On Nov. 11, in an event that felt like a combination political rally, cocktail party and parlor meeting, about 200 Angelenos and a number of local elected officials gathered at the Taglyan Cultural Center in Hollywood to launch the local Los Angeles chapter of J Street.
The two-and-a-half-year-old organization calls itself “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans” and claims a nationwide base of support of more than 160,000. To make clear to lawmakers in Washington, D.C., the breadth of support for its agenda within the American Jewish community, J Street began launching “locals” around the United States earlier this year. The first batch of 22 J Street locals launched on Feb. 4; the L.A. local is the 37th and will coordinate J Street’s efforts in Southern California and the Southwest.
“Our mission in the months ahead is to rally what I call “the passionate moderates” in our community and beyond,” J Street founder and president Jeremy Ben-Ami told the audience. “Here in Los Angeles and across the country, we must build a political power base in the center, even as those with the loudest voices — and, sometimes it feels, the deepest passion — gravitate to the extremes and try to drown us out.”
Ben-Ami cited J Street’s polling of American Jews in Illinois and Pennsylvania on Election Day, which showed that two-thirds of American Jews voted Democratic, that an even greater percentage support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that 70 percent believe that Israel should stop building settlements in the West Bank.
Coming just over one week after the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives, the evening’s other speakers, including Congresswoman Judy Chu and Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti, recognized that J Street might face a difficult battle trying to make this voice from the American Jewish community heard.
“This week it looks pretty depressing,” Shawn Landres, a member of J Street’s national advisory council, told the audience. He said it is essential to remember that “the American Jewish community is not only the organized Jewish institution that sometimes speaks for us and sometimes claims to speak for us, but that the American Jewish communities are all of American Jewry, people who are in the conversation and people who are not yet in the conversation.”
J Street organizers hope the diversity of Los Angeles’s Jewish community will make for fertile ground to mobilize this progressive mainstream voice. “You have those of us who are all the way to the left, and you have those of us who are all the way to the right, and most of us live somewhere in the middle,” J Street Southern California/Southwest Regional Director Serena Zeise said. “There’s a plethora of individuals in Los Angeles who have been starving for a J Street.”
