Not only did J Street explicitly violate its firm commitment, it did so with breathtaking audacity.
Within hours of the event, J Street sent out thousands of releases and emails urging everyone who was not present at the launch to go to its website and watch the video. While the video of Ben-Ami’s remarks is no longer – four years later – still up on the website, it was for many months. In fact, the text of the statement still is on the J Street website. You can see it for yourself.
For some reason, perhaps because they did not want it known they had been duped so completely, the Philadelphia-area Hillel leadership chose to not publicly remonstrate with Ben-Ami over his calculated lie at Hillel’s expense. But because J Street’s brazen deception was not shared with other Hillels, other campus organizations, and other Jewish organizations, were denied an early opportunity to know about the deception and to raise the honesty bar before J Street. The bar itself seems to be lost.
In fact, anecdotal evidence from college students around the country raise concerns that J Street has not only been embraced by the Open Tent of Jewish communal organizations on campus. Now there is a danger of it becoming the owner of the tent.
Just one example of that comes from an op-ed which recently appeared in The Jewish Press. It described a Brandeis University campus event at which J Street U members entered late, shouted at the speaker and disrupted the event. What is even more galling is that after the event, a J Street U student criticized the other students, claiming J Street U was shut down because its views are “unacceptable.” The views were not the reason there was criticism, it was the behavior displayed by J Street U students that was.
And now word comes that J Street is again setting up shop in various cities across the country, this time to have what it is calling a Town Hall. The goal of the Town Hall is to continue banging the drum for its obsessive goal of creating a Palestinian State. And J Street is hosting one of its Town Hall events in Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania Hillel!
The University of Pennsylvania Hillel seems to enjoy playing the losing end of the game “Heads I win, Tails you lose.”
There still are members in those big tents, especially the Jewish-built ones on campuses, who see real peace in the Middle East as the only acceptable goal of the Middle East Peace Process. This distinguishes them from organizations such as J Street, whose sole goal is the immediate creation of a Palestinian State. Maybe what you see as the goal of the peace process is a legitimate litmus test to use for groups who enjoy the benefits of being in the Big Tent.