One thing to note is that many who have traveled from the United States to attend are being funded by WallBuilders, the organization of “historian” David Barton, who, as columnist Michelle Goldberg documented, has a past littered with white-supremacist and anti-Semitic associations and whose work is dedicated to arguing that the United States was explicitly founded as an evangelical-Christian nation. Which doesn’t make Barton a particularly strange bedfellow for Beck. But for Israel, he certainly is. Isn’t he?

Live Blog: Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Courage” Rally in East Jerusalem [Haaretz]
Glenn Beck’s Israel Tour Raises Eyebrows [LAT]
Should Israel Welcome Glenn Beck’s Support? [Hudson Institute]
U.S. Jews Warn Israel Not to Get Too Cozy With Glenn Beck [Haaretz]
Major Funder for Glenn Beck’s Israel Rally Linked to Anti-Semitic Group [Lobelog]
Related: History Lesson [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Take a Trip to Israel With Glenn Beck
Beck Accused of ‘Holocaust Revisionism’

Yehudah Krinsky, the Chabad-Lubavitch leader, remained at the top for the second year in a row. By far the biggest hit was taken by Eric Yoffie, who moved from number 2 to off the list—no doubt because of his lame-duck status (though I question this radical movement, given that he will head the Union for Reform Judaism through July 2012); his nominated replacement, Richard Jacobs, took number seven. David Wolpe, a Conservative rabbi in Los Angeles, went from 13 to the runner-up spot. The rest of the top ranks are no strangers there: Three, four, and five went to David Saperstein, of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Peter Rubenstein, arguably New York City’s most influential Reform pulpit rabbi; and Marvin Hier, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. (Oh, and congratulations to Joseph Telushkin, author of Nextbook Press’s Hillel, who secured 15th for the third year in a row.)

Women. Best thing about this year’s list? It has more women (13) than the past two years’ lists combined (six and six), which is likely a reflection both of actual trends and of the recognition that not enough have been included. Last year’s top-ranked woman, at 17, was Ellen Weinberg-Dreyfus of the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis; this year, it’s Sharon Brous, at 10, a Conservative rabbi whose innovative, spiritual “IKAR” movement is all the rage in L.A., where such things tend to be all the rage. Other notables in this category include Naomi Levy, 19th, also a Conservative founder of a quirky, catchy, spiritual L.A. movement; Sharon Kleinbaum, 24th, head of Manhattan’s Beit Simchat Torah, the largest LGBT-focused congregation; and, of course, Sara Hurwitz, 32nd, controversially appointed Orthodox Judaism’s first “rabba” last year by Avi Weiss (#12). May there be 20 or 25 next year!

Down a Schneier. Last year’s father-son tandem, Arthur and Marc Schneier, ranked 34th and 41st, respectively. Arthur, of Manhattan’s Park East, continues to be a rising star, at 26, but his tastefully named son—who has been in the news for all the wrong reasons—dropped off the list.

Shmuley. New Jersey’s own dropped from sixth to 11th. Happens.

“Kabbalah.” The Kabbalah Centre’s Yehuda Berg fell from 14th to 37th. Given what the Kabbalah Centre is, things have upset me more.

The Scroll’s beachhead. Friend-of-The Scroll Andy Bachman reappears on the list, at 41, after a few years in the wilderness. As the list acknowledges, Bachman is actually a critic of the list, and thereby embodies the quintessential Jewish quandary of not wishing to belong to a club that has him as a member. My guess is, however, that this is secretly providing him necessary consolation following a weekend in which his Milwaukee Brewers were swept by the above-.500 Washington Nationals (ahem, below).

America’s 50 Most Influential Rabbis [The Daily Beast]
Related: Hillel [Nextbook Press]
Why Newsweek’s 50 Most Influential Rabbis … Aren’t [HuffPo]
Earlier: Top Rabbi
Reform Movement Picks New Head

“I’m honored to follow the giants before me,” Jacobs told reporters today, just prior to an introduction with the URJ’s board of trustees, at the Upper West Side’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. “But we need a new path. I’m going to build on our movement, which is a strong movement.” The URJ, an umbrella organization that claims 1.5 million members and 920 congregations, has been threatened by financial difficulties and criticisms from congregation leaders like Jacobs.

