aaron
I can't say enough good things about JVP. They're terrific folks, and they do excellent work. Their director of educational policy, Mitchell Plitnick, has been writing a column for us since March. He wrote a terrific piece about how unrepresentative America's major Jewish organizations are of domestic Jewish politics in the current edition:
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0607/plitnick
There are a lot of good people and new organizations doing this kind of advocacy and analysis in the American Jewish community right now. Its really representative of the second - some would say third - generation of progressive Israel-oriented activist periods to have hit the US.
With each successive wave, these activists and organizations things seem to be moving further left, away from the inviolable Zionist consensus of the New Jewish Agenda period that began after the Lebanon War in '82 here. Twenty years ago, if Norman Finkelstein had been the profile he has now, he'd have been condemned outright. But, now, everyone - even the most conservative of this crowd - will admit they follow his work - even if they disagree with him.
Though the largest of these outfits - Brit Tzedek veh Shalom - is decidedly centrist compared to the folks at JVP, there's a lot of interesting reflection & debate going on within it that is worth watching. I wonder how the current war in Lebanon will affect BTvS' long term political positioning. I attended a conference of theirs in Manhattan last year that, despite my political differences with BTvS, was highly instructive.
I'm, not a purist. As an editor and a journalist working within this milieu, i try and step back and look at how all these organizations are in their totality indicative of potentially much larger cultural changes going on in the American Jewish community viz Israel. Its all definitely good, particularly given how absolutely fucked up domestic Jewry is on questions concerning Israel. And I say this acknowledging what a minority this crew still is here.
But what i don't see happening yet in any substantial way is an emerging consensus across these outfits (with certain exceptions) that the Israel/US tie has to be finally severed - that the US cannot be a positive agent for change in the Middle East - and that the liberal American Jewish community has to adopt alternative national means to intervening. every day i get more and more letters saying 'get congress to sponsor a peace resolution now', get Bush to press a peace plan now - as though it were still the Clinton or even Carter years. those days, with all their imperfections, are gone forever.
If American Jews are so concerned with adopting an effective strategy to achieve a final peace, a permanent ceasefire, what have you, maybe pouring their time and money into reshaping domestic Israeli politics would be a more worthwhile endeavor.
Joel
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com