RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jeremy Ben Ami’s Whitewash of J Street by Jerry Gordon

What was President Ronald Reagan’s favorite riposte to critics: “there he goes again’!  Well, the same could be said for Jeremy Ben Ami- the founder of J Street who launched a self-promoting book, this week, “A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation” (Palgrave MacMillan.  J Street has generated controversy across the American Jewish landscape and this from the son of one of the Bergson Boys, Yitzhak Ben Ami.  J Street and the younger Ben Ami  lack credibility over revelations of  the group’s  ‘hidden’ source of funding from the self-hating, anti-Israel George Soros,  criticisms  by local activists of local Jewish Federations and Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRC) in cities like Boston, Hartford and Indianapolis for inviting local J Street  chapters into the ‘big tent’.  All this from a group that promotes its vision of being “pro-Peace pro-Israel” while demanding the creation of an immediate Palestinian State. In fact J Street has supported several Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) speakers at its annual conferences in Washington, DC. Further, it has drawn the ire of the Netanyahu government in Jerusalem when it came to promote its views to a majority of a very wary Israeli body polity, excepting, of course, extremist leftist allies like Peace Now, Rabbis for Human Rights, the New Israel Fund and B’Tselem.

The senior Ben Ami Yitzhak was one of the six Jabos, revisionist Palestinian Jews, followers of the late Ze’ev Jabotinsky, under the leadership of Peter Bergson, the nom de guerre of Hillel Kook, who came to the US just before WWII to promote the idea of a Jewish Army to fight Fascism and Nazism. Instead, they became embroiled in a campaign to save the remnant of Six Million European Jewish men, Women and Children murdered in unspeakable ways during the Holocaust.  The Bergson Boys, as they were called, through dint of lobbying on Capitol Hill in Washington, major pageants, free ads in Hearst newspapers electrified American Jews and Christian Zionists to defy FDR and his Jewish viziers like speech writer and White House counsel, New York lawyer and Judge, Samuel Rosenman and what passed for so-called American Zionist leadership, Rabbi Hillel Silver, among them.   The latter were toadies to Jewish Agency leaders in the yishuv in Mandatory Palestine led by the first Labor Socialist Prime Minister of Israel, founding father, David Ben Gurion.    The Bergson Boys succeeded, despite opposition from American Jewish Zionist leadership, in getting a joint Congressional resolution passed entreating an unmoved FDR to do something to save European Jews from being consigned to death in the gas chambers and crematoria of Nazi death camps.  It was left to Roosevelt’s Dutchess County, Hudson Valley New York neighbor, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., aroused by his staff, to confront Roosevelt in the Oval office. That effort led to the establishment of the War Refugee Board and efforts that may have saved perhaps 250,000 Jews.  That important episode by the Bergson Boys in America was been chronicled in the 2003 book, Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, by Professor David Wyman and Rafael Medoff.

Yitzhak Ben Ami, the father of Jeremy, helped to organize those fabled “We Will Not Die” pageants in major American cities, with Broadway and Hollywood figures like actors, Edward G. Robinson, Edward Arnold, playwright Ben Hecht, émigré composer Kurt Weil and even choreographer Jerome Robbins.  Rabbi Jon Hausman’s mother Ethel attended one of those pageants and has preserved the program from an event that her uncle took her to in Philadelphia when her parents in Bridgeport, Connecticut sent her as an adventurous teenager for a visit that sparked her lifelong Zionist commitment a legacy for her four accomplished sons. In it is a picture we found of none other Yitzhak Ben Ami, Jeremy’s father.

What passes for the American Jewish wire service, the JTA, had a ‘whitewash’  piece by Ami Eden“ J Street, the book—expect more controversy “ showcasing  Jeremy Ben Ami’s new book.   Note some of self adulatory excesses by the younger Ben Ami in making comparison with his father’s valued efforts as a Bergson Boy.

“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.”

It is true, as Ben-Ami asserts in his book, that some right-wing and centrist critics of his organization have launched vitriolic and distortion-filled attacks against J Street and its leaders, often working to blackball them from various forums.

Then there is the evident lack of credibility of Jeremy Ben Ami cited by Eden;

Take George Soros-gate, the controversy over the news that the billionaire funder of anti-communist and anti-Bush causes — and a critic of some Israeli security and settlement policies — in fact had been a leading donor to J Street.