More press for J Street (UPDATED WITH LINK)

J Street is the subject of a lengthy article that will appear this Sunday in the New York Times Magazine and has already been posted online. Entitled "The New Israel Lobby" and authored by James Traub, the largely positive article notes J Street’s growth:

There appears to be an appetite for J Street’s approach. Over the last year, J Street’s budget has doubled, to $3 million; its lobbying staff is doubling as well, to six. That still makes it tiny compared with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, whose lobbying prowess is a matter of Washington legend. J Street is still as much an Internet presence, launching volleys of e-mail messages from the netroots, as it is a shoe-leather operation. But it has arrived at a propitious moment, for President Obama, unlike his predecessors, decided to push hard for a Mideast peace settlement from the very outset of his tenure. He appointed George Mitchell as his negotiator, and Mitchell has tried to wring painful concessions from Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states. In the case of Israel, this means freezing settlements and accepting a two-state solution. Obama needs the political space at home to make that case; he needs Congress to resist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appeals for it to blunt presidential demands. On these issues, which pose a difficult quandary for the mainstream groups, J Street knows exactly where it stands. “Our No. 1 agenda item,” Ben-Ami said to me, “is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”

The article also notes the appeal it has to many younger Jews:

Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, was born in Poland in 1940, and he often sounds as if only eternal vigilance will ward off the Holocaust in the offing. Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, was born in a camp for displaced persons, to parents who were Holocaust survivors. The prophetic voice comes naturally to such men. So does the sense of besetting peril. 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. There’s a curious and striking analogy with the situation of Cuban-Americans, whose politics until quite recently were dominated by the generation that fled Castro’s revolution and were grimly determined to see his regime overthrown. Obama has not had to pay a price for moderating the American embargo, as his predecessors would have, because Cuban-American opinion is no longer in thrall to the older generation — precisely J Street’s goal in regard to the Middle East.

But the article also raises the question of whether J Street can sustain the interest of a constituency for whom, in many cases, Israel is not their top concern:

Ben-Ami … acknowledges that moments of crisis for Israel tap into the ancestral impulses. “There’s a rational side that on policy grounds is with us and Obama,” he says, “and can understand that talking, peace, these are good things, and they’re better than pre-emptive military action. Then there’s their grandmother’s voice in their ear; it’s the emotional side and the communal history, and it’s the fear of not wanting in some way to be responsible for the next great tragedy that will befall the Jewish people.”

This in turn raises a question about J Street’s prospects. As a lobbying group, would you rather represent the passionate few or the dispassionate many? The National Rifle Association knows the answer to that question. One administration official involved with the Middle East points out that Aipac cultivates single-issue partisans. Wielding the other 92 percent into a potent political force, he notes, will be “a major, long-term and uphill task.” He adds, “I’m not sure it can be done.”

A couple stray observations on the article. First, it is interesting that the reporter quotes no one by name criticizing J Street — although it’s not clear if that’s because critics didn’t want to go on the record about the group or the reporter simply didn’t call the right critics.

Second, Ben-Ami is quoted at one point in the piece as saying that "I’m very consciously not interested in portraying our organization as anti-Aipac." Aside from the fact that the organization has marketed itself as an alternative to traditional, and often more conservative, pro-Israel voices, Ben-Ami is quoted earlier in the piece saying, “We’re trying to redefine what it means to be pro-Israel. You don’t have to be noncritical. You don’t have to adopt the party line. It’s not, ‘Israel, right or wrong.’ ” Well, if there is a "party line" on Israel, it is set by AIPAC.

Even Traub doesn’t seem to buy it, recounting how J Street offered an alternative letter last spring to AIPAC’s letter on the peace process and writing that it "muddied" the waters on Ben-Ami’s claim.

A J Street official argues that the organization and AIPAC don’t work at cross-purposes because they do have some major areas of agreement, such as supporting robust foreign aid to Israel and a two-state solution.