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2011 J Street Conference

14 years ago
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by ck
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Aw man! This year the Jewlicious Festival and the JStreet National conference were at almost the same time! Had the scheduling been different I might have braved the snow in DC and the lack of Kosher food at the JStreet conference in order to attend. Luckily, there are oodles of videos online about the event – some even featuring just your every day conference attendees – this is important because as everyone knows, at conferences, it’s all about the shmooze. In any case, the video below features random interviews with random J Street conference attendees. They have some interesting things to say:

Yeah.

UPDATE: Oh crap. Working the Jewlicious Festival really kicked the crap out of me and it seems I missed a whole big kerfuffle regarding this video! OK so here it is. William Daroff tweeted a link to the video above. If you haven’t seen it yet, it features some “random attendees at J Street’s second national conference making loony left-wing statements about Israel and Hamas.” The Washington Jewish Week, which wouldn’t post the video, quoted one person on the video as follows:

One participant, for instance, is asked by the anonymous videographer if she believes Hamas is terrorist organization. Her smiley response: “Not anymore than the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] is.”

In any case, you can read the twitter dust up between William Daroff and Repair the World‘s Director of Digital Strategy, Dan Sieradski (who was not tweeting as a representative of RTW) by reading the The Washington Jewish Week post on the issue.

Now, you know me, I have been critical of J Street on more than one occasion. While I think that some members of J Street definitely fall within the “Loony Left” category, I can’t say that they all do or that the people in this video are representative of the J Street organization. I mean, look at this video:

Aren’t those kids cute representin’ with their Hashomer Hatzair shirts? What about Shawn Landres who attended the J Street National Conference despite his declaration that he doesn’t always agree with them? Here’s the link to that. Not posting the video because Shawn isn’t wearing a cute tie. The point is that in this case I am kind of sympathetic to J Street. I know that if someone went through the Jewlicious Festival and cherry picked interviews, they could paint the Festival any way they wanted to – from a right wing, pro settler Orthodox celebration, to a drunken frat boy orgy. Luckily, no one has done that (yet) and if they did I would find them and ki… uhm, hug them and shower them with love because unconditional love is how we hasten the arrival of the Mashiach! Yeah.

One of the people caught in the video sting, I guess Harpo Jaegger is his name, tries to explain his and the others’ comments on his blog. He seems kind of young and certainly earnest but I don’t know that he did such a good job defending J Street from the “smear” represented by the video. Read his post, tell me what you think. Dan Sierdaski for his part wrote a comment in the aforementioned Washington Jewish Week article where he stated “As we endeavor to figure out “how big the ‘pro-Israel tent’ should be,” we should be mindful not to take people’s words and ideas out of context in order to score cheap political points.” I agree. That’s why I think that some of Max Blumenthal’s videos are unfair – but where was the outrage from the progressives when Blumenthal does what he does? Don’t ask me – I don’t know. Daroff also wrote a comment, gotta read that too.

My final take on this is that this is what happens when extremes collide. Anyone reasonable would know that the people in the video are not representative of J Street as a whole. They made the cut specifically because of the extremity of their words. The right does it to the left and the left does it to the right. Those who love partisan bickering, will either love or loathe this sort of thing – those of us who actually care about peace and justice will just ignore this nonsense.

ck
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ck

Founder and Publisher of Jewlicious, David Abitbol lives in Jerusalem with his wife, newborn daughter and toddler son. Blogging as "ck" he's been blocked on twitter by the right and the left, so he's doing something right.

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11 Comments

  • Has anybody ever shopped at Vape Headquarters Vape Store located in 584 E Main St Suite 16?

  • For the record, I don’t think I anything I said was “loony.” The woman who says the IDF is a terrorist group is a bit out there, but the rest of us said pretty non-controversial stuff. Settlement boycotts, etc. See this post for more on this video.

    • Yo Harpo – the “loony” reference, in quote marks, was taken from the WJW. I don’t think you’re loony at all. You seem perfectly sane – not crazy, just wrong IMHO.

  • Somebody should read my posts about J Street. You can find them by inputting “J Street” into our search box. Good reading, I promise. 😉

  • Ha ha KFJ. Blame it on the lag, but you missed the update apparently. Also in the original post I really just let viewers decide for themselves. You’ll note the language, yes? Anyhow, feel free to revise your opinion…

  • David, this isn’t J Street. This is J Street.

    A couple of my friends are in that video and met the kid taking these videos. He took a helluva lot more than five interviews. He only found enough misleading quotes for this little clip? He was sure working hard.

    He also lied to a few of his interviewees. The fourth testimony was given only if the video would be used “for a school project” and explicitly asked not to post it to YouTube. Precisely because he was nervous about being taken out of context. And now that self-same individual (let’s call him “Dave”) who is a graduate of a Jewish day school and whose father is an Israeli, can see that Jewlicious and William Daroff believe he is dangerous to the Jewish community. Worthy of public shaming, it seems. Will he ever go near Israel again? Certainly last night he had his doubts. Thanks, guys, you just alienated a young Jew. Considering Abitbol and I are going to discuss this on a panel at TribeFest in three days, I figured I’d point out when and how young Jews get estranged by their home community.

    P.S. Doesn’t this video remind us of similar gonzo videos from the past? If you’d like to know what real J Streeters say, you can take as many videos of me as you like. I’m the real deal.