J Street—countering the establishment or embracing it?-UPDATE
J Street, the "pro-peace, pro-Israel" lobby, has come a long way since its inception just about 18 months ago, and not just because its conference later this month is drawing the endorsement of 160 Congress members (about half the number that attend AIPAC's annual gala.)
Its PAC scored among the top three in fund-raising, it has establishment Jewish congressional luminaries such as U.S. Reps. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) on its "call me" list, and its made nice with Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the leader of the Reform movement who had scored the lobby for its Gaza war equivocation, to the extent that Yoffie is keynoting the conference.
Plus, tomorrow, founders Jeremy Ben Ami and Daniel Levy will hobnob with a pantheon of neoconservatives at the Hudson Instiute at a day-long event on U.S.- Israel relations. If J Street is a good enough interlocutor for the likes of Elliot Abrams and Marty Peretz, it's kind of arrived, one would think.
So is the alternative the mainstream now? Not judging by the salvos its still getting from some pro-Israel groups and luminaries:
*Lenny Ben David, who remains close to AIPAC after years of representing the lobby in various capacities a past AIPAC senior staffer and a former Israeli diplomat, has made exposing what he says are J Street's ties to Israel's enemies something of a crusade mission.*
*Stand With Us, the group established to make Jewish students more comfortable with being pro-Israel on campus, has launched a campaign seemingly aimed at making J Street's new campus operation a little less comfortable.
*Isi Leibler, who led Australian Jewry for what seemed an eternity and who helped bring about rcent changes in the World Jewish Congress, likens J Street to Jewish Stalinists in his Jerusalem Post column.
Who wins this fight? We'll be tracking this in weeks to come.
*UPDATE: Lenny wrote to tell me that he's no longer close to AIPAC, and has not been since 1997. He also suggests that "crusade" is a pejorative, which I did not intend it to be, but he has a point. My larger point is that he is using his prodigious research skills to try to poke holes into an impression that is now taking hold that J Street represents one (not the only one) pro-Israel, Jewish establishment point of view. I find this interesting, and will be looking deeper into it.
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There is no street in Washington named for the letter “J,” but that hasn’t stopped a group of critics of Israel from forming the “J Street” lobby. It’s like J. K. Rowling’s invisible Platform 9 ¾ at the King’s Cross Station. Befitting a Harry Potter character, J Street performs acts of illusion and deception such as cooking its polling data and presenting it as scientific truth. The “pro-Israel” J Street PAC has cloaked dozens of PAC contributors as plain citizens, when they are actually Arab-American, Palestinian, Islamic, and pro-Iranian activists. All the while, J Street hides the names of its directors and has never explained who makes its controversial decisions.
http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com/2009/09/peeling-off-j-streets-invisibility.html#links
Also: http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com/2009/09/soros-axelrod-axis-j-street-gang.html#links
Cheryl, we’re on the same page, again. Compared to European Jews, American Jews (religious or otherwise) have suffered nothing like the kinds of discrimination they’ve had to deal with. As a kid, my parents bought a summer house in a community in upstate New York that had had signs prohibiting Jews back in the 1930s. After World War II, laws that made such discrimination illegal allowed anyone including Jews to buy there, but the community still discriminated with membership in its country club. Wow, compare that to the pogroms of eastern Europe. A lot of Americans breathed a sigh of relief when post-War refugees went to Palestine instead of the U.S. The J-Streeters are not pro-Israel anymore than Noam Chomsky is pro-Israel.
Professor Jonathan Sarna has FORGOTTEN more about American Jewish history than goya Cheryl and Brownstein will ever know.
As to the “Orthodox, right-wing coming forward to defend Israel"- which Orthodox? Jack Abramoff, the million$ tax cheats, the child molesters, the organ transplant ganavim, the Agriprocessors crowd? With “defenders” like that, Israel hasn’t got a chance!
I agree with Cheryl and Rob, but being a bit older (over 80) I can recall being chased home from school by my “friends” calling me a Christ-killer. It’s one of the reasons I have long been a Zionist. Another reason was the hatred expressed by the Arab delegates to the UN after the partition vote in 1947. I was there, by the way. After knowing what had happened in Europe, I feared these madmen even more. I often think the reason the UN voted for partition was the European delegates knew the Arabs would invade and they hoped the Arab armies would provide the Final Solution to the Jewish problem that Hitler failed to accomplish. But age has made me increasingly cynical.
A fight, would suggest 2 parties duking it out for recognition. J-street, got 160 members to endorse it, is simply due to its fabrication and misrepresentation of who actually supports it. Its policy goes against 96% of israeli Public, against the grains of recent poll by ajc http://www.ajc.org/site/c.ijITI2PHKoG/b.5472819/k.D6D7/2009_Annual_Survey_of_American_Jewish_Opinion.htm.
J-street represents itself, it polls its own support base, and publishes the figures and accurately portraying the jewish people .
Supporters of Jstreet “are all intermarried,” says Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s founder and director. “They’re all doing Buddhist seders.” They are “baffled,” as the Times puts it, by the notion of — in Ben-Ami’s words — “Israel as the place you can always count on when they come to get you.”
The dayschools ill prepared jewish youth with information about Zionism as a whole, that once subjected to counter arguments, fell easy prey.
( Note: i had a decent sunday school teacher, although we disagreed on Jonathan Pollard)
Jstreet addresses those disenfranchised jews who feel guilty about their Judaism as a whole and seek to apologize for anything resembling contrary to their 4th grade level of jewish understanding.
J-streets minor success is simply from the use of Obfuscation of its stats and preying on the uninformed.
Join http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=133282082589&ref=mf the facebook group J Street Does NOT represent me!
“lo”,
We’re not “Orthodox, right-wing”, we’re real Jews of every persuasion who know that Israel must never belong to her genocidal enemies. You are obviously not a real Jew, but a disingenuous coward.
P.S. Jonathan Sarna was a sissified sellout in Cincinnati and he’s still a sissified sellout!
P,
You’re known here as a prevaricating, left-wing progressive puppet. Every word you say about J Street and their diabolical strategy for turning Israel into Palestine is traitorous. “Breath of fresh air”, indeed! It’s more like a rush of contaminated pro-Pali stench!
Cheryl and others: “goya” is a good Yiddish word, preferable to the historically-odious associations suggested by its synonym, “shiksa.”
If you, Cheryl, had a authentic knowledge of Yiddish- as opposed to what gentiles in New York can pick up on the street from Jewish acquaintances or online- you would have known that!
Moreover, a reader/poster in a previous thread demonstrated your lack of Jewish genealogical bona-fides, so feel free to drop the pretense.
As someone who once suggested that Ted Kennedy should have been euthanized- as you, Cheryl, once did in a thread in a previous JTA blog entry - you have no moral standing to judge other people.
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Providence
10/07/09 12:38 PM
J Street is a breath of fresh air. They add a long overdue sensible, rational pro-Israel, pro-peace perspective to the debate. They’re doing so well because they reflect the views of a majority of American Jews, who are mainstream liberals. The right wing is panicking because they’ve lost their monopoly on the debate. J Street is good for the US and good for Israel.
You know the right wing is desperate when they really have to distort what J-Street is in order to make any criticisms of it. If you don’t know much about J-Street, go to their website and check them out for yourself.