The Man on J Street: The Story of Jeremy Ben-Ami

He's Been Called a Judas, But Unruffled, Continues Lobbying U.S. Policymakers to Push Israel Toward Peace

Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J Street, the new “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby, is eating his lunch—green salad with flatbread and bottled iced tea. He orders the same thing every day from the Cosi downstairs. He may be on K Street, proverbial home base for tasseled-loafer lobbyists in the nation’s capital, but Ben-Ami’s plain fare matches the spare modernist quarters. Sublet from a software firm, its blue and orange offices furnished with little more than laptops and filing cabinets give J Street the feel of a start-up.

Which it is. The two-year-old lobbying organization, complete with an online and grassroots network and a political action committee, is making headlines by aggressively campaigning for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—even when that means brazenly criticizing Israel on matters like West Bank settlements and military action in Gaza. Despite J Street’s relatively small size, it has roiled the waters of American Israel advocacy, perhaps causing ripples for even the AIPAC super-tanker. And while this has endeared Ben-Ami to many left and centrist Jews who have looked askance at the Israel advocacy business, it has also rendered him a seemingly dangerous unknown in some powerful circles.

The media is abuzz about J Street and its potential impact, but anyone expecting to meet the wild-eyed fanatic behind this taboo-busting organization may be surprised by Ben-Ami himself. This wonkish, salad-eating 46-year-old in a tweedy jacket, with his wire-rimmed glasses and neatly combed ginger hair, has all the radical aura of an Episcopal church deacon.

Ben-Ami speaks precisely, in fully formed sentences, his slightly nasal voice barely rising as he recalls an event that hastened his transformation from domestic-policy technocrat to megaphone for U.S. policy in the Middle East. In 2003, when he was national policy director for the presidential campaign of Howard Dean, the candidate suggested in a speech that America should be “evenhanded” in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “The next thing you knew, he was subjected to a letter from a hundred congresspeople telling him he was not pro-Israel,” Ben-Ami says. “He [Dean] was forced to sit down with all sorts of American Jewish leaders. I called them ‘come to Jesus meetings.’”

It fell to Ben-Ami and other aides to give the candidate an emergency crash course in what Ben-Ami calls “the chapter in the rule book of American politics on ‘How to Deal With the Jewish Community.’ There are certain words and phrases you can and can’t say, a certain language you need to memorize,” he elaborates. “One of the goals of J Street is to rewrite this chapter in the rule book, because it’s not serving the best interests of Israel, the U.S. or the American Jewish community.”

What is in the best interests of Israel is at the heart of the debate. Ben-Ami thinks Israel’s future is best ensured by the creation of two states along the lines of Israel’s pre-1967 borders, with Jerusalem as shared capital. Although Israel’s most hawkish defenders disagree, a broad range of mainstream pro-Israel groups support a two-state solution—as does Israel’s Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Still, like Israelis, American Jews diverge wildly on how that goal should be reached, under what kind of pressure from the United States and with what degree of urgency.

Ben-Ami is in the “urgent” camp, impatient with those who claim that the time isn’t right for peace. They see a peace deal, he says, as “a distant aspiration. Mostly it’s phrased, ‘if the other side were ever to be willing to make peace, then we’d be for it.’” But, to Ben-Ami, surveying the failure of peace talks since Oslo and the Arabs’ demographic ascendance in Israel, time is running out. “The failure to reach a two-state solution in the coming few years is an existential threat to the state of Israel as a Jewish democracy,” he says. “If we fail to solve this now, then, 20 years from now, I don’t think my kids will have a state of their people that they will be able to visit.”

The urgency he describes is new to neither American nor Israeli political discourse: Groups on the left, like Americans for Peace Now—sister group of Shalom Achshav [Peace Now] in Israel—and the Israel Policy Forum, have been pushing a two-state solution for years. Still, while it is universally acknowledged that any peace agreement will require the involvement of Israel’s strongest ally, most American Jews shun prescriptive points of view, according to a source close to AIPAC leaders. “The established community thinks, ‘We want to have a close relationship with Israel and not tell it what to do, other than that the U.S. and Israel should be strong allies,’” he says.

J Street, by contrast, wants to convince American politicians to pressure both the Palestinians and Israel to make peace, leaving some Jewish groups to wonder if J Street is friend or foe.  

