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The who-represents-American-Jews-on-Iran fallacy

[additional-authors]
August 17, 2015

It has been a constant feature of American-Jewish life in recent years: complaints from certain quarters — in most cases, the same quarters — about the way Jews are represented, or misrepresented, by organizations pretending to represent American Jewry. The argument is simple: American Jews think this or that — as the polls show — while American-Jewish organizations advocate for the opposite position. Take Iran, because that is the most recent and most important example: Polls have shown that American Jews generally support the proposed deal with Iran. But the leaders of organized Jewry “don’t speak for most Jews,” as Steven M. Cohen reported with the Jewish Journal poll, and as Todd Gitlin wrote for the Washington Post just recently. Or as Peter Beinart, a writer who is building a whole career on opposing the Jewish establishment, framed it: The Iran deal “has laid bare a profound gulf between American Jews and the organizations that purport to represent them.”

It is important for Gitlin, Cohen, Beinart and other writers supportive of the Iran deal to highlight the supposed discrepancy between the position of the organized community — say, The Jewish Federation of Chicago — and the Jewish rank and file. That is because they allege that such a discrepancy makes the position of the organizations and the leaders less significant and less credible. If The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles does not speak for Los Angeles Jewry, if the American Israel Public Affairs Committee doesn’t represent a majority of Jews, if other organizations claim to speak for the Jews but really only speak for a certain group of Jewish supporters, maybe we ought not pay attention to their views.

To go along with these claims, one has to believe at least three things:

1) That American Jews truly support the Iran deal.

2) That organizations should represent what most Jews think.

3) That if the organizations don’t represent what most Jews think, their views are of less significance.

Let’s talk about these three suppositions. All are worthy of some discussion.

Support: Cohen has the numbers to speak with authority on the position of American Jews from the poll he conducted for the Jewish Journal. There also is the poll by J Street, which came to a similar conclusion. Cohen and Gitlin write: “More than three-fifths of American Jews who express an opinion support the deal, compared with a bit more than half of Americans overall.” They also ask: “Why is the ‘Jewish leadership’ so unrepresentative of the population it claims to speak for on one of the most consequential and controversial American foreign policy decisions of our time?”

Concerning the numbers, it is reasonable to assume that, indeed, the majority believes what Cohen thinks it believes, but a word of caution is still necessary: The polls were taken when a majority of Americans also supported the deal. Since then, many Americans have changed their views — as polls clearly show. Unless one believes Jews are immune to changing their minds, one has to take into account the possibility — possibly a distant possibility — that Jews may also have altered their views in recent weeks. That is to say, unlike views on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process or the issue of the settlements, which are unlikely to change from week to week, Americans’ views on the issue of the deal with Iran are changing from week to week. It is a hotly debated issue, and many of the respondents to Cohen’s survey who did not have a firm opinion at the time of polling might by now have had a chance to think about it, hear more about it and come to a conclusion different from the one we tend to automatically attribute to them.

Representation: Even if the numbers haven’t changed — even if most American Jews support the deal — we still have to ask: Should Jewish organizations always support the views of the majority of Jews? I don’t think they should. Not on Iran, nor on other issues. The organizations of American Jewry are volunteer-based. American Jewry is not a state headed by a Jewish government that represents all of the citizens of the state; it is a loose network of communities and people. Some of them are more involved, many less so; some attribute great importance to being part of the community, others less so; some pay dues to the organizations, but most don’t; some are active in organized Jewish life, but a lot choose not to be.

Of course, the organizations aim for as many members and friends as possible. And it’s true one can argue that the more an organization showcases a policy close to the views of its potential members, the more members it will attract. But, at the end of the day, the organizations cannot represent a vague concept of American-Jewish opinion based on polls. The organizations represent what their members and their activists believe, what their leadership believes is right for the organization and for the Jewish people. It cannot be any other way, and it should not be any other way. (I know: There is an issue with the supposedly undemocratic nature of Jewish organizations. It is an issue worthy of debate — but for now, let’s leave it aside. We can’t deal with all issues at the same time and I don’t think it really matters when it comes to Iran. Organizations represent the views of their members, not the views of a vague “community.”)

Significance: Finally, as I said earlier, the third assumption underlying the argument against the position of the Jewish organizations is that if the organizations don’t represent what most Jews think, their views are of less significance. That is ridiculous, as most politicians know well. Had that been the case, the Obama administration would not be so eager to sway Jewish organizations to its side.

This is not a serious assumption, because politics in modern democracies is driven not by the silent masses, but by the active few. The whole issue of “the Jewish vote” — the self-importance attached to the Jewish vote — has little to do with numbers. Jews don’t have the numbers to elect a president or a senator, and in few cases do they have the numbers to elect a congressman or a congresswoman. The significance of the Jewish vote comes from other factors: Jewish activism and visibility, Jewish passion, Jewish financial clout, Jewish presence in elite institutions. In other words, it is not the numbers. It is something else. It is not the numbers when we talk about how Jews vote — and it is not the numbers when we talk about what Jews think about the Iran deal.

If there is any significance to what Jews think about the Iran deal, it is not because Jews have such great numbers and their opinion makes a difference and is representative of a national mood. It is because some Jews play a role that has little to do with Jewish numbers: Those who are active, those who care, those who are willing to put their money where their mouth is, those who are involved, those who have influence, those who have the means to convince other people and those who have the tools to sway politicians aren’t afraid to speak up. Jewish organizations — most Jewish organizations — represent those Jews. Not all of them, but probably a majority of them.

It is true: Jewish organizations represent the organized Jewish community, namely the community that wants to be represented as a community. They cannot represent the Jews who do not want to be represented by them. And while supporters of the Iran deal would like you to think that this is not a good policy — that the organizations should reflect the views of the majority of Jews — I think it is a good policy and, in fact, the only viable policy. An organization cannot, and ought not, snub the views of its own activists and members to reflect and appease the views of nonmembers. 

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