"J Street," the new alternative to the Aipac lobby, says that it "represents
Americans, primarily but not exclusively Jewish…." The gentile outreach is significant. As I noted a couple of
months back, the Israel Policy Forum is also reaching out to gentiles,
having named a gentile to its board for the first time.
The importance of this trend is that it reflects an understanding by progressive Jews that they need non-Jews to help them out on a Jewish issue, and that they must trust them. Jews used to present a united front. Now progressives understand that that method hasn’t worked out so well, they need the help/values/engagement of the wider community. Similarly, Ambassador Kurtzer calls on the next president to have a diverse negotiating team re Israel/Palestine–not just Jews.
Which gentiles will J Street get? Well, AIPAC is also reaching out to gentiles: Christian evangelists. Which says to me that J Street is going to end up with liberal Protestants, Jimmy Carter types. A lot of these gentiles will have read Walt and Mearsheimer, whose last chapter, as I recall, was "A New Israel Lobby?" This is going to be fun!
My headline is not ironic. This moment recalls assimilationist motions in Central Europe in the 1700s and 1800s when Jews, so inward-looking over the ages, began to open their minds and language and books to gentiles. The first to do so were scorned, still the trend continued. This time the outreach is aimed at sharing policymaking. And as such it reminds me of Michael Walzer’s pained admission about Jewish self-governance at the Center for Jewish History a year or so back:
"It may be that the talents honed by exile don’t fit
the circumstances of statehood." Jews were trained in the circumstances
of "kehal" or their own legal/religious
community. "We governed only ourselves, as best we could… Sometimes
[we were] semi-autonomous… responsible only for ourselves. In the
state of Israel, we have accepted responsibility for other people. That
is something we have never had in all the years of exile, and we have
not done terribly well."
We haven’t done that well here as lobbyists either. Now that the
issue is breaking out of the ghetto, maybe the U.S. will get a real debate.
