J Street’s Jewish progressivism

At the end of her piece on J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami’s recent visit to Columbia, Jill Marcellus issued a warning to the “extremists” hostile to the concept of a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby: “Anyone ready to purge me or other progressive Jews from the fold should realize: you will not create a Jewish American monolith, but a nation of ‘self-loathing’ Jews.” She offers no concept of what “the fold” is other than an American Jewry so blinded by pro-Israel fanaticism that “Woody Allen seemed like its paragon of sanity.” And she offers no concept of what “progressivism” means, other than a high-minded rejection of Jewish tribalism and a desire to “broaden the Israel conversation.” So for Marcellus, “progressivism” means extricating yourself from a monolithic identity that you didn’t care or think that much about anyway.

Yet American Jewish life is only “monolithic” for those who are oblivious to the real substance of it—or worse, for those who need a straw man against which to measure their own “progressivism.” This characterization is interesting because it’s so facile—its shallowness is a symptom of the very problems it attempts to diagnose. To wit: Marcellus’s “progressive Judaism” has nothing to do with Rachel Adler, Steven Greenberg, Heeb Magazine, J-Dub records, alternative prayer communities like the Upper West Side’s own Kol Zimrah, or the scores of people and institutions who have made contemporary American Judaism so dynamic. By Marcellus’s account, her dormant progressive Jewish consciousness was awoken a few Sundays ago with the realization that the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” camp now has an lobbying group.

Marcellus’s op-ed proves that the most significant tension in American Jewish life isn’t between J Street and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, but between people for whom American Jewish life is casually reducible and therefore easily dismissible and those who actively care about the direction of their religious and ethnic community. No matter where you stand politically, it’s impossible to shrink American Jewish life to the level of mere Israel fetishism as Marcellus does and still be an active participant in it. This mindset is almost the definition of parochialism. And J Street actually jeopardizes the very “Israel conversation” it is trying to “broaden” when it simply allows “progressive” American Jews to wash their hands of their Meshugana co-religionists.

Blogger Philip Weiss demonstrates just how ugly this kind of thinking can get. “I don’t get to feel proud as a Jew very often these days,” he wrote this September in reference to Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who is perhaps his society’s harshest critic. Weiss’s attitude represents an inversion of the claim that American Jewish identity is defined by it being uncritically pro-Israel—indeed, Weiss is only “proud as a Jew” when other Jews dispense with the need for a Jewish state. This is no different from—and no less dangerous than—the opposite assertion that American Jewish identity should be intrinsically linked to mindless support for Israel.

Weiss’s concept of Judaism is offensively limited. For instance, this past week, Weiss condemned the New York Times for having an ethnically Israeli correspondent in Jerusalem. “The other Times correspondent, Ethan Bronner, is an American Jew also married to an Israeli,” Weiss blogged. “South Africa never had it so good.” For Weiss, any Jewish or Israeli journalist covering Israel is an apologist for apartheid-style racism. Thus, Zionism and indeed ethnicity itself hopelessly infect all but the most “progressive” Jews with near-incurable bigotry.

Weiss established his “progressive” credibility in relation to the primitivism of the rest of his tribe. He also bolstered it by speaking at the J Street convention this past month.

J Street could follow Weiss (and, to a lesser extent, Marcellus) by capitalizing on the spurious notion that J Street and AIPAC form the defining fault line in American Jewish life. Or it could follow Ben-Ami, who epitomized actual Jewish progressivism in an interview with The Atlantic Monthly right before the J Street conference. “I think that the notion is that there should be a homeland that is a Jewish homeland,” he said of his group’s defining principles. “The question is, how do we preserve it?”

Luckily for American Jews, J Street’s founder believes that the organization should not operate from a position of embarrassment or hostility and that it should practice a progressivism that has goals loftier than self-therapy—goals such as the improvement of the Jewish people and the only political entity it controls. An ideal Jewish progressivism realizes that Marcellus’s frustration is real but that the parochials will overtake the participants if American Jewish life doesn’t offer them an alternative to communal alienation. But the parochials will also win if groups like J Street simply vindicate their frustration rather than work toward its reversal.

This is the real tension that J Street embodies. If it’s merely a front for deep anti-communal cynicism, J Street will provide American Jews not with the opportunity to engage with their ethnic and religious heritage, but with an excuse to distance themselves from it even more.

The author is a List College senior majoring in English and Judaic studies.