Many liberal Jews have long chafed at the premise that Aipac or the Anti-Defamation League represented their point of view. Bush got only a quarter of the Jewish vote in 2004 and was deeply loathed by the most liberal-leaning voters. The community began searching for new ways to represent itself. Existing progressive groups like the Israel Policy Forum issued position papers or agitated for a change in policy; but scarce few did the yeoman labor of lobbying. Tom Dine, a former Aipac executive director, says he was approached in 2006 by a group of liberal Jewish philanthropists about heading a “counter-Aipac.” That idea went nowhere, but in late 2006 a different group of philanthropists and activists, including Ben-Ami, began to talk about combining the progressive organizations into a more powerful and influential collective body. Out of these conversations came J Street, named after the street missing from Washington’s grid and thus evoking a voice missing from Washington’s policy discussions. Early financing came from Alan Sagner, a retired New Jersey real estate developer and longtime supporter of Democratic candidates and Jewish causes, and from Davidi Gilo, an Israeli-American high-tech entrepreneur; another 50 early backers each gave $10,000. Unlike the liberal advocacy or policy organizations (or Aipac, for that matter), the new group would endorse and finance candidates, through a body called J Street PAC.

Image TEAM J STREET From left: Daniel Kohl, political director; Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder and executive director; Rachel Lerner, chief of staff. Credit... Henry Leutwyler for The New York Times

Ben-Ami is a political junkie who, at age 14, handed out leaflets for Jimmy Carter. He has worked in New York City government and politics; he served as deputy domestic-policy adviser in Bill Clinton’s first term and national policy director on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. But he also benefits from an unusual Israeli pedigree. His great-grandparents joined the first group of Russian Jews to make aliyah — to move to the Holy Land — in 1882. His grandparents were among the 66 families that in 1909 drew seashells from a hat — the legendary Seashell Lottery — to parcel out sandy lots in what was to become Israel. His father served as a commander for Betar, the youth arm affiliated with Irgun, the fervent nationalist movement that fought the British to gain Israel’s independence. Ben-Ami’s father was tasked with purchasing the Altalena, a naval vessel left over from World War II that was then filled with arms and was on its way to Palestine when David Ben-Gurion declared the independent state of Israel and ordered all fighters to accept the authority of the state. After Menachem Begin, the head of Irgun, refused to turn back the Altalena, it was sunk by Ben-Gurion’s forces, led by Yitzhak Rabin. Ben-Ami, who was born in New York, says, “I grew up with my father spending his entire life arguing with his friends about the Altalena and Ben-Gurion and what a schmuck he was and how could Begin give back the Sinai.”

This is the world that shaped the mainstream American Jewish groups. Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, was born in Poland in 1940, and he often sounds as if only eternal vigilance will ward off the Holocaust in the offing. Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, was born in a camp for displaced persons, to parents who were Holocaust survivors. The prophetic voice comes naturally to such men. So does the sense of besetting peril. Important Jewish organizations are normally reached through a series of locked doors presided over by glassed-in functionaries. The peril may be real. But it can also feel like a marketing device. “You know what these guys are afraid of?” says M. J. Rosenberg, Washington director of the Israel Policy Forum. “Their generation is disappearing. All the old Jewish people in senior-citizen homes speaking Yiddish are dying — and they’re being replaced by 60-year-old Woodstock types.”

J Street, by contrast, is wide open to the public. Visitors must thread their way through a graphic-design studio with which the organization shares office space. There appears to be nothing worth guarding. The average age of the dozen or so staff members is about 30. Ben-Ami speaks for, and to, this post-Holocaust generation. “They’re all intermarried,” he says. “They’re all doing Buddhist seders.” They are, he adds, baffled by the notion of “Israel as the place you can always count on when they come to get you.” Living in a world of blogs, they’re similarly skeptical of the premise that “we’re still on too-shaky ground” to permit public disagreement. There’s a curious and striking analogy with the situation of Cuban-Americans, whose politics until quite recently were dominated by the generation that fled Castro’s revolution and were grimly determined to see his regime overthrown. Obama has not had to pay a price for moderating the American embargo, as his predecessors would have, because Cuban-American opinion is no longer in thrall to the older generation — precisely J Street’s goal in regard to the Middle East.

Street PAC sent out a questionnaire to Congressional candidates in the summer of 2008, seeking their views on U.S. engagement with the Middle East. The group ultimately decided to support 41 candidates (most of them non-Jewish) and raised $580,000 in barely six months. A lot of the money came in small donations over the Internet, another sign of the organization’s new-generation status. And the money has continued to flow. This past June, several Jewish leaders were quoted in Politico as being disappointed in Donna Edwards, an African-American freshman legislator from suburban Maryland whom J Street had endorsed last year. Edwards voted merely “present” on a resolution supporting Israel’s assault on Gaza, and she criticized Israel’s settlement policy during a visit to the region. Edwards’s supporters feared she could face a primary challenge from a more pro-Israel candidate. As soon as the Politico item appeared, Ben-Ami fired off a fund-raising appeal to the J Street netroots. “This is exactly how — for decades — established pro-Israel groups have enforced right-wing message discipline on Israel in Congress,” he wrote. “But not this time — and not to our friend Donna Edwards.” Edwards, who says that her own views place her “right where the administration is” on Israel-Palestine issues, attracted $30,000 via J Street PAC’s appeal in three or four days. That made people in Washington take notice. It also infuriated some established leaders. One of them told me that any group that would raise money for the likes of Edwards “is not a responsible Jewish organization.”

On the fundamental questions of Middle East peace, J Street occupies fairly traditional liberal territory, which of course places it well to the left of the mainstream groups. According to its “statement of principles,” the group favors “creation of a viable Palestinian state as part of a negotiated two-state solution, based on the 1967 borders with agreed reciprocal land swaps” — the formula envisioned by the Clinton administration in its 2000 negotiations with Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak. Ben-Ami says he also favors Jerusalem as the shared capital of the two states. On the question of talks with Hamas, classed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, J Street takes the cautious view that while we should not speak directly with officials, we should engage through intermediaries with the goal of finding interlocutors willing to live in peace with Israel.

J Street maintains that most American Jews share its views on the Middle East. They are reliably liberal on questions of war and peace; three-quarters of Jewish respondents to a 2007 Gallup poll, for example, opposed the war in Iraq. The question is how much of an exception they make for Israel. J Street sought to answer this question by commissioning an extensive poll of Jewish opinion on Middle East issues. The survey, taken in July 2008 and repeated with almost identical findings in March, found that American Jews opposed further Israeli settlements (60 percent to 40 percent), that they overwhelmingly supported the proposition that the U.S. should be actively engaged in the peace process even if that entailed “publicly stating its disagreements with both the Israelis and the Arabs” and that they strongly supported doing so even when the premise was revised to “publicly stating its disagreements with Israel.” Strikingly, the average respondent placed Israel eighth among a list of concerns; only 8 percent placed it first or second.