Today, however, Jacobs praised the URJ for being responsive to critics, and while he insisted, “I am not defined by the Rabbinic Vision Initiative”—the group of prominent, critical rabbis of which he is a member—he did assert that his “RVI colleagues are with” him. He also bristled at questions concerning the financial challenges facing the URJ, insisting that with a truly transformative vision, he would attract partners and funds. To some extent, he admitted he’d be “renovating the house while the owners are still living there.” As to critics, he argued, “They might not love everything that happens, but they’re part of everything that happens.”

Jacobs will most likely follow in Yoffie’s tradition of political liberalism. He spoke expansively of enduring the “scars of Hebrew school” only to come into his Jewish consciousness at Camp Swig, a Jewish camp in Saratoga, where, “among the redwoods,” he met progressive leaders like César Chávez and Joan Baez. In recent years, he’s traveled to Haiti and spent Sukkot in Darfur; in August, he attended a rally in support of the Cordoba Initiative, the group sponsoring the Islamic cultural center a few blocks from Ground Zero.

He spoke proudly of his home in Israel, which he and his wife built during the Second Intifada. He smiled while describing coaching a basketball team of high-school seniors, none over 5’2’’, against much taller players from French Hill—all of whom fought in Lebanon.

He’s also a leader of the New Israel Fund, a board member at American Jewish World Services, and a former dancer and choreographer who is pursuing a doctorate in ritual dance at New York University.

Halevi, a kind-looking, good-humored middle-aged man with close-cropped whitish hair and a kippah, made aliyah in 1982 (he grew up in Boro Park, Brooklyn), but yesterday he sat around a table with 20 or so journalists and activists, mostly Jewish (though Irshad Manji, the prominent Muslim critic of Islam, sat opposite me), as we munched on kosher sandwiches as guests of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. I decided to schlep to the fourth floor of SoHo’s Puck Building all the way from Tablet Magazine’s offices on the fifth floor of SoHo’s Puck Building to hear what Halevi had to say, because I’ve long admired—though not always agreed with—his work in The New Republic, where he is a contributing editor.

Halevi used hand-written notes as he talked for the first 30 minutes. In between writing his book—which will follow a group of paratroopers from the Six Day War, some of whom ended up leaders in the settlement movement, some of whom ended up leaders in the peace movement—he has been grappling with an essay about the danger of what he called the “re-ghettoization” of the Jewish people. Lunch was based around his essay-in-the-making, and therefore had the welcome feel of a creative writing workshop: One person reads his story; then everyone else responds with their constructive criticism and complaints; the story itself is strengthened.

In a nutshell, Halevi’s thesis is that the right-wing agenda, which focuses on combating the international demonization of Israel, and the left-wing agenda, with its litany of grievances—settlements, the threat to democracy posed by the religious and nationalist parties—are really targeting the same fear: “That the Jews stand to be re-ghettoized.” If the Holocaust is the ultimate of ghettoization, then the state of Israel and the thriving American Jewish community—and the pact the two have made—mark a resistance to lapsing back in that direction. In turn, the far left’s attempts to de-legitimize Israel and the far right’s gambits that turn American Jews off the Jewish state mark threats to that resistance.

The Israeli right wants a loyalty oath to spite the world; the world wants to spite Israel because of the loyalty oath. And so on. Yet, curiously, the moderate right and the moderate left remain at odds. Halevi wants a re-alignment wherein the sensible, moderate forces on each side, without abandoning their substantive ideologies—he is no mushy-middle Jon Stewart or anything like that—recognize their common goals and common enemies and, together, wage a two-fronted, coordinated counter-attack against worldwide demonization and domestic right-wing alternatives, the twin tools of re-ghettoization.

Acknowledging first the legitimacy of right-wing fears, he noted: “This is a classic anti-Semitic moment. Israel has become the symbol of human rights violations, apartheid, and colonialism.” He continued: “It’s not that the U.N. Human Rights Council has singled Israel out for condemnation more than any other country. It’s that it has singled it out more than all the other countries combined.” The ultra-Orthodox—Halevi listens to their radio stations, almost as a mischievous hobby—see the international campaign of delegitimization “as confirmation of their theological despair: How it is an inviolate law of human nature that Esau, the goy, hates Jacob, the Jew.” And, he added, it’s not just the right: 55 percent of voters for the left-wing Meretz party recently said that they believe there is nothing Israel could do to alter international perceptions. The left-wing party! “I’ve never seen a statistic that shocked me more,” he said.

