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By Charles Jacobs
(April 17, 2024) Few Jews still believe that the Jewish establishment has done a good job defending and protecting the community from the rhetorical onslaught against Israel that has morphed into a full-on assault against American Jewry.
From the start, the “establishment”—the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federation system, the Jewish Community Relations Councils and many rabbis—failed to understand that the obsessive, intense, continuous “criticism of Israeli policies” that appeared almost daily in the media was a new form of antisemitism. They failed to defend Jewish students on campus who were intimidated and harassed by the leftist academia and then subjected to continuous vigorous attacks by woke student groups. The establishment told us to embrace all the leftist groups’ causes so that presumably these groups would reciprocate and have our backs, too. We followed this advice: We supported blacks and feminists, gays and Latinos, and even Muslims, and then all of them stabbed us in the back. To this day, neither local nor national establishment leaders have given an accounting of this colossal and perhaps lethal failure. Worse, they refuse to do a difficult rethink of the unthought-out policies that brought us all down to this dark alley where we seem to be dangerously trapped.
One key failure of our leaders was their policy of the “Big Tent.” This concept was pitched to us as a way to include all segments of Jewish opinion to maintain Jewish unity in the face of severe internal disagreements. For example, the JCRC in Boston accepted as members both J Street and the New Israel Fund, organizations that essentially place the blame for the conflict on Israel. Of course, the actual result of the Big Tent policy—now clearer than ever—was to dilute the pro-Zionist voice in our community while making the establishment even less likely and less able to defend Israel and the Jewish community. And in those instances when the establishment did defend our people, public officials, the media and other foes could quote J Street’s hostile-to-Israel policies to weaken the defense of the Jewish state.
Left unstated was the fact that the Big Tent policy served the establishment’s fundraising needs. (Big salaries need to be paid, after all.) In reality, it should be referred to as “the Big Money Tent:” Just keep the left at the table, and you get their money, too.
This foolishness persists, even now when we are under direct assault at even the highest levels. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (aka, the Conference of Presidents or also, “CoP”) is a collection of 50 organizations that is assumed to be one of the most powerful voices of American Jewry. Yet even now the CoP continues to include groups that blame Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians, and think and demand that Israeli concessions can lead to peace with Islamist movements that insist that Jews may never have sovereign self-rule in “holy Arab land.” And even now, when more than ever we need their voices to be strong and determined, the CoP’s very mechanism for choosing its next chairperson indicates that it will be a mostly feckless group, unable to protect American Jewry.
Many people will be surprised that even today—when the Jewish community is under an ideological assault that brands its support for Israel as “racist” and even “genocidal”—the CoP’s 50 organizations include the far-left groups Americans for Peace Now and Ameinu, which announced that it is merging into APN. Ameinu/APN actively oppose key mainstream Zionist positions and are more allied with the Jewish community’s foes.
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