FOR YEARS, many prominent Jews on the left have argued that the American Jewish establishment is deeply out of touch with the Jewish rank and file it supposedly represents. Most recently, this assertion was made repeatedly by supporters of the Iran nuclear deal reached in July.
Take, for example, political commentator Peter Beinart, a darling of anti-establishment liberal Jews. Writing in the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz barely two weeks after the Iran agreement had been concluded, Beinart declared that the deal “has laid bare a profound gulf” between the organized Jewish community, which was largely unsupportive, and American Jews, most of whom reportedly favored the deal.
Similarly, in a mid-August Washington Post op-ed, Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at Columbia University in New York, and Steven M. Cohen, a professor of Jewish social policy at New York’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, ask, “Why is the ‘Jewish leadership’ so unrepresentative of the population it claims to speak for on one of the most consequential and controversial American foreign policy decisions of our time?”
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