaps, being outfitted in flowing scarves rather than Congress-ready suits—of departing from J Street’s party line but who, in conversation, acknowledged that their personal politics were further left of the organization’s. They weren’t wed to the idea of Israel being a Jewish as well as democratic state, for instance—but they also seemed happy to behave themselves for the sake of the organization.

“I see it as a division of labor,” said Michael Feinberg, a New York rabbi and labor activist, who wouldn’t go into detail about his politics because he’d “already been so trashed about the issue” from some on the right, he said. “J Street’s policies are not mine, exactly, though they’re closer to it than many other groups. But I’m not looking for a perfect fit, I’m looking to get something done. Let’s get the big policy work done and then we can fight it out within the family.” Elizabeth Bolton, a Reconstructionist rabbi from Baltimore active in Rabbis for Human Rights, agreed. Bolton said she was disappointed, for instance, that Jeremy Ben Ami, J Street’s executive director, criticized Goldstone as well, but, she said, “Ben Ami is trying to push the policy perspectives of the American government. I don’t want to be naïve.”

Other participants said that, since long before J Street formed, they’ve been accustomed to framing their opinions carefully when doing activist work with some of the smaller organizations that participated in the conference. “I tend to want to be more outspoken and it was made clear to me that if I wanted to join Brit Tzedek, I needed to deliver a certain message,” said Linda Iacovini, a member of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, which is being absorbed into J Street next year. “I had a friend who didn’t want to join because of that.” That’s fine, said J Street spokeswoman Amy Spitalnick, as long as participants understand that the group is “an explicitly pro-Israel organization, and it’s not going to be otherwise.”

Unfortunately for J Street, the blogosphere was alive with chatter about another issue altogether: the apparent desire among leaders of its student arm, J Street U, to shorten J Street’s ubiquitous “pro-peace, pro-Israel” slogan to just “pro-peace.” “We don’t want to isolate people because they don’t feel quite so comfortable with ‘pro-Israel,’ so we say ‘pro-peace,’” Lauren Barr, an American University junior and J Street intern who sits on J Street U’s board, told Jerusalem Post reporter Hilary Krieger. (On Sunday, at the opening session of the conference, Barr warned older people in the audience that people her age were being “driven away” from a vibrant relationship with Israel because of their doubts over the country’s handling of the Palestinian issue.) J Street’s executive director, Jeremy Ben Ami, told U.S. News and World Report’s religion blogger that he wanted to “honor” the questions some Jews have and didn’t seem to mind the change of mottos: “We can’t force them to use language that makes them uncomfortable.” But by this afternoon, J Street publicists were insisting that the original story was wrong, dismissing it as college students mouthing off, and referring reporters to a statement from J Street U director Tammy Shapiro, who reiterated the requirement that all work “be done in a context that always embraces the right of a state for Jewish people in the land of Israel to exist beside a state for Palestinian people in the land of Palestine.”

As it happens, Shapiro was also behind J Street’s decision to cancel a poetry session planned for the conference,after it emerged that some of the poets had made potentially offensive links between the Holocaust and Israel’s actions in Gaza. But, here’s the ironic part: the louder the bloggers gloat over every perceived stumble, the more enthusiastic, and righteous, the true believers at the Grand Hyatt seem to get. That’s politics, folks.

J Street’s Campus Branch Drops Pro-Israel Slogan [JPost]
J Street’s College Arm Drops ‘Pro-Israel’ From Its Slogan [USNews]
Top Obama Aide: U.S. Commitment to Israel is Not a Slogan [Haaretz]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The audience, too, appeared to have a majority of pre-’67-ers in attendance, many veterans of long-established progressive Zionist groups like Americans for Peace Now. In an interlude during the official remarks, the lights went up and attendees were asked to converse with their tablemates about what brought them there, then tweet or email their thoughts to the folks up on stage. At our table, everyone pounced on the sole college student, asking him about Israel politics at Yale, but the only person who wanted to transmit her thoughts was a gray-haired woman who used a pencil and paper. “Finally!” she wrote.

Whose Israel Is It? [Talking Points Memo]

JB: An inaccurate quotation. Our staff is not intermarried. Not that that’s a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with being intermarried.

JG: This is getting Seinfeldian here.

JB: There’s nothing wrong with intermarriage. What’s wrong with intermarriage?

JG: We’re a small people—

JB: Right, but you know what I find? I find that most of my friends, and we’re talking mid-to-late forties at this point, most of my friends who intermarried, their spouses either converted, or their kids are being raised Jewish. What I find so fascinating about my intermarried friends is that they’re searching for welcoming Jewish communities. So let’s make ourselves a welcoming community.

JG: Look, I have that sadness of ‘Oh, why are you leaving?’ but I also recognize that you may as well just open up the door and say, ‘Come on in.’

JB: The fastest answer to the shrinking Jewish population is to welcome in all of these spouses.

JG: It’s good for the gene pool, too.

