It’s always difficult to untangle when J Street officials actually believe in the anti-Israel policies and anti-Semitic rhetoric that they push and defend, and when they’re just following the commands of donors. The group’s president Jeremy Ben-Ami raised eyebrows by voluntarily injecting himself on the side of anti-Jewish language during the “Israel-Firster” debate, and then later it turned out that J Street had a potential financial incentive to take that stance. On the other hand the group and its partisans seem genuinely enthused about rolling out the red carpet for Peter Beinart and his exhortation to economically suffocate Israelis who don’t live where he tells them. As for J Street’s call on Obama to pressure Israel in the aftermath of the Flotilla even though the Israelis were in the right on self-defense, that simply had an incoherence borne of conflicted priorities.
So it’s impossible to know which dynamic — donor pressure or personal passion — was at work when J Street officials defended Occupy Wall Street from criticism of its disgraceful and extensively documented anti-Semitism. In favor of the donor theory, there’s the fact that J Street funder George Soros backed Occupy. On the side of the labor of love theory, there turn out to be deep sociological, institutional, and personal ties between pro-Occupy radicals and J Street officials – so much so that those radicals are now officially “partnering” with J Street on this weekend’s conference.
Most likely it was a little of Column A and a little of Column B, with J Street officials being genuinely sympathetic but wary about the optics of supporting yet another group of anti-Semites.
The debate revolves around a statement by self-declared “Jewish leaders” who, per the statement title, set out to “Denounce Right-Wing Smears of Occupy Wall Street.” The piece specifically attacked the Emergency Committee for Israel, a J Street bête noire and a major force behind the electoral wipe out of J Street candidates in the 2010 election. Ben-Ami’s name was one of about a dozen on the bottom of the statement, and the press contact for the entire release was J Street VP Carinne Luck.
The upcoming conference will have a core, recognized, pro-Occupy new media presence. The leftwing Jewschool site recently announced that it was going to “partner with J Street” on the conference, including dispatching sponsored bloggers to cover the events. Jewschool actively pushed Occupy and continues to do so, with the most recent sympathetic post getting published just last week. “We are the 99%,” declared another post. An admittedly inaccurate Google site search for “occupy wall street” turns up over 700 hits.
It turns out that J Street officials and Jewschool officials have demonstrably been cooperating to insulate Occupy. For instance, an early version of J Street’s toe-in-the-water press release was published on a site called Occupy Judaism (later versions had additional press contacts). Daniel Sieradski, founding publisher and former editor-in-chief of Jewschool owns the site. I’d direct you to the original statement on Sieradski’s site but the whole blog was taken down some time this morning, after I searched for it and found it last night. Luckily it’s still cached here.
J Street officials and Jewschool activists have long worked together to paper over the anti-Semitism of Occupy Wall Street, albeit sometimes with each being once removed from their home organizations. It would be hard to think of two more appropriate “partners” for the J Street conference.
but the Occupiers are hand-me-down six-degrees-of-separation hippiedom to begin with, at wits end after whatever Phish-reunion Nodding Man Bananarana Gathering of the Tribes carnival they regularly attend has gone on hiatus. Now that the initial buzz has worn off are these revolutionary swallows of last season up to anything more than trashing foreclosed houses from stem to stern whilie their owners are fighting foreclosure? It's as if J-Street decided to take a break from cleaning Rosenberg's dribble cup to enter into formal association with Cindy Sheehan.
This is the J Street org that tries to deny they are a Leftist Marxist George Soros entity, right??? n nSo LOL!
All I can say about J Street is that they are somone's useful idiots.
I've never paid much attention to J Street but I did read Ben Ami's take on Beinart's divestment op ed. While in it there was some reasoned argument, self promotion abounded in quantities incredibly unusual for a supposedly critical piece of analysis. I'm inclined to judge the whole by this small bit.
Peter Beinart's career arc seems to have followed that of liberalism itself: from the kind of liberalism able to distinguish, in the world, good from bad actors — the liberalism subscribed to by Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter — to today's nihilist travesty, co-opted by the radical left, causing so many ur-liberals to flee to the more rational precincts of neo-conservatism. n nBeinart's demand for divestment, in response to Israel's failure to conform to his and his cohorts' policy diktats, and the blatantly anti-Semitic Occupy movement to which Beinart apparently has allied, recall the character trait common to them, indeed to all movement liberals: overweening narcissism.
Can't add more than one thumbs-up to this comment. Beinart is a self-absorbed disgrace.
It's disgraceful that Obama allies with J Street. May they continue to out themselves as the Soros hate group that they are, and may the Republicans make the most of the Obama-J-Occupy-Soros connections. To have "their man" in the White House speaks volumes about the incredible ineptitude of the American political system and the cluelessness of the electorate. Even Hilary Clinton would have been a step up compared to this unholy alliance.
Let's be honest about JStreet, it is a business organized to make money for it's organizers and leaders. These people may even believe their anti Israel bias and they may even support Obama's predilection that Israeli policies are anti peace, anti democracy, and anti American, but at the end of the day, the Jews who run JStreet do the bidding of their donors. They also enjoy a certain notoriety and influence if you will due to their willingness to do the bidding of Barack Obama as well as give Obama's anti Semitism and anti Israeli polilcies a degree of respectability. This is why the Israeli government and decent Jewish organizations should shun the JStreet crowd in every possible venue, because granting JStreet any sort of recognition only further empowers them.
This publication has the uncanny ability to find enemies every where. To a hammer everything looks like a nail. To professional victims everyone looks like a villain.
Jews who cooperate with anti-Semites are capos.
. . . by definition
J Street is gutter trash. They know it. They are self-hating Jews. They should convert and stop pretending to be what they are not.
Convert to what? Self-negating, suicidal leftism, I guess