The man behind J Street has been called everything from “appallingly naïve” to a Judas, but he seems largely unruffled by the carping, perhaps because he is not the first in his family to raise the hackles of Jewish leaders. Family legend has it that his father, Yitshaq, was the first Jewish baby born in what was, in 1911, the brand new city of Tel Aviv. As a young man, Yitshaq Ben-Ami was tapped by the Irgun militia to help smuggle Jews out of Europe. When war broke out there, he and several comrades redeployed to the United States. Here, under the leadership of founding Irgun member Peter Bergson, they shifted their battles to the political, propaganda and fundraising fronts.

They ran ads, lobbied politicians, organized protests and sought donations to raise the alarm about Hitler. They also advanced Irgun efforts to arm Palestinian Jews and help European refugees break through the British blockade of Palestine. Much of their work drew strenuous protest from well-connected American Jews like Rabbi Stephen Wise, a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, and the American Jewish Congress.

After fighting at the Battle of the Bulge with the U.S. Army, Yitshaq Ben-Ami settled into the affluent life of an international metals trader. He and his second wife, the former Eve Stern, raised their two children, Jeremy and Deborah, in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Yitshaq also had two sons from an earlier marriage.) Jeremy, born in 1962, attended the prestigious Collegiate School, but Israel and its hardscrabble origins played a major part in his early years, which included annual summer visits.

In those childhood years, he reminisces, “my house was always filled with arguments and discussions about Israel,” in which opinions ran the gamut from right-wing Zionist to radical right-wing Zionist. “The notion that there is no such thing as a ‘Palestinian,’ that Israel belonged not only in the West Bank and Gaza but in Jordan—that was my father’s world view.” Still, in a pattern many Jews will recognize, Yitshaq “was a liberal on everything else,” adds his son, “always voting Democratic.”

Jeremy became a bar mitzvah at Rodeph Sholom, a Reform congregation in Manhattan, but that was the extent of his Jewish involvement, he says, describing his attitude throughout his teens and 20s as “rather mainstream and disengaged.” He never joined Jewish youth groups or organizations, he adds. “My thing was politics much more than the Jewish community or Israel.”

After completing a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1984, Ben-Ami concentrated on homelessness and housing issues in New York City government while earning a law degree from New York University. He then worked on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, becoming a deputy domestic policy advisor in the White House with a portfolio that included welfare reform. “[This] made me very unpopular among my liberal friends,” he recalls.

Meanwhile, Ben-Ami was for the first time beginning to nurse “a nagging curiosity about what it would be like to live in Israel and a real fixation on learning Hebrew. I felt that if I didn’t try it when I was in my 30s and still single, I might not ever do it,” he says. So, he moved to Jerusalem in 1997, applying for “temporary resident” status as a possible stepping-stone to making aliyah and working in consulting and communications. 

In Israel, Ben-Ami found far broader debate than he had heard around his father’s table. “You couldn’t have a taxi ride, you couldn’t have a meal, you couldn’t have a meeting, you couldn’t go anywhere without an argument about politics,” he enthuses, “without a discussion of what was best: Are we going in the right direction? The wrong direction? Should we give up more land? Give up less?”

Personally, though, Ben-Ami found Israeli society harder to penetrate. He pauses uncharacteristically to shape his phrasing before plunging into an explanation: “If you didn’t grow up in Israel, and you’re making aliyah, and you don’t speak Hebrew fluently, and you didn’t serve in the army, in terms of professional opportunities and full acceptance into the society, there were some barriers to coming in at 35.” Despite his sabra ties and professional success, he concluded, “I didn’t think I could ever be 100-percent fully accepted as an Israeli.”

So, on December 31, 1999, he moved back to New York and began as policy director for the city’s high-profile Democratic public advocate, Mark Green. Just three weeks after arriving, he found a missing piece of his social puzzle when he met his future wife Alisa Biran, who worked in fundraising for a music school. Biran happened to be the daughter of his childhood cantor at Rodeph Sholom, and Ben-Ami’s mother and the cantor had once tried to set them up.  But they were paired in the end by a website—and not even a Jewish one. “We had both tried JDate and we were both disillusioned with it, so we met on Match.com,” he reveals with a slight smile.