J Street’s Ben-Ami on Zionism and Military Aid to Israel [The Atlantic]

Earlier: J Street Debuts in ‘Times Magazine’

It’s also worth remembering that context matters, so it’s probably not entirely irrelevant that the Israeli embassy softened its position right after Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni—whose Kadima party actually came first in last February’s Knesset elections, though it couldn’t muster a working parliamentary coalition—lashed out at Netanyahu’s government for isolating Israel on the international stage. “You have managed to beat the president of the United States, Israel’s greatest friend, or at least this is the impression you and your people tried to convey after the meeting,” Livni railed during Monday’s opening of the Knesset. “You have managed to humiliate the only partner for a peace settlement Israel has. In short: We have beaten America, humiliated the Palestinians, isolated ourselves. Raise your head from the small politics and see what has happened, see that Israel is excommunicated.”

On Eve of Conference, J Street Struggles To Prove Pro-Israel Cred [Forward]
Livni Accuses Netanyahu of ‘Humiliating Palestinians’[Ynet]
Related: Generation Z [Tablet]

There was, of course, a time, in the early 1980s, when AIPAC, at least, was run by left-leaning progressives—people like Tom Dine, a veteran of Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign—but Traub seems to be suggesting that what’s going on is generational, more than anything else. M.J. Rosenberg, another veteran of AIPAC, told Traub that “all the old Jewish people in senior-citizen homes speaking Yiddish are dying, and they’re being replaced by 60-year-old Woodstock types.” But Rosenberg—who cheerfully blogged this morning that the Times story “heralds a new day”—missed the mark by about thirty years. The real shift, Traub writes, is from the moment of people like the Conference of Presidents’ Malcolm Hoenlein and the Zionist Organization’s Morton Klein, both born in Europe amid the wreckage of the Holocaust, to that of people like Ben-Ami, whose great-grandparents helped found Tel Aviv, who handed out leaflets for Carter as a teenager, and whose office is filled with thirty-something Jews who are intermarried and “all doing Buddhist seders.” As with the Cubans in Florida, who have outgrown their exile mentality, Traub argues, J Street believes American Jews no longer need to be “in thrall to the older generation” when it comes to the Middle East.

But it seems to us that there’s really something even deeper going on—not so much a shift in opinion, but a shift away from the idea that American Jews should, or even could, arrive at something like a unified opinion on Israel. Traub draws a distinction between the fortresslike offices of AIPAC and most other major Jewish groups and those of J Street, which he describes as glassy and airy and open. Last week, J Street announced that it had hired Hadar Susskind, an Israeli-born, American-raised veteran of both the IDF and the Hill, to be its new director of policy. In this week’s Forward, Susskind writes: “It’s time for all of us who grew up loving Israel and praying for peace to stop letting the mythical notion that American Jews speak with a single voice keep us from supporting Israel’s security and future by calling for peace.”

The New Israel Lobby [NYTM]

Jeremy Ben Ami, J-Street’s executive director, told Tablet that the idea is to apply the strategies developed by liberal activist groups like MoveOn.org and Democracy for America to organize online supporters for real-world campaigns—letter-writing, meetings with local officials, teach-ins—on behalf of President Obama’s peace efforts in the Middle East. “I think we have two years for Obama to do this”—come up with a workable Middle East peace plan—“so this window over the next couple of years is essential,” Ben Ami said. “This is really a campaign atmosphere.” He said J-Street, which has doubled its budget in the last year to $3 million, intends to spend hire a national field director and some local staff to get the program up and running by next March. The lobbying group is also exploring a partnership with the grassroots group Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, which already has chapters affiliated with local JCRCs around the country, though that group’s president, Steve Masters, said it’s still too early to say exactly how they plan to work together. “I have no idea what this will look like,” he acknowledged.

J Street
Brit Tzedek v’Shalom

The president did a fine job in the interview, according to the participants. He was friendly and relaxed, re-avowing his commitment to the existence of the Jewish state but also insistent on America’s right to have differences with Israel. Two aides, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, were with the president, who spent the hour mostly on Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, the wider issues in the Arab world, and Iran.

The headline question was put to Obama by the vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein. A lively account of it was up on Jeffrey Goldberg’s Web log within minutes of the meeting. It quoted Jeremy Ben Ami of J-Street paraphrasing Hoenlein, who suggested that “history shows that progress is made on the peace front when Israel and the U.S. are in lockstep and there’s no daylight between them on their position publicly.”

The president disagreed. “For eight years under the prior administration,” Ben Ami quoted the president saying, “there was no daylight between the two sides and there was no progress on the peace front, and no hard decisions were confronted, no progress was made.”

In other words, it’s George W. Bush’s fault. It’s not that one is shocked, shocked to find political jibes being uttered in the White House, and not even I would argue that Israel and America need to be in lock-step. My own view has long been that, if peace is the goal, then the right policy for America is to shadow whatever government Israelis elect a bit to the hawkish side, so that we are never caught between Israel and her enemies. But it’s startling that he got so little, if any, pushback when he suggested that no hard decisions were confronted. We’ve just come through a period, after all, when the government in Jerusalem decided, to the cheers of the peace camp, to uproot forcibly the Jews who’d settled in Gaza and to impose wrenching retreat—only to be met with yet more war.

