Jeremy J Street Makes A Joke

In a reviewof Jeremy Ben-Ami's book on J Street, we are informed that

Ben-Ami starts with a historical analogy that is sure to drive many of his critics bonkers: He compares J Street to the Bergson Group, the band of right-wing loyalists to Ze’ev Jabotinsky. The group was ostracized by the U.S. Jewish establishment in the 1930s and ‘40s for waging an aggressive campaign to finance illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine and publicly pressuring the Roosevelt administration to do more to help European Jewry. What gives the comparison extra punch is that Ben-Ami—a former Bill Clinton and Howard Dean staffer—is the son of the late Bergson Group member Yitshaq Ben-Ami.

“My organization, J Street, is attacked … from the right for being left-wing, while the attacks in the 1930s against the Bergson Group came from the left and called them ‘fascist,’ ” the younger Ben-Ami writes. “If the experience of the Bergson Groups teaches us anything, it is that the appropriate way to deal with those new voices is not to reflexively shut them down but to engage them on the merits and see what value there may be in what they are trying to say.”

True.

And J Street has no merits.

It is a pro-American liberal progressive group of assimilated Jews that can find enough solace in its Israel-directed activity to feel still Jewish, but barely, and not be condemned by antisemites.

It is subversive, it undermines Israel's security and unabashedly identifies with the enemies of the Jewish people.

Bergson Group?

Is that the sounds of "Mike" Ben-Ami, a proud scion of Chabad and the Irgun, I hear banging?

Remember, he wrote the following:

Western political leaders have acquired a concern for 'Arab-Palestinian homelessness', which is selfishly economic rather than humanitarian. At the same time they ignore that three quarters of the original Palestine Mandate area is now under Palestinian-Arab rule. The sooner disaspora Jews and the Hebrew nation recognize these new realities, the stronger they will be.

The Hebrew renaissance offers a painful choice to Jews. They can live in the diaspora, often facing isolation, persecution and ambivalent identities, or they can return to their ancient land and face perils, but with a chance for honorable self-fulfillment and an end to wandering...

on page 544 of his book, Years of Wrath, Days of Glory.

Jeremy, you're joking, right?

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