Two excerpts from a favorable piece about J Street in the forthcoming NYTimes Magazine, by Jim Traub. Excerpt one, the Jewish identity piece. Funny shrewd quote from MJ Rosenberg:
Important Jewish organizations are normally reached through a series of locked doors presided over by glassed-in functionaries. The peril may be real. But it can also feel like a marketing device. “You know what these guys are afraid of?” says M. J. Rosenberg, Washington director of the Israel Policy Forum. “Their generation is disappearing. All the old Jewish people in senior-citizen homes speaking Yiddish are dying — and they’re being replaced by 60-year-old Woodstock types.”
J Street, by contrast, is wide open to the public. Visitors must thread their way through a graphic-design studio with which the organization shares office space. There appears to be nothing worth guarding. The average age of the dozen or so staff members is about 30. Ben-Ami speaks for, and to, this post-Holocaust generation. “They’re all intermarried,” he says. “They’re all doing Buddhist seders.” They are, he adds, baffled by the notion of “Israel as the place you can always count on when they come to get you.” Living in a world of blogs, they’re similarly skeptical of the premise that “we’re still on too-shaky ground” to permit public disagreement.
Israel lobby piece– good reporting:
A Congressional aide told me that Berman’s predecessor, Tom Lantos, permitted Aipac’s lobbyists to write the crucial language of resolutions and legislation, but Berman’s staff solicited comments from a wide range of groups, including J Street, and wrote the document themselves.
Even J Street’s staunch friends on the Hill acknowledge the potential costs of their position. Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman who represents Memphis, told me that in his mind Israel had squandered its heroic status through its wars in Lebanon and Gaza and had come to be seen as “the neighborhood bully.” But he recalled that “when J Street first surfaced, the talk among members was, ‘Do we get near them?’ ” The organization had endorsed Cohen and asked if he would record a video for its Web site. “Several veteran Jewish members cautioned me not to do it,” he said. “They were afraid I would be attacked by Aipac. Some people whispered about the possibility of having an opponent.” He went ahead and made the video. He also signed the J Street letter calling for deeper American engagement in the peace process. I asked if there had been any repercussions. “I’m thinking about it,” said Cohen, a significantly wryer-than-average legislator. “I did have some strong Aipac supporters who didn’t come to my last fund-raising party. And they’re normally the first people to come forward.”
And you wonder why there are colonies in the West Bank and the two-state-solution is at death’s door. Palestinian statelessness is an American Jewish achievement.