When the couple married in February 2001, Ben-Ami was deputy campaign manager for Green in his close mayoral race against billionaire Michael Bloomberg, then a Republican.  After Green lost, Ben-Ami took his first job in the Jewish organizational world as New York-based regional director of the New Israel Fund, a charity that champions social justice in Israel and has drawn fire from the right for advocating on behalf of Israel’s minorities. He left in 2003 to join Dean’s campaign, where he was exposed to the leading edge of “netroots” advocacy—using the Internet to attract tens of thousands of small donors and to mobilize a cadre of younger supporters not usually reached by traditional campaign tactics.

While observing close hand the organizing methods that would prove so successful at MoveOn.org, the progressive political website, Ben-Ami’s bailiwick remained domestic policy—and, unexpectedly, the Middle East—after Dean’s “evenhandedness” remark blew up. Away from the microphones, he heard grumbling by many who agreed with Dean on Israel but felt too cowed to say so.

“The thing that struck me was how many people quietly would say the same thing that I was saying, which is, ‘I can’t believe this is the way the Israel issue plays out,’” Ben-Ami recalls. “These were big donors in Democratic Party politics, Jewish donors. So I was convinced there was a large group of people who just didn’t have a vehicle for engagement in American politics to express their views.”

Jewish internecine political warfare dates back at least to King David but has rarely come to blows. That’s why a Jew-on-Jew skirmish in Israel’s earliest days remains notorious. In June 1948, vying for control of his fledgling military, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the Israel Defense Forces to fire on a newly arrived Irgun arms ship, the Altalena. The fighting left 16 partisans and three soldiers dead. Jeremy Ben-Ami’s father’s New York efforts had helped pay for the ship. Yitshaq Ben-Ami, who died in 1984, never forgave Ben-Gurion. Indeed, the Irgun-IDF struggle was just one example of many in which the senior Ben-Ami and his allies pitted their radical vision against powerful opponents claiming the “official” Zionist mantle.

Despite such disagreements, by 1948 most American Jews were united in support of the infant state of Israel. The decades following saw the rise of a plethora of new philanthropic and activist organizations, most of which were eventually represented in the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. Formed in 1956, it now consists of 52 member groups. Meanwhile, in the face of a traditionally Arabist State Department and the influence of “petro-dollars” on Capitol Hill, the group that would become the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was emerging under the leadership of Canadian-born ex-journalist I.L. “Sy” Kenen, with funding from various Jewish organizations. AIPAC soon became a tireless behind-the-scenes advocate for Israel.

Despite its name, AIPAC is not a federally registered political action committee that can endorse or donate directly to candidates. AIPAC’s mission is to lobby Congress to promote strong ties between the U.S. and Israel. The group’s power stems from educating members of Congress with briefings and missions to Israel, careful vetting of candidates’ views and the activism of its members and some two dozen Jewish PACs that carefully digest its analysis.

Through the 1970s, AIPAC grew in strength and numbers, playing a critical role on Capitol Hill in ensuring financial support and arms for Israel. What once seemed fairly straightforward became more complex in the 1980s when, after years of Labor rule, Israel’s right-wing Likud Party came to prominence, and an era of dramatic left-right power flips began. AIPAC, which is non-partisan, duly swung with the political pendulum, installing staff and leaders with ties to whichever party dominated in Washington and Tel Aviv and expanding its reach from Capitol Hill to the executive branch. Still, while AIPAC has occasionally irked conservative groups, the organization—with 100,000-plus members and a $140 million endowment—has been seen by many as skewing rightward on the peace process in apparent accord with the views of a handful of powerful donors.

In response, Israel-focused organizations began springing up on the left. Americans for Peace Now, founded in 1981 as a fundraising arm for Shalom Achshav, soon evolved into a membership organization in its own right, known for its efforts to halt settlement expansion. With the encouragement of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a think tank called the Israel Policy Forum was created in 1993 to promote the peace process among U.S. policy makers. The Israel Policy Forum flourished when Rabin and Shimon Peres were in power, but its influence waned after Israel’s Labor Party fell out of favor. In the 1990s, volunteer-run Breira began to organize Jews at the grassroots level in support of a two-state solution; many describe Brit Tzedek v’Shalom (the Alliance for Justice and Peace) as its successor. But none of these included a political action committee or enjoyed anywhere near the influence or collective power—in Washington or the national media—of AIPAC and established Jewish organizations like the Presidents’ Conference, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.

