Matt Berkman has a great piece up at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, reporting on the screening last week in Philadelphia of a right-wing documentary attack on J Street, the liberal Zionist organization. Nearly 700 people went to the screening of The J Street Challenge at the University of Pennsylvania; Alan Dershowitz was the headliner.

It was widely expected that the battle that night would be between liberal Zionists and rightwingers over the fact that Jewish community organizations (the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Hillel Foundation for Jewish Campus Life) were sponsoring an event trashing liberal Zionism.

But as it turned out, the main attacks that night were on Dershowitz, from the right, because he opposes some settlements in the West Bank.

Berkman writes that traditionally Zionist forces in US life were able to sustain a coalition between right and left wings, epitomized by Dershowitz himself. But that old coalition is falling apart, and Dershowitz is now in a middle ground, assaulted by the rightwing donor base. And J Street may also be marooned in the middle, Berkman says, as young Jews abandon Zionism altogether.

Some of his report on the screening: