Thoughts on the Conference

All in all, the first J Street conference was a success: 1500 people showed up, The Obama Administration sent the National Security Advisor to bless the event, three dozen members of congress attended the gala dinner, and conference attendees were enormously positive about the gathering.

Monday's notable event was a town hall meeting between Jeremy Ben-Ami and Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the head of the Reform movement. Yoffie's stance is somewhere between J Street's and the center-right position often repeated by large institutional leaders of the Jewish community: he was sharply critical of settlement construction, the Goldstone report, and International Community's criticism of Israel. The Yoffie's and Jeffrey Goldberg's of the Jewish community seem to be key discursive links in the chain- they support a two-state solution and acknowledge J Street as legitimate, with some reservations.

Tuesday's best panel featured three Israelis: centrist politician Haim Ramon, former Shin Bet Admiral Ami Ayalon, and journalist Bernard Avishai.

Avishai talked about the need for peace for economic development, persuasively arguing that Israel's economy will be based around providing solutions for large companies.

Ayalon said that when he was head of the Shin Bet, the lowest year of Palestinian violence was directly related to Palestinian hopes for an belief in the peace process.

Ramon suggested that unilateral disengagement from the west bank may be needed in the future to ensure the demographic viability of Israel as a state with majority jewish population.

I haven't heard these viewpoints at an event with a National or super-public profile and audience. The conference is wonderfully unique is providing the American public access to these sort of ideas.

One JTA write-up of the conference quotes a certain 25-year-old from Washington...

An Evening On H at the J Street Conference

I spent Sunday evening at the Grant Hyatt on H street at the first-ever J Street conference. The evening was the conference's kickoff event featuring 1200-1500 people sitting in a ballroom. After speeches from Jeremy Ben-Ami (J Street's executive director), Daniel Sokatch (the charismatic new CEO of the New Israel Fund) and some others, the attendees discussed their connection to Israel and pro-peace activism in small groups at our tables. The mood was positive but not ebullient, and the informal conversation-style gave the evening a more participatory feel than is usual for issue or policy conferences.

Wandering around in the lobby before the dessert reception, I bumped into a motley assortment of characters: an old friend in rabbinical school, the executive director of Uri L'tzedek (the ethical kashrut org), a college friend covering the conference for an online jewish magazine, fellow jstreeters from NY, a frum activist trying to talk folks on the Berkeley campus out of divestment, and the online director from the labor movement.

Looking at the parade of name tags, I recognized the last name "Tassini" on a middle-aged man walking by, but couldn't place it. A later Google search revealed him to be Jonathan Tassini, the New Yorker who challenged Hilary Clinton in the 2006 Senate primary (she was a first-term incumbent) over her vote for the Iraq war.

The number of people attending is very encouraging. The crowd is a mixture of middle aged and younger people, with a large number of kippot-wearing attendees and beards. There is a noticeable Israeli presence, and lots of journalists, who seem to be dressed more formally than the average conference-goer.