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

• Residents of Ghajar, the disputed town on the Israel-Lebanon border, want the IDF, which is set to vacate, to stay. [Haaretz]

• Breaking: Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America likes to second-guess the behavior of teenage Jewish boys during the Holocaust. [JustASC]

• An interesting quote from Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama administration’s anti-Semitism envoy, on the connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. [Goldblog]

• The fall-out from Wire creator David Simon’s speech at the General Assembly, in which he complained that Jewish institutions are not doing enough to halt the “Holocaust in slow motion” in black urban communities, has been mostly (and predictably) critical. [NY Jewish Week]

• “I’m going to Graceland”? Paul Simon to release an album of Christmas jingles. [Jewcy]

And now, an ostrich and a baby giraffe playing tag.

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]

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.