Dear Friends,
Last night’s results are a solid gut punch to all of us in the J Street family.
There’s no getting past the pain, grief, fear and, yes, even some anger, that we’re feeling individually and as a community. These feelings aren’t going away quickly – they’ll likely last for days, weeks or longer for some.
Many of you – like me – probably didn’t sleep all that well last night, anxiously wondering what the return to power of Donald Trump and a Republican Senate majority will mean for so much that we care about. What it means for the world we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren.
We’ll likely spend a lot of time over the coming days refreshing election results to track a handful of House races that will determine if there’s an emergency brake on MAGA power in Congress. Our strategy and that of many advocacy groups will hang heavily on the outcome in a final few swing congressional seats.
I don’t have to tell you how stark the implications of yesterday’s results are for everything we care about, from the personal – our health care, the state of the environment, our freedom and rights – to the national and international. And it’s not just Americans whose future is impacted. It’s Israelis and Palestinians, Ukrainians and more.
I know within J Street there is especially deep concern over what this means for the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and whether Benjamin Netanyahu and his government will take the results as a green light for further devastation there and in the West Bank.
Please know we have plans in place to respond to this and more – and to press for immediate, meaningful action from the Biden Administration in the time it has left in office. We’ll have much to say about this in the coming days.
As we take a beat to process all of our thoughts and emotions, I promise that J Street will be a political home for you and tens of thousands like you, providing space to come together as a supportive community with a shared set of values.
We’ve been through a lot together these past 16 years – the shock of the 2016 election, the horrors of terror and war, a pandemic, and more. So we know what we need to do. We’ll start by setting up time for our members to process the results and to plan a course of action in chapter meetings at the local level and in national forums as well. And we’ll come up with an advocacy and political strategy to meet this moment with strength, resilience and optimism.
Many of you have been around long enough to know that after every setback we’ve experienced, we’ve bounced back, and new victories have followed our defeats.
We’ve demonstrated resilience. We’ve joined with allies in resistance. We’ve formed effective opposition. We work together actively to shift the course of history.
Today, this organization and movement are stronger than we’ve ever been, and we continue to grow. In this political cycle, we raised nearly $15 million for our endorsed candidates. We were the largest Jewish institutional fundraiser for the Harris campaign.
We established ourselves as the mainstream voice for Jewish Americans in Democratic politics and beyond.
So, in the wake of last night, we will step forward to lead Jewish political opposition not just to what Donald Trump may try to do to our country, our democracy and our foreign policy – but to the policies of Netanyahu and the extreme right in Israel.
The overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans oppose the politics and policies of both Trump and Netanyahu. We understand the threats they pose are intertwined. It's not surprising that the same forces that don't oppose Netanyahu and the Israeli right are silent about Trump and the danger he poses to our democracy.
That's why I promise you that J Street will lead our community’s loud and potent opposition to both of these leaders and their dangerous agendas.
In the days ahead, we will pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get ready for the fight ahead for our values and our future.
We have come back before from defeat to win – and we will do it again in the months and years ahead. The stakes are too high for us to walk away.
Thank you for all you did in this election – where we do have many accomplishments at the Senate and House level – and I look forward to what we will do together.
Yours,
Jeremy Ben-Ami
President, J Street
