J Street, the leftish Jewish lobby, is having an effect. Here is a piece urging Obama to make common cause with the “other Jewish lobby”— not the Likudnik-neocon lobby, AIPAC. Here is J Street’s great ad in the New York Times the other day, in which it urges American Jews to give support to Israel when it is negotiating with Arabs (not just when it’s killing them). Here is Ralph Seliger (of Meretz-USA) supporting J Street, and noting that Avrum Burg and Henry Siegman are associated with the new lobby, two prophets.
Last night I was reading about an effort by progressive Jews to take on the lobby 30 years ago, Breira. In his book on American Jews and Israel, Steven T. Rosenthal says that Breira formed in the mid-70s in alarm over the occupation. The Jewish establishment promptly stuffed the group in a bag and dropped it off a bridge. Breira people were blacklisted, the group seems to have disappeared.
This time round J Street has plenty o’ room to run. Israel looks a lot worse, for one thing; Zionism has worked out to be an extremist ideology by and large. I think the biggest factor in its favor is assimilationism. As Rosenthal writes, the American Jewish devotion to Israel served as a “bulwark against assimilation…While their love affair with Israel has never guaranteed a viable Jewish identity, it has at least prevented the decline in Jewish identification from becoming a total surrender and has kept alive that sense of communal obligation indispensable for the well-being of both Israeli and American Jews.” Ah, now you know what it’s about, huh! Rosenthal said that, presciently, 7 years ago. Since then Jewish identification has softened even more in the U.S. One of my principal impressions of going to the AIPAC policy conference was how old the crowd was, and old-world too.