To at least one participant it seemed as if there was a kind of unstated assumption in the conversation—that the settlements were, in the main, not a good thing and were even part of the problem. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, a friend to whom I often turn when trying to fathom liberal thinking, told me after the meeting, which he attended, that the major institutions within his movement, which he characterizes as the largest grass roots movement in American Jewry, are against the settlements.

So I asked Rabbi Yoffie about the “accounting of the soul” that he had gone through after the rejection of Camp David II and the launch of the Second Intifada. The phrase was from a speech he delivered at Cleveland in 2001. I’d written about it in on the Wall Street Journal’s Website at the time. Back then Rabbi Yoffie said the crisis in Israel had led him to re-examine his most fundamental assumptions about the Middle East. He had gone so far as to review all that he had said and written during the past five years as well as all the resolutions of the board and assembly of what was then called the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the umbrella group for Reform Judaism.

“With that review complete,” the rabbi said back then, “I share with you my feeling that we have been wrong about some very important things. We have been wrong not so much in what we have said, but rather in what we have not said. We have been wrong in not understanding the full complexity of the threat that Israel faces.” First and foremost, he said, “we have been wrong about Palestinian intentions. We believed, along with our allies in the peace camp, that if an Israeli prime minister would be brave enough to say that Israel must choose peace over territories, the Palestinian Authority would also choose peace.”

That was at the start of another administration. Now Rabbi Yoffie says simply that it is one thing to be skeptical about the prospects for peace (he still is) and another to countenance actions, like building settlements, that preclude peace. Which seems to be the logic of the peace camp—and the administration—as we approach the 80th anniversary of August 1929, when the Jews were driven out of Hebron. The one leader in the Conference of Presidents who might have been counted on to speak up for the Jews who have returned to Hebron and other settlements, Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, wasn’t at the meeting with President Obama.

When I asked Rabbi Yoffie about that, I didn’t detect a lot of regret. There was a time, though, when a leading figure in Reform Judaism, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, was head of the ZOA. It is something to read from this remove Silver’s speech at Madison Square Garden, where, in 1955, he thundered about the folly of what we now call land for peace. As his rage grew over the next two years, Silver dressed down the American administration mercilessly for pressuring Israel—going so far as to say at one point that some of its members had become afflicted with “the same blindness which formerly afflicted the Mandatory Power in its dealings with the Arabs and Jews.”

So what, in fact, have we learned? I telephoned Klein and asked him why he wasn’t at the meeting. He said he’d been told by his friends in Washington that one can’t criticize a president with the harshness Klein has used in respect to Obama and expect to get invited to the president’s house. Fair enough. Bergson never got in to see the president, either, though the treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, did step up. Bergson ended up organizing a protest of 400 Orthodox rabbis outside the White House, which helped throw the situation into sharp relief. It’s a reminder that, from the long perspective of history, there are times when it’s not the worst thing in the world to be on the outside looking in.

Seth Lipsky’s column for Tablet runs every other Wednesday. He can be reached at slipsky@tabletmag.com.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J Street, wrote on the lobby’s blog that “[i]t was made clear to the President and his team the strong support that exists among American Jews and the broader public for a strong push to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for a two-state solution, and for a regional and comprehensive approach to the peace process.” The left-leaning M.J. Rosenberg at TPM Café added: “When one of the main rightwingers told Obama that he should keep his differences with the Israelis private, Obama said that had not worked in the past and he’ll go the public route.” And Lynn Sweet at The Chicago Sun-Times reports: “According to a source familiar with what occurred at the 45-minute meeting who briefed me, Obama said that he was pushing Arab and Palestinian leaders too, but the press was focused on finding divisions between the U.S. and Israel.”

Even those who disagree with Obama’s stance on settlements had warm things to say about the powwow. The Jerusalem Post quotes Abe Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League: “He understood why we are anxious. He understood and said they have to find ways to [emphasize] the requirements they have made of the Palestinians.” And Nathan Diament of the Orthodox Union, who was also present for the meeting, told the paper “the president acknowledged there’s certainly a perception problem that the U.S. is pressing Israel and not the other side.” Ben Smith at Politico quotes Ira Forman, the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council as commenting that Obama “said we have been very specific with the Arab world on incitement, violence, commitments on accepting the reality of Israel and conveying that to their street as well.”

According to The New York Times’s Caucus blog, however, the only real critic at the meeting was Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who briefly argued with the president. Hoenlein said that diplomatic progress in the Middle East only happens when there is “no light” between the U.S. and Israel, to which Obama countered that “no light” was the situation under George W. Bush and yet nothing got done.

Obama Talks of Progress on Israeli Settlements [Reuters]