This is juicy. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of J Street, and Marty Peretz (left) met up on an NPR radio show yesterday out of Boston. Go to minute 29 or so and you get a delicious exchange.
A woman named Tracy, who says she worked on the Clinton campaign with Ben-Ami, calls in from Boston and asks for advice on "how to talk about this with your family." Nervous laugh. "I am very much in line with J Street, and my in-laws certainly would view it as heretical."
Host Tom Ashbrook asks if Tracy is "afraid" to bring it up with them at the High Holidays. "You got it," Tracy says. "I find that if I even broach the topic of questioning any of Israel’s policy stances, it is viewed as a very upsetting thing to say."
Marty Peretz snaps.
"That’s your personal problem, it isn’t a social problem," he says with zero sensitivity. "I discuss with my kids who have different views from me– AIPAC, J Street. Too much of J Street’s emotional push is to give someone a voice. There are so many voices, and J Street is one of them. The question is, Is the voice right?
"This is not about your psychological issues with your in-laws, and this is demeaning, to try to discuss this."
Ashbrook finally steps in to lift Peretz off Tracy’s bloody form. Well she truly feels this way, he says.
"She feels it, and Jeremy also feels that you need more and more and more viewpoints," Peretz says. "The question has to be, ‘Are the viewpoints correct?’"
Jeremy Ben-Ami truly distinguishes himself with his response to Peretz’s meanness.
"It is really important for the people of Marty’s generation [Peretz is 70] to hear the calls that just came in…To deny that this sense of being muzzled exists, to deny that this sense that I cannot speak, not only within my family, within my synagogue, within my Federation, within my community, to my friends about this topic, to deny that this feeling exists and to say it’s a personal psychological issue– is to completely miss the point. Because this is a community wide phenomenon. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Jewish Ameicans who share these views and share that sentiment, and it is sowing the seeds of the long-term disintegration of the American Jewish community if those feelings are allowed to fester."
A few comments. The exchange demonstrates once again that the political battle we are all engaged in is at a very important level a war over Jewish identity, what it means to be Jewish. Ben-Ami is trying to change that Jewish identity, Marty Peretz is holding on to 1967-era Jewish identity, joined at the hip to Israel. Peretz’s generation made a giant mistake here by swallowing Jim Crow hook, line, and sinker. Ben-Ami is trying to correct the error. As a Jew who became completely alienated from the Jewish community over apartheid in the Middle East, I cheer Ben-Ami on.
Secondly, the thuggery of Peretz’s response cannot be understated. He is saying: There are lots of voices in the Jewish community! But some are wrong! So shut the fuck up! Peretz is rationalizing his own refusal to publish anything critical of Israel in the New Republic, or the Democratic Party too, for that matter– by saying, It’s wrong, end of discussion. And not only wrong but– remember my headline– crazy. Anyone who thinks that Palestinians are being mistreated is a lunatic.
This is about religious orthodoxy. And Peretz’s denial of access and psychological smearing are practiced across the Jewish spectrum, which Ben-Ami fails to point out includes the media and the Congress. Let my (American) people go.