Ben-Ami, since returning from Jerusalem, had been discussing his idea for a new pro-peace voice with other Zionist progressives—in particular, British-born political scientist Daniel Levy, a former official at Israel’s foreign ministry and now co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation, a center-left think tank in Washington, DC. Other early key advisors included Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and Davidi Gilo, a wealthy Israeli tech entrepreneur with Silicon Valley ties.

When Dean’s campaign folded in 2004, Ben-Ami took up in earnest his father’s focus on Israel. Bringing his experience and a list of progressive donors acquired since his Clinton years, he sought advice from David Fenton of Fenton Communications, a consultancy for progressive non-profits. “David convinced me to do the incubation as a project of Fenton,” Ben-Ami says. Now based in Washington, Ben-Ami consulted for other Fenton clients on issues like climate change, while pushing for a new organization—possibly a merger of existing groups, that would also be the Zionist left’s first registered lobby.

By the fall of 2006, he and Morton Halperin—former aide to Presidents Clinton, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson—were meeting with representatives of America’s leading Zionist dove organizations, on the one hand, and of liberal foundations and donors on the other. Perhaps the most eagerly awaited participant at a meeting they held on October 25 was Hungarian-born financier and philanthropist George Soros. Soros had founded the Open Society Institute, where Halperin served as director of American advocacy. Though Jewish and a Holocaust survivor, Soros has rarely donated to Israel-related causes and had provoked an uproar a year earlier by harshly criticizing AIPAC in The New York Review of Books. Still, Ben-Ami hoped the billionaire activist would back his still unnamed project, drawing enough attention and additional donors to amass the several hundred thousand dollars he estimated was needed to launch.

Soros, too, knew what his backing could mean and had his answer ready: It was “no.” He “walked into the room with a prepared statement that announced that he would not be a part of the project because he felt his involvement would be counter-productive,” as Ben-Ami explains (and Soros has confirmed in print). Those concerns were borne out. Some opponents still think of J Street as a covert Soros project. In a rueful nod to J Street’s lingering Soros taint, Ben-Ami gripes good-naturedly, “We got tagged as having his support, without the benefit of actually getting funded!”

Merger talks, meanwhile, also weren’t going well. Marvin Lender, the bagel-dynasty scion who then chaired the Israel Policy Forum, recalls attending several J Street meetings over six months before his group and Americans for Peace Now walked away. (The Israel Policy Forum this year folded itself into the Center for American Progress, headed by former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta.) Only Brit Tzedek proved willing to merge with J Street, as happened on January 1 this year. Marcia Freedman, a Brit Tzedek founder and member of J Street’s Advisory Council, says the larger union failed because “the more established organizations were reluctant to give up their organizational identities.” Lender counters that the Israel Policy Forum’s rejection was political. Ben-Ami “was very good at bringing various groups together… But the way J Street was positioning itself and the people that were associated with it, starting with Jeremy himself, were too far to the left for most of us in the Israel Policy Forum.”

Around the time the merger idea was abandoned, another prospect was also falling by the wayside: that of enlisting a “big name” from the Jewish community to lead the new organization. “It increasingly became clear that either Jeremy was going to head this, or it wasn’t going to happen,” says Levy. When it comes to finding the right person to lead, “you can’t invent people.” Ben-Ami had proven himself and demonstrated personal qualities that perhaps made him a safe choice in a field where egos sometimes loom large. “Jeremy doesn’t have an evangelical kind of style to him,” says Levy. “He’s good at spotting people, good at delegating and disciplined with his time.” 

Ben-Ami became the head of J Street for another important reason: He could raise money. Early funders included Gilo, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Alan Solomont, a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser. But it was an infusion from the family foundation of New Jersey real estate magnate Alan Sagner that enabled Ben-Ami to cut the cord with Fenton in late 2007 and run J Street full-time from the basement office of his Washington, DC, home. The start-up stake of roughly $200,000 was far lower than he had hoped, but “I was able to at least tell my wife we can pay the mortgage,” says Ben-Ami, who now earns $200,000 a year for running an organization with a roughly $4-million annual budget.

