I am trying to imagine a conversation between Donald Trump’s people and a delegation of Reform rabbis and lay leaders.
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, the Reform movement’s man in Washington, told me that Trump’s people agreed to a meeting to discuss Jewish concerns about Trump’s policies on immigration, Muslims and women, to name a few. He hopes it is the start of a long process of repentance — teshuvah, in Hebrew — for the real estate mogul and Republican front-runner.
“Teshuvah is not a quick thing,” Pesner told me at this week’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in Washington, D.C. “But we’d like to see real tikkun here,” using another Hebrew word that suggests repairing what’s broken.
If I have trouble picturing this, it is because of the gaps in language between the two camps. Reform’s Religious Action Center, which Pesner heads, speaks the language of carefully crafted policy and carefully chosen words of Torah.
Trump speaks — well, Trump.
Asking Trump to make teshuvah is a category error — like asking AIPAC to speak the language of the prophets regarding anything other than securing a strong U.S.-Israel alliance. AIPAC isn’t a synagogue or a denomination. It is an organization with a single focus: supporting Israel from afar.
The strengths and challenges of that single focus were on display before and during this year’s annual conference, held March 20-22. The conference is a show of pro-Israel power and influence, a gigantic affair that sprawled across Washington, D.C.’s huge convention center and into its basketball arena. The roster of political grandees who came to pledge allegiance to Israel’s cause is impressive. 18,000 enthusiastic delegates packed the Verizon Center, rushing among sessions devoted to all things Israel and later heading to Capitol Hill to woo their legislators on aid to Israel and keeping the Palestinians from seeking statehood outside the framework of peace talks.
Critics call AIPAC “right-wing,” but that doesn’t capture the diversity of its supporters. No doubt AIPAC has a core of big givers and vocal activists who vote Republican, abhor any hints at pressure on Israel and are at best suspicious of the two-state solution. They cheered the loudest when Trump, in his March 21 speech, called President Barack Obama “the worst thing that ever happened to Israel.”
I spoke to members who were appalled by Trump’s speech and embarrassed by the enthusiastic reception for it, but they weren’t giving up on AIPAC. Pesner told me about the large delegation of Reform Jews at the conference — including some who are active both in AIPAC and J Street, its putative ideological rival.
The challenges of single-issue lobbying were seen in the days before the event, as various rabbis and activists demanded that AIPAC issue some kind of statement condemning Trump’s most incendiary — and in their view, un-Jewish — positions. But AIPAC officials reminded them that, in the interests of bipartisanship and the U.S.-Israel alliance, AIPAC can’t afford to be as discerning as many would like — politically, spiritually or ethically. “Bipartisanship is the only way to make stable, sustainable policy from one election to the next,” said Howard Kohr, AIPAC’s executive director, in his state of the lobby address on March 20.
There are pressures on AIPAC to abandon this bipartisanship. Critics of the Trump speech — and those made queasy by the lobby’s cozy relationship with pro-Israel but deeply conservative Evangelicals — think a Jewish organization must stand up for a wide range of values, not just support for Israel. There is even more pressure from the right, whose activists and donors are convinced that the future of Israel support rests with the Republican Party. They are no fans of bipartisanship when a Democrat like Vice President Joe Biden tells them that Israel’s settlements are “eroding, in my view, the prospect of a two-state solution.”
In apologizing to those offended by the loud ovation for Trump’s remarks, AIPAC president Lillian Pinkus defended bipartisanship, saying, “we will not allow those who wish to divide this movement from the left or from the right to succeed in doing so.”
As this crazily unpredictable election unfolds, however, the very premise of single-issue advocacy is going to be tested as never before.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is the Editor in Chief of JTA.