---

CANDLELIGHTING

---

THE JEWISH VIEW

---

HOLIDAYS

---

JUDAISM 101

---

{weblog_name} - Intersecting With J Street
Comments (1)

Why has J Street struck such a chord – for some happy and for others cursed – in so many people? Earlier this week, I went to Washington, D.C. to attend part of the 2,000 delegate national convention for the not-quite three-year-old lobby that bills itself as “pro-Israel and pro-peace.” (Check it out at http://www.jstreet.org ). For the most part, I found people who deeply care for Israel but do so along liberal lines. That is, they voice out loud what many American Jews I know say privately: We love Israel but we surely don’t love its actions of West Bank/East Jerusalem settlement building, policies of demolitions of homes of families of Arab terrorists and even the need to maintain a “united, eternal, undivided Jewish capital of Jerusalem.” Of course, I know plenty of other Jews who agree with… read more

Re the following:

““You guys might not realize it,” I told them, “but you have a deep responsibility toward American Jews. The way I see it, your job is to reach out to Jews on the left and the far-left – where there undeniably are anti-Semites – and give them a Jewish organization to feel comfortable in. You guys can really help someone with their Jewish identity.”

“I stand by that even more today. And the good thing is I saw people with good Jewish identities of many ages, particularly young adults. I saw some men and women with kippot, and I saw smiling college students and aging veterans of the Jewish peace movement bantering in the hallways and sessions.”

I wonder why there can’t be more organizations on the right like J Street who come out and condemn what needs to be legitimately condemned in Medinat Yisra’el, and also condemns the actions of those like George Soros. As a Messianic Jew and registered Republican, I think that some fellow Jews need to emerge out from the Meir Kahane crowd has monopolized and say, “Hey, not all Zionists are Meir Kahanists, Jewish Supremacists, or meshuga haredim.”