Therefore, as a moderate Israeli, he has little but contempt for those in America who “support those Israeli groups aligned with the demonization of Israel.” “There needs to be a red line drawn between the American Jewish community and the far left,” he added. And what is the red line? It is Judge Goldstone—whom he kept coming back to, as both symbol and touchstone, metaphor and metonym, of the international community’s unique animus toward Israel. (He noted that J Street dissociated itself from Goldstone only after significant external urging. “If J Street understood what Goldstone means to the mainstream of Israel,” he argued, “there would not have been hesitation.”)

“That’s not to let us off the hook,” he continued. Ah: Time to switch gears, to the left’s fears. I was surprised, though perhaps I should not have been, to hear him endorse President Clinton’s controversial statement regarding the illiberalness of the million Russian immigrants—“they come from a non-democratic culture,” Halevi noted. “In their minds, they’re associating democracy with the radical left.” He condemned Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s “genocidal banter”—the man who was formerly Israel’s chief rabbi recently mused that all Palestinians should go away, pretty much for good. As for settlements? Our host, Professor Steven M. Cohen, noted that in a recent essay Halevi devoted most of his word count to explaining why Israel is unlikely to abandon settlements, while mentioning, in a brief aside, that he would personally support an extension of the freeze. Halevi’s emphasis remained on the first point. Besides, he pointed out, when war with Hezbollah and who knows who else could start any day, do you really want to antagonize the religious Zionist movement whose members constitute 40 percent of the IDF’s combat-officer corps?

But Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the influential president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who sat directly across from me, would not accept Halevi’s more-in-sorrow defense of not extending the freeze. For many American Jews, Yoffie argued, it is difficult to move onto combating international demonization when that demonization is provoked by the blatant moral and practical blight that is continued West Bank construction.

Here came, for me, the most useful part of the conversation, because I got to see, in Halevi, something I had heretofore only read about: The widespread Israeli understanding of the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from all the Gaza settlements and a few in the West Bank as a complete disaster, which must never be repeated. “I don’t want Netanyahu to give anything away for free,” Halevi insisted, his voice carrying a harsh undercurrent for the only time that afternoon. The problem with extending the freeze for nothing in return, he said, is that the last time the settlements were put on hold—indeed, they were eliminated—in exchange for nothing, there were rockets; and then there was an attempt to stop the rockets; and then there was a near-total absence of international support for stopping the rockets; and then there was the Goldstone Report.

I decided to ask a question. Earlier, Halevi had set up an equivalence between the fringe Israeli right and the fringe Israeli left, in how they both are working, consciously or not, to re-ghettoize the Jewish people—the former by casting Jews as uniquely just, the latter by casting Jews as uniquely unjust. Even if that’s so, I inquired, in Israel, right now, the fringe left has barely half a voice, while the fringe right is running much of the government. Therefore, I inquired, shouldn’t American Jews focus on condemning the Israeli right fringe, if only to help bring about an equilibrium? He ceded my point about the fringe right’s outsize power in Israel—after all, when the foreign minister is Avigdor Lieberman, the point is inarguable—but parried by referring back to the international community, where, he said, the fringe left is at least as strong. (My rebuttal, which I didn’t get the opportunity to make, would be that “the international community” doesn’t really matter—what matters, really, is Israel and the United States, and in those two communities, the fringe right maintains far more power than the fringe left.)

No doubt lefties familiar with Halevi cringed when I described him as moderate, but the fact is that well over an hour had passed before I heard a genuine right-wing voice, and it wasn’t Halevi. Jonathan Mark, an associate editor at The Jewish Week, had been sitting skeptically silent with an overly large tape recorder perched on the table in front him; its red light was especially big, giving the impression that every word was being captured extra clearly, the better to be thrown back at their speakers with extra velocity. Finaly, Mark spoke, comparing Shas, the premier ultra-religious Israeli party (of which Rabbi Yosef is spiritual leader), to Herschel Grynszpan, the teenage Jew who shot a German official in Paris and thereby “provoked” Kristallnacht, as Nazi propoganda had it. It is an ugly analogy—that Mark floated it confirms that, for some Jews, it will always be 1938—but one that can be engaged without being taken completely literally. Essentially, Mark was arguing that Shas’s desire to religiously regulate most facets of Israeli life, Ovadia’s “genocidal banter,” and the rest, is not why the world hates Israel, and that blaming the world’s hatred of Israel on Shas is a canard equivalent to blaming Kristallnacht on one Jew. Israel could banish Shas tomorrow, Mark was saying, and many of Israel’s enemies would continue to be Israel’s enemies.