In what proved a branding coup, the organization’s official name also emerged from the Fenton bivouac. For months, the group had been casting about for names—“Coalition to Support __” or “Jews United for __”—but found none to their liking. In the meantime, they had nicknamed the project “J Street” after the thoroughfare famously missing from Pierre L’Enfant’s alphabetical street plan for the nation’s capital. At least one veteran of the merger talks dismisses the name as signifying “‘J’ for ‘Jeremy,’” but J Streeters scoff at the notion. They say the name is a play on multiple sources: the “K Street” label for lobbyists, “J” for “Jewish” and, like the street it honors, the pro-peace voice “missing” from U.S. discourse on the Middle East.

J Street’s public launch occurred in April 2008 at the same time Barack Obama was campaigning for president, promising to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians and to open communication lines with Syria and even Iran. For Ben-Ami, the timing couldn’t have been better. “J Street was part of a perfect storm,” says one ally from the progressive camp who did not want to be quoted by name. “The whole discourse shifted in the direction of this budding organization, J Street. They had a tremendous amount of cachet. People supportive of their message were associated with the [future] White House and went to work there. They enjoyed the political circumstances tremendously.” Nor did it hurt that Ben-Ami’s old boss, Howard Dean, was chairing the Democratic Party.

J Street’s new political action committee, JStreetPAC, went into action: Its first order of business was raising money for the November 2008 elections. The $578,000 it distributed was “more than any other pro-Israel PAC in the two-year cycle,” the organization boasts. (NORPAC, a prominent hawkish PAC, disbursed less than $500,000 to candidates during the same period, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.) Of the 41 candidates J Street endorsed, 33 won their races. All but one—Louisiana Republican Charles Boustany—were Democrats.

Late December brought J Street a new flurry of attention when, within 24 hours of Israel’s first air strikes on Gaza, it issued a public statement calling the action “counterproductive” to peace—a view echoed by Americans for Peace Now and Brit Tzedek (which had yet to merge with J Street). Throughout the three-week Gaza incursion that followed, J Street continued calling for a ceasefire, resulting in a barrage of criticism. Even an ally, Reform movement leader Rabbi Eric Yoffie, wrote a sharply-worded op-ed in The Forward in which he called J Street’s position “morally deficient” and “profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment.”

Ben-Ami, though, was unbowed, reiterating J Street’s view that this was simply another way to be pro-Israel because anything that threatens the peace process threatens Israel’s security. His position deepened doubt among Israel’s conservative supporters and roused suspicion in Israel, where even many on the left supported the war and the conservative Likud Party was poised to win the February 2009 elections.

But the Gaza debate boosted J Street’s national prominence, as did a Democratic House primary in Silver Spring, Maryland, the following June. Representative Donna Edwards had angered local Jewish leaders by not voting to support Israel during the Gaza War and by visiting Gaza. They were considering other candidates when J Street, which had already given Edwards $3,000, came to her aid. Ben-Ami’s email appeal raised $15,000 from 270 contributors in four hours; Edwards won her election, and J Street demonstrated its Internet fundraising prowess.

J Street’s biggest 2009 visibility-booster came in the form of an invitation. In July 2009, when President Obama hosted his first official White House meeting with Jewish leaders, most of his 16 invitees hailed from the Presidents’ Conference, representing venerable stalwarts like AIPAC, Hadassah and the Orthodox and Reform movements. But Obama also included J Street’s Ben-Ami, the new kid on the block, in a guest list shake-up that also brought Americans for Peace Now back for the first time since the Clinton administration, and excluded the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (like Americans for Peace Now, part of the Conference of Presidents). ZOA President Morton Klein, a harsh critic of J Street and Obama, responded to the snub by accusing Obama of refusing “to engage at this face-to-face meeting with pro-Israel organizations that disagree with him.” Given Ben-Ami’s political ties, his inclusion could not have come as a complete surprise, but J Street nevertheless heralded the invitation as a sign of its arrival.

