On June 16th, J Street NYC and the New York Society for Ethical Culture hosted a vital conversation between Jeremy Ben Ami, J Street Founder and President and Jeffrey Goldberg, National Correspondent for the The Atlantic entitled, “Who Speaks for Me? Israel and America in the 21st Century.”
.The Center for Ethical Culture on 64th St. in Manhattan–what Jeff Goldberg called “a Chabad House for atheists”–looks a lot like a synagogue in its extreme iconoclasm. The only difference is that instead of a Hebrew verse spanning the back wall, there’s a quote about holy space being where other people are; otherwise it was an austere chapel with (almost full) seating for about 400, a raised stage in the front and a space that looked like it could have housed a Torah. As it was, almost everyone in the room Wednesday night was Jewish and the main event would center around a quasi-theocratic state.
We had come to see two other MOTs, more famous ones, attempt to have a better version of the conversation that we had every Friday night dinner. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, and Goldberg, a columnist and Israel expert for The Atlantic, would talk about Israel, the US, the Palestinians, American Jews and–to Ben-Ami’s chagrin–AIPAC. This was the latest of a few conversations between Ben-Ami, who now seems to represent the party line of liberal Zionism in America, and the moderate liberal journalist who, as he wrote in his blog preceding the event, would try “juggling liberalism and Zionism while riding a flaming unicycle.”
When Goldberg and Ben-Ami started talking, I noticed something odd: for the first time in my life, I saw two Jewish Israel experts speaking to each other in front of a full house without a moderator. This, I assumed, meant disaster. Even in events where there had been moderators, the conversation would dissolve into argument and ideological brinkmanship. For most Israel lecture events, that was part of the fun. It was the intellectual version of the Foreman-Cotto boxing match, with all the jabs and none of the pay-per-view. But here Goldberg and Ben-Ami were alone, left to rip each other’s arguments apart without restraint, so I feared the worst and hoped I would survive when the building went up in flames.
The event’s format stated that Goldberg would ask the questions and Ben-Ami would answer, but from the beginning the two exchanged banter, with Goldberg responding to Ben-Ami’s claims and Ben-Ami turning Goldberg’s questions around on him. The best example of this came when Goldberg–in the style of an exemplary obnoxious journalist–asked Ben-Ami three or four times in a row whether he thought AIPAC was pro-peace. After protesting, Ben-Ami gave an answer saying that AIPAC was not-not-not pro-peace. Goldberg 1, Ben-Ami 0.
That, however, was the only score-keeping moment of the evening. Otherwise, the crowd watched two intelligent, insightful and articulate people have the same debates I had with my friends: what to do about Iran, how to solve the settlement issue, whether American Jews have a right to dictate policy to Israel, whether Israel is judged too harshly given its democracy and civil liberties and other conversations my friends and I had had over the past week, month, year and decade. The only difference was that this conversation was more intelligent, insightful and articulate. When their time ran out, Ben-Ami and Goldberg were sitting in their chairs and smioling. No one had yelled, no body parts were broken and it looked like the building would survive.
So what impressed me most–more than the extraordinary minds of the two speakers, more than the points they made, more than their comprehensive knowledge of the situation–was that these two men were able to keep their cool, were able to make relevant points and were able to have a discussion that wasn’t a debate. I knew that when I would broach similar topic with my friends (many of whom were also at the event) we wouldn’t set nearly as good of an example.
Maybe had they been farther apart ideologically, Goldberg and Ben-Ami wouldn’t have been so amicable with each other; maybe if they weren’t as smart they wouldn’t have been as civil. But as it was, I’m happy I went not because Ben-Ami and Goldberg knew what they were talking about, but rather because they knew the right way to talk.
