It’s not unusual to be on the receiving end of name-calling at J Street. I’ve heard quite an array over my fifteen years at the pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy advocacy group.

Increasingly there’s been more coming from the far-left: tagging us with the accurate Zionist label but that is meant as a slur, comparisons to Nazis and other genocidal references, and more–some that either borders on or is full-on antisemitism.

But what’s been consistent since J Street’s founding are the attacks from the right. I’ll forgo most of the examples and simply keep with the most recent, which come from Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, who in the last couple weeks has referred to J Street as “a cancer within the Jewish community” and has since only doubled down on his claims that we are not pro-Israel, despite a letter from over 600 Jewish communal leaders calling for an apology. 

It’s been perplexing over the years to understand why J Street evokes such animosity from the right, but I think journalist Joshua Leifer captured it in his recent Haaretz piece:

It is precisely J Street’s normality that makes the Jewish right hate it with such venom. It is because J Street’s supporters cannot be dismissed as communal outsiders, deluded youths or self-hating Jews – and are instead, by and large, mainstream liberals and Jewish communal professionals . . . . J Street’s adversaries would like nothing more than for J Street to be a radical left group and cannot bear the fact that it is not.

It is precisely J........

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