On the first evening of J Street’s inaugural national conference, in a downtown DC hotel in October 2009, two 60-something men in windbreakers slouched against a pillar outside the main entrance. Nearby, a shiny placard emblazoned with the J Street logo read, “J Street: Driving Change, Securing Peace.” The men had a sign, too. Hand-lettered, it said, “Quislings. Kapos. Appeasers. J Street: the New Judenraat.”

Several floors below, with conference attendance having ballooned from 1,000 to 1,500 in just a few days, crowds were swelling at the sign-in tables. The plenary session was about to start, and overwhelmed staffers finally just gave up on registering guests and threw open all doors to the cavernous, dimly lit hall. Television cameras were lined up along the back of the room, with representatives of other media arrayed, laptops open, behind long narrow tables stretching to either side.

Ben-Ami stepped to the Lucite podium, and with his accustomed placidity, addressed the crowd in calm, emphatic tones. His broadest gesture was the poking of an index finger into the air as he issued a distinctly net-nerdy challenge: “This is a conversation that some would say it’s better to either have privately or not at all,” he announced defiantly. “So, to make matters worse, not only are we taking it public, we’re webcasting and we’re Tweeting, so welcome to the 21st century.”

Back in the analog world, J Street had mustered all the firepower it could for the three-day event. Hosts, panelists and guests included senators, congresspersons and several members of Israel’s Knesset, plus former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. Tzipi Livni, also an ex-foreign minister and the Kadima Party’s leader, sent a congratulatory note. When Reform movement leader Yoffie co-chaired a “Jewish Community Town Hall,” participants booed him for his earlier criticism of J Street’s statements on Gaza. And, signaling J Street’s continued clout at the White House, National Security Advisor General James Jones was the keynote speaker.

But equally noteworthy was who was not there. There were no high-ranking members of Israel’s current government. In the week before the conference, 10 of J Street’s 160 original congressional “hosts,” including New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, dropped out. The most prominent rebuff was from Middle East scholar and new Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, who declined to attend on the grounds that J Street positions “could impair Israel’s interests.”

It was, however, the left-right clashes among J Street followers, playing out before and during the conference, that revealed one of the most formidable obstacles facing the new organization. As even its allies in the “progressive-center” will attest, many in J Street’s constituency hail from the far left. Though a much needed voice, the organization is “too open to people who should not be welcome in the tent,” according to one professional Israel advocate, who insisted on anonymity. It’s a delicate balance, he says. “If people come in from the left who are not most interested in Israel’s security and well-being but are interested in human rights and justice, you end up with a left flank that is very robust but that is not pro-Israel. When you stretch the tent, it gets too thin and can tear.”

Ben-Ami was hard-pressed, therefore, to show he could keep the more extreme tent-dwellers at arms’ length, even as they took the stage at his conference. Critics were ready to call him on it. As The New Republic’s James Kirchick, who participated in the conference, wrote: “And while Ben-Ami is trying to assert his group’s Zionist bona fides, a number of speakers at the conference questioned the very idea of a Jewish state—and actually received loud applause. Cheers greeted Bassim Khoury, the Palestinian Authority’s former Minister of National Economy, when he said that ‘if the majority of the Israeli people want to define Israel as a state with a religion like the Islamic Republic of Iran, let them.’”

To shore up centrist support, Ben-Ami gave an interview to The Atlantic’s staunchly Zionist Jeffrey Goldberg, in which (in Goldberg’s words) he “declared himself a Zionist; condemned [John Mearsheimer’s and Stephen Walt’s 2007 book], The Israel Lobby [and U.S. Foreign Policy]; called America’s military aid package to Israel untouchable; and told me he hopes his group angers the non-Zionist left by staking out mainstream Jewish positions on Israel and the peace process.” Ben-Ami himself stresses that J Street is “not anti-AIPAC or anti-anything and willing to work with any organization that shares its overriding goal of a two-state solution.”

The conference is seen as having moved J Street incrementally closer to the center. One sign of this was the appointment of Hadar Susskind as J Street’s director of policy and strategy. Susskind came from the Jewish Public Affairs Council, which is liberal but mainstream and highly respected. “In terms of leadership they are looking for mainstream, not Jewish Voice for Peace,” says one observer, referring to the San Francisco group that believes that the United States should stop military aid to Israel. In other rightward signs that have led some critics to reassess J Street, Ben-Ami supported Iran sanctions legislation from California Democrat Howard Berman, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He also condemned students who heckled Ambassador Oren at the University of California at Irvine.