Halevi’s response was deft: Not even addressing those irreconcilably ill-disposed to the Jewish state, he said, “I’m concerned how Rabbi Ovadia plays to our friends.” I’ll lift a kosher salmon sandwich to that.

Halevi is just one man, with idiosyncratic views. Yet I won’t consider it the height of irresponsibility to extrapolate somewhat from him to a broader Israeli consensus. Which means I’ll be waiting for that essay (which hopefully I haven’t just ruined!) Toward the end, without anyone even attempting to define his specific politics, Halevi volunteered them: “I’ve voted for every winning Israeli prime minister since 1992,” he said.

Related: Why Israel Won’t Abandon the Settlers [WSJ]

• West Bank settlers yesterday protested the demolition of a single home. [NYT]

• Russia, in many ways one of Iran’s prime patrons, has seen its relations with the Islamic Republic deteriorate significantly since it voted for sanctions at the U.N. Security Council. [NYT]

• Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Reform movement, expresses bewilderment at why some in Israel, led by David Rotem, would push their conversion bill at a time like this. [JTA]

• Roger Cohen wonders why we haven’t heard more about the lives and deaths of the nine flotilla activists, including the one American, and wonders whether, say, a Jewish kid caught in some crossfire would receive the same non-attention. [NYT]

• Soon after the United States raised the Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic status from “bureau” to “delegation,” France went a step farther, raising it from “delegation” to “mission,” which includes an ambassador. [NYT]

A special in-the-family pat on the back to Joseph Telushkin, who held steady at spot 15. Telushkin’s biography of Hillel is being published by Nextbook Press in September.

Some more notable winners (and some losers) from the list—which is the brainchild of Sony Pictures’s Michael Lynton and “his pal” Gary Ginsberg, and which is strictly subjective—after the jump.

Shmuley. New Jersey’s own Shmuley Boteach jumped a spot, from 7 to 6.

Big gains from Avi Weiss. The Bronx-based Modern Orthodox rabbi jumped from 38 to 18, on the strength of his controversial granting of the title “rabba” to a female student of his, Sara Hurwitz. Speaking of which …

Women. I count six women on both lists, with the highest-ranking, Ellen Weinberg-Dreyfus of the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, moving up from 18 to 17. Hurwitz is a new addition, at 36. And Sharon Kleinbaum, the rabbi at Manhattan’s Beth Simchat Torah—the world’s largest LGBT-oriented synagogue—held steady at number 25.

Leave your shul, doesn’t matter. In 2009, while Jeffrey Wohlberg was still top rabbi at the venerable Washington, D.C., Conservative shul Adas Israel (where he presided over the bar mitzvah of your humble blogger), he was at 19. In 2010, as president of the Rabbinical Assembly, Wohlberg was at … 19.

A tale of two Schneiers. In 2009, rabbi-to-the-stars (and—ladies!—newly single) Marc Schneier was ranked 33rd; this year, he dropped to 41. But Arthur Schneier, of the Park East Synagogue, rose from 36th to 34th. Oh, it is on. Which Schneier are you chneiering for?

The 50 Most Influential Rabbis in America (2010) [Newsweek]
50 Influential Rabbis (2009) [Newsweek]

I’ll defer to J.J. Goldberg for a summary of the findings:

Don’t count on those American Jewish blockheads to stand up for Israel: 11.
Well, they’d better / Hey, they just might: 7.
I’m hoping Obama will see the light and we won’t have to choose sides: 7.
Obama isn’t Israel’s enemy / This symposium is a right-wing set-up: 4.
Miscellaneous (Both sides are nuts / We haven’t properly taught Israel to our young’uns): 2.

Meanwhile, from the other half of Dysentery, Dissent posts an essay co-written by founding editor Irving Howe in the aftermath of the Six Day War. “Israelis should take a constructive and humane attitude toward the problem of the Arab refugees,” the 1967 essay argues, “who, even if exploited by the Arab governments, are suffering human beings and deserve more sympathy and active help than they have gotten from a nation itself comprised of refugees.”

Obama, Israel, and American Jews: The Challenge—A Symposium [Commentary]
‘Commentary’ Polls the Experts [J.J. Goldberg]
From the Archives: Irving Howe and Stanley Plastrik, ‘After the Mideast War’ [Arguing the World]

Yoffie talked to Tablet Magazine today about his diagnosis, and how he hopes the left will respond.

