The Man on J Street: The Story of Jeremy Ben-Ami

[Mosby]

Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J Street, the new “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby, is eating his lunch—green salad with flatbread and bottled iced tea. He orders the same thing every day from the Cosi downstairs. He may be on K Street, proverbial home base for tasseled-loafer lobbyists in the nation’s capital, but Ben-Ami’s plain fare matches the spare modernist quarters. Sublet from a software firm, its blue and orange offices furnished with little more than laptops and filing cabinets give J Street the feel of a start-up.

Which it is. The two-year-old lobbying organization, complete with an online and grassroots network and a political action committee, is making headlines by aggressively campaigning for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—even when that means brazenly criticizing Israel on matters like West Bank settlements and military action in Gaza. Despite J Street’s relatively small size, it has roiled the waters of American Israel advocacy, perhaps causing ripples for even the AIPAC super-tanker. And while this has endeared Ben-Ami to many left and centrist Jews who have looked askance at the Israel advocacy business, it has also rendered him a seemingly dangerous unknown in some powerful circles.

The media is abuzz about J Street and its potential impact, but anyone expecting to meet the wild-eyed fanatic behind this taboo-busting organization may be surprised by Ben-Ami himself. This wonkish, salad-eating 46-year-old in a tweedy jacket, with his wire-rimmed glasses and neatly combed ginger hair, has all the radical aura of an Episcopal church deacon.

Ben-Ami speaks precisely, in fully formed sentences, his slightly nasal voice barely rising as he recalls an event that hastened his transformation from domestic-policy technocrat to megaphone for U.S. policy in the Middle East. In 2003, when he was national policy director for the presidential campaign of Howard Dean, the candidate suggested in a speech that America should be “evenhanded” in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “The next thing you knew, he was subjected to a letter from a hundred congresspeople telling him he was not pro-Israel,” Ben-Ami says. “He was forced to sit down with all sorts of American Jewish leaders. I called them ‘come to Jesus meetings.’”

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