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September 3rd, 2022 
Awake Goy The liberal Zionist organization J Street is adamantly opposed to BDS, the nonviolent boycott campaign targeting Israel, and proudly declares that it is “Pro-Israel.” But one of its student leaders evidently disagrees with the organization on both counts.
Eliana Blumberg, a junior at Brown University who has been an official of “J Street U,” wrote that she supports BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), in an op-ed about her generation’s critical views of Zionism published at the Americans for Peace Now site on August 30:
My father and I have very similar politics when it comes to Israel. But despite our shared criticism of the Israeli government, outrage about settler violence, and support of the BDS movement, if you asked us who comes to mind when we hear the term “Zionism,” our answers would be strikingly different..
Blumberg also said that the term “pro-Israel”– a key part of J Street’s slogan– is a lost cause.
There are those who insist that young progressive Jews must focus on “reclaiming” the term “Zionist” or even the term “pro-Israel” in order to show people that you can support Palestinians while being a Zionist, that being pro-Israel means being pro-democracy, not pro-apartheid. I think such efforts are futile.
Blumberg is no lightweight. In June she said that she was the New England president of J Street U, and a National Vice President of the organization.
In the op-ed she calls herself a J Street U leader, and writes that J Street’s stances are alienating the young.
I don’t identify as a Zionist, and neither do many of my fellow J Street U leaders, and by excluding us from institutional or organizational spaces, progressive groups are alienating their next generation of organizers and leaders.
J Street is proudly Zionist and it has supported legislation that characterizes BDS as antisemitic. The group states, “We believe in the Zionist ideal on which Israel was founded,” even as it seems to avoid the word Zionism in its messaging.
J Street exists to lobby official Washington; and the tensions between J Street’s message and idealistic young Jews’ beliefs are disrupting progressive Zionism. J Street has insisted that its student arm J Street U is “pro-Israel.” It prides itself on the numbers of students who come to its conferences and tries to ride the energy of the youth group IfNotNow– though IfNotNow acknowledges Israeli “apartheid,” and J Street disavows that language.
A summer intern at Americans for Peace Now, now studying public health and Middle East Studies, Blumberg wrote in her essay that the dispute over Zionism is generational. For her father, Zionism is “Israel bonds and the socialist experiment of the kibbutz, but when I think of Zionism, IDF violence and AIPAC come to mind.”
She said that J Street is desperate to cast the young as pro-Israel but it is alienating them.
In my experience, liberal Zionist groups like J Street desperately want their students to identify as Zionist and even as “Pro-Israel,” and as a result, many student leaders have questioned their involvement, wondering if they should leave the movement. Not only does this exclusion hurt the future of movements like J Street, it also hurts students who feel alienated, prevents effective political solidarity with other groups, and distracts from the desperate need for political action.
I wrote to Blumberg yesterday asking for an interview but she did not respond.
Blumberg said in a podcast about young Jews for Americans for Peace Now in June that she is an organizer with J Street for tactical reasons– as a halfway house to help young indoctrinated Jews abandon traditional lies about Israel.
I think that a lot of people who are in J Street U, that’s a way that we justify our involvement in an organization that a lot of us don’t necessarily align with, ideologically or politically. I know the joke that like everyone involved in J Street is to the left of J Street, as is a joke, but it’s definitely rooted in truth, especially on college campuses. But I think this idea that like in these four years if we can get six or seven people to learn about occupation and learn about the destruction that AIPAC causes on the American political system, and also how, you know, like the American Jewish community funds occupation, if we can get like six people to graduate and say, You know what, I’m not going to donate to AIPAC. I’m gonna break this tradition, quote, unquote, tradition of supporting these Jewish institutions. That’s enough, right.
She also said that arguments inside the Jewish community over words like “occupation” are “exhausting” and “infuriating,” and she appeared to fault J Street’s opposition to the word “apartheid.” Americans for Peace Now has been far more open to that description.
I think that that’s something that I get really frustrated with J Street is that it feels a lot like we are making compromises on things that we don’t need to be making compromises on like, I get that, you know, politically, politicians are not in a place where we can use certain language to talk about this stuff. Because just people won’t listen, or things won’t get done. But I think that what APN does really well, is they acknowledge that sometimes we do have to come out and say, you know, like, yeah, the Amnesty report was very controversial, but like, we need to focus on what’s going on in that report, and not the language that was used. And we shouldn’t get distracted by that. So I think that’s one example of why I like APN so much
Blumberg also said that she would not go on Birthright, the propaganda trip to Israel for young American Jews, because Palestinians can’t go to the country.
[E]ven though my ancestors came to America before world war two and you know, have have never really had any specific connection with the State of Israel, that I have more right to go than a Palestinian whose grandparents were born there, that really upsets me. And so I think that for that reason, I decided that it’s not, it’s not gonna happen.
What a clear-eyed young leader for the American Jewish community! I look forward to many more eloquent articles and comments from Blumberg in years to come.
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