What prompted you to write this now?
As I said in the essay, the conservative response was the motivating factor. The common sense notion is that you need American support for dealing with Iran, and the anti-government rhetoric seems so counterintuitive and counter-productive. I have heard it, and having that experience in several instances had me shaking my head, and saying I need to write about it. On the one hand it indicates concern for Iran, but on the other hand it seems to be so counterproductive and not focused on Iran at all, but focused on all kinds of other agendas. Do we care about Iran, or is it a pro-settlement agenda, or an anti-Obama agenda? And is Iran getting lost in the fog?

You wrote that you were puzzled about the relative silence from left and center of the Jewish community on Iran. Why do you think that’s been the case?
On the liberal, centrist side of the equation, I don’t think people feel as passionately about it as they should. So much of the rhetoric on the right strongly suggests, implies, or directly acknowledges that what we’re really pushing for is military action, and that really makes the left and center uncomfortable. My view is that, as the Obama administration has said, we’re not taking anything off the table, but that while it’s getting late, crippling sanctions can still make a difference. I think that’s the way to go. Liberals and centrists are scared off by the implication of military action and that’s a factor in their thinking. But that can’t be a reason for staying silent.

You invoke 1967 to indicate how urgent the threat is.
This is the critical time. It’s not something we can wait six months to talk about. We have to talk about it right now. I think we’re running out of time on the ability of economic sanctions to be effective. So there is real urgency now. And the Obama people have ratcheted up the rhetoric. But if it’s between that and delivering results, results have not been delivered yet.

If you believe the Obama administration is engaging with the Iran issue, and endorse the approach they’re taking, why is there a need for people who support that to mobilize now?
It’s a question of getting everybody on board. We need to push the administration. They’re moving in the right direction, they’ve said some of the right things, but at this time are we confident that Iran is going to be blocked from getting nuclear weapons? No.

Do you think you should have written this essay six months ago? Were you waiting for your constituents to mobilize themselves on this?
I would have liked to see more grassroots activity than I’ve seen. And it’s not like I’m not happy with what we have said—we have resolutions, and if I wanted to build a paper trail, I could. But the community is very split right now on a lot of the Israel questions, and Iran shouldn’t be an issue on which we are split. So I think it’s very important for the Administration to hear from everybody on this, across the spectrum. We don’t want the government to perceive this as a right-wing issue alone. The overriding issue is that this is a terrible threat that we all have to be concerned about, and the government is less likely to move if it’s perceived as an issue of the right.

You were booed at J Street last fall over your defense of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war, in 2009. Have you had pushback from the left since the essay was published?
Well, if you think about what the response is going to be, you’d never write anything. I don’t rule anything out but I worry more about indifference or silence that amounts to indifference than a negative reaction. Someone did share with me some blog on the right where the author was laudatory, especially since in those circles I’m the crazy leftist. But all the talkbacks were attacks, people who were saying this is simply an apology for the Obama administration. That’s the narrow partisan perspective I’m trying to avoid here. What will the response be on the left? I just don’t know. But in a certain sense I don’t care. This is an overriding issue.

What kind of action do you want to see from your rabbis and congregants?
I’m going to sit with some of our folks and talk about what the best strategy is for pursuing this. Again, it’s not that we haven’t done things, and there are a lot of people out there who feel very strongly about this in the centrist or liberal camp. So the issue is working with those folks to give this greater urgency and higher priority, and to have more organization on the local level. Do I have a whole plan worked out? I do not. But I do have ideas and we will begin to move on them very soon.

Do you want to see them engage with AIPAC, for example?
My view is that we should work with everyone in the community. But we should be prepared to speak up on our own.

Getting Serious About Iran [Forward]
Earlier: Reining in Iran

At the very back of the ballroom, where the press was penned at long banquet tables, Benjamin Sack, a public-affairs officer for the Israeli embassy, watched the proceedings with his arms crossed over his chest. Sack, whose nametag did not include his affiliation, showed up as the token observer, in place of Israel’s ambassador, Michael Oren, who very publicly declined last week to take his turn in front of the crowd. What did he make of it? “I’ll tell you what I’m telling everyone—it’s exactly what I expected,” he said, raising an eyebrow. Would there be any surprise guests from the embassy? “No.” Did he think Oren, or other embassy staff, would make use of J Street’s live-streaming to tune in? “We’ve got other things going on today, you know.”

Rabbi Yoffie’s Remarks to J Street Convention [URJ.org]

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.