While Israeli officials are still all over the map about J Street—Israelis generally look to AIPAC as a critical channel to American aid and arms, rather than a player in the peace process—even Oren has softened his stance. “The J Street controversy has come a long way to resolving,” he said in a February interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). “The major concern with J Street was their position on security issues, not the peace process. J Street has now come and supported Congressman Berman’s sanction bill. It has condemned the Goldstone report; it has denounced the British court’s decision to try Tzipi Livni for war crimes, which puts J Street much more into the mainstream.”

While some on the far left may have been disappointed, they shouldn’t have been surprised: Successful organizations rarely satisfy their fringes. “The more you grow, the more it forces you to become mainstream,” says one observer who finds J Street’s growth impressive. “Coming out of nowhere, they have taken over the Jewish left wing. That is significant.”

Candidates who accept money from J Street do run a risk, however. Tennessee Representative Steve Cohen’s closely contested 2008 re-election campaign received an infusion of more than $35,000 from JStreetPAC. “When I first accepted their endorsements, members of Congress suggested I not do it because there might be reprisals from AIPAC supporters,” recounts Cohen, who went on to win the election. “In some ways that has happened—some AIPAC supporters have not been as strong.” Cohen continues to ally himself with J Street, though. And, despite possible repercussions from AIPAC supporters, many other politicians are recipients of JStreetPAC funds. In January, 41 candidates accepted its endorsement. Although it is difficult to gauge J Street’s actual impact on the Hill, these candidates include political heavyweights like Senator Russ Feingold and Representatives Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

J Street may be flirting with power, but it’s still far from AIPAC’s league. After all, AIPAC, with its much broader mission, has been around nearly 60 years. Even if it wanted to, J Street is unlikely to budge the AIPAC elephant from the room, says J.J. Goldberg, author of Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment. “AIPAC has a major donor in every congressional district who can get their congressman on the phone,” says Goldberg. The main challenge for J Street, he adds, is amassing a similarly single-minded, activist base: “I don’t see J Street coming up with a threat that can match the threat of the right—the threat of flooding your office with angry phone calls, the threat of pouring money into your opponent no matter who it is, to punish you.”

As it grows, J Street—which now has nearly 40 full-time staffers—is in some ways emulating AIPAC with the launch of its campus group J Street U and J Street Local, based on Brit Tzedek’s grassroots network. In February, its Jewish Education Fund sponsored a mission to the Middle East: five members of Congress accompanied Ben-Ami to Israel, Jordan and territories of the Palestinian Authority.

An entrepreneur, Ben-Ami is focused on the present. “I really want this place to operate with a campaign mentality,” he says of J Street. “I’m only worried about right now and two years, three years, five years from now—this is the rough window, if we’re going to win this fight and get peace and try to save Israel. I’m not thinking, ‘Twenty years from now, will we have a nice building on Capitol Hill?’” Rather, Ben-Ami envisions a day soon when Israel might “proudly and affirmatively” approve a peace deal, and “J Street will be able to say its mission has been accomplished.”

Few experts forecast that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be solved in five years, but Ben-Ami thinks the outstanding issues could be resolved quickly once talks begin—maybe within a year or two. “That’s because so much has been done over the last 16 years to really understand what the issues are and what the gaps are. What’s essential to closing the deal is active U.S. engagement in the process, providing ideas and creative solutions for closing gaps the parties themselves can’t close. The actual implementation of the agreement might take a while—maybe much more than five years, but the sides would know the agreed-on end game.” He believes, once the Palestinians can see what they could gain by following the non-violent path, even many who currently support Hamas will accept a diplomatic solution.

At that point, “I’d be thrilled to be able to go and work on other issues,” he says. Given his optimism about solving the Middle East’s thorniest stalemate, perhaps Ben-Ami’s future public policy ambitions should come as no surprise: He dreams of tackling global warming.

Mandy Katz is a senior editor at Moment. She reports on lifestyle topics for The New York Times, and her blog, AngloFiles.com, explores “one Yank’s ‘special relationship’ with all things British.”