JustASC

In his big interview in the New York Times Magazine, J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami was quoted as making the following ruh-oh statement:

The average age of the dozen or so [J Street] staff members is about 30. Ben-Ami speaks for, and to, this post-Holocaust generation. “They’re all intermarried,” he says. “They’re all doing Buddhist seders.” They are, he adds, baffled by the notion of “Israel as the place you can always count on when they come to get you.” 

As soon as I read this, I understood that a/ he was speaking in generalizations about the generation of Jews attracted to J Street, not the J Street staff per se; b/ readers would nonetheless ignore that distinction and dismiss J Streeters as indifferent to their Jewish heritage; and c/ Ben-Ami would come to regret saying it.

Indeed, it turns out Ben-Ami had sought a retraction from the Times, but didn’t get it. He discusses the quote in his interview yesterday with Jeffrey Godlberg. Goldberg’s writing on J Street has been otherwise on-target and insightful, but here Goldberg disappointingly misreads the quote in the narrowest possible way:

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let me ask you something about something that you said to James Traub in The New York Times Magazine. You said that all of the people who work for you are intermarried and I was wondering –

Jeremy Ben-Ami: No, I never said that. I asked The Times for a retraction but they wouldn’t give it. I never said that. What I said is that the young generation of Jews is a different generation, and all that. No one is intermarried in my office! No one on my staff is intermarried.

JG: So it’s an inaccurate quote.

JB: An inaccurate quotation. Our staff is not intermarried. Not that that’s a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with being intermarried.

JG: This is getting Seinfeldian here.

JB: There’s nothing wrong with intermarriage. What’s wrong with intermarriage?

JG: We’re a small people –

JB: Right, but you know what I find? I find that most of my friends, and we’re talking mid-to-late forties at this point, most of my friends who intermarried, their spouses either converted, or they’re kids are being raised Jewish. What I find so fascinating about my intermarried friends is that they’re searching for welcoming Jewish communities. So let’s make ourselves a welcoming community.

That’s hardly a radical position inthe Jewish community (see this and this), although some of the same folks who are apoplectic about J Street’s deviation from communal “consensus” on Israel are bound to hate efforts to be more welcoming to the intermarried.

The attachment of intermarried Jews to Israel hs become the topic of  mainstream study as well. As Steven M. Cohen and Ari Kleiman told Shmuel Rosner last year:

In our study, Beyond Distancing, we found that age is directly related to Israel attachment over the entire age range. Elderly Jews are more attached than middle-aged Jews and both are more attached than younger adult Jews. Our statistical analysis pointed to the major explanation for this trend: the rise in intermarriage among younger Jews. Younger cohorts contain more Jews married to non-Jews, and, increasingly, intermarried Jews who are younger are more distant from Israel than intermarried Jews who are older.

Of course, many intermarried Jews remain attached to Israel, but it’s no surprise that many of them would define that attachment in different ways than the inmarried and would be attracted to J Street’s stances — more assertive about seeking a peace, more willing to acknowledge Israel’s faults, and thus implicitly critical of the current Israeli government and many mainstream Jewish leaders.

Depending on your political views, you can either conclude that a/ those most likely to push the “peace” platform are weakly identified Jews to begin with and won’t sweat the consequences, or b/ that those with looser bonds to the Jewish community and to Jewish tribal identity are able to see the situation with more clarity and less ethnic defensiveness.

I think there’s truth in both those positions.