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‘Ask Malcolm.’
by Nicholas Jahr
It doesn’t quite have the ring of ‘Clear it with Sydney’, but to read Allison Hoffman’s profile in Tablet, at the height of his power Malcolm Hoenlein may have enjoyed a similar status. For those unfamiliar with the name—although I imagine that’s not an issue for most readers of Jewish Currents—Hoenlein is the Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the “central coordinating body representing 50 national Jewish organizations on issues of national and international concern”.
Tablet (the Website Formerly Known As Nextbook) billed Hoffman’s take as “definitive”, and her reporting is impressively comprehensive: she’s got quotes from several former chairs of the Conference, two former Israeli UN ambassadors (although not, curiously, Israel’s ambassadors to the US), the ubiquitous “senior administration official”, and Jewish leaders from J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami to the Zionist Organization of America’s Mort Klein. All this along with a dash of biography and some cell-phone chatter for flavor; she even penetrates into Hoenlein’s sanctum sanctorum before it’s all over.
For all that, Hoenlein, or at least his politics, remains elusive. The man himself “refused to discuss his personal politics” with Hoffman; whether he distinguishes between his own personal positions and those of the Conference is unclear. So Hoffman turned to his colleagues, who “unhesitatingly” declared him to be “conservative” or “right-wing” on Israel; a former official with the Israel Policy Forum pegs him as a “principled, pro-settlement right-winger”. None of her sources “thought it likely that Hoenlein was among the 78 percent of American Jews who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.” This is the representative who talks to the White House in the name of that 78%.
Of course, Hoenlein may not be talking to the White House much at the moment. Although the Conference’s current chair, Alan Solow, was a makher in the Obama campaign, Hoenlein’s relationship with the Obama administration has been tense. In February of ’08, Hoenlein called out then-candidate Obama at a press conference in Jerusalem: “All the talk about change, but without defining what that change should be, is an opening for all kind of mischief.”
The following September, Hoffman recounts how Hoenlein organized a rally at which Hillary Clinton was to speak, only to invite Sarah Palin to share the stage with her. This didn’t go over well; Clinton bailed, and Palin’s invitation was revoked. The Forward judged it a “political embarrassment.”
Since then, Hoenlein has continued to run afoul of the administration. Last June, he proclaimedJews were “very concerned” about Obama’s speech in Cairo attempting to calm tensions with the Muslim world (Hoenlein said the quote was taken out of context). At a White House summit of Jewish leaders the next month, Hoenlein told Obama that “history teaches us that when there is daylight between us [Israel and the U.S.] it is harmful.” Obama was reportedly unconvinced.
Hoffman sees Hoenlein as increasingly at odds with the zeitgeist, whether incarnated in the form of Obama or the “progressive alternative” posed by J Street. It’s worth noting, however, that referring to J Street as one of three major organizations that “have not joined the Conference” slightly confuses the matter; J Street, like any other organization, is only eligible to join the Conference until it has been around for five years. Were J Street inclined to seek a seat at the table, the signs that there’d be one available are less than auspicious; back in 2002, the pro-peace group Meretz USA was shut out after a four year long campaign for membership. The way in which Hoenlein has reportedly stacked the Conference’s deck against peace advocates suggests it’s less a matter of any group challenging the Conference from the outside than of Hoenlein’s excluding certain groups from the Conference.
Despite Hoenlein’s refusal to talk politics with Hoffman, all the evidence suggests he stands well to the right of the majority of American Jews. Writing in The Nation in May of ‘02, Michael Massing reported that “Hoenlein has long had close ties to Israel’s Likud Party. In the 1990s he helped raise money for settlers’ groups on the West Bank, and today he regularly refers to that region as ‘Judea and Samaria.’”
Even in this context, it’s still surprising when Hoenlein professes of Meir Kahane, “I was intellectually sympathetic when he started.” Kahane, of course, was the founder of the Kach Party, which was designated as a terrorist organization by both the U.S. and Israel after card-carrying member Baruch Goldstein killed 34 Muslims (and the Oslo peace process) at a mosque in Hebron. Whether Hoenlein’s sympathy dates to Kahane’s early days of “Every Jew a .22” or Kach’s later calls for ethnic cleansing isn’t entirely clear. Hoffman simply goes on to quote Hoenlein as saying, “Security is vital to the Jewish community, and we don’t take it seriously enough.”
It all comes down to what constitutes security. One comment on Hoffman’s profile notes Hoenlein is interviewed every Friday on the Nachum Segal Show (otherwise the comments run the predictably hysterical gamut, denouncing Hoenlein for “upholding fundamentally corrupt neocon politicos” or Hoffman for “a whiff of old fashion [sic] anti-Semitism”). The most recent episode available from Segal’s archive is dated January 10 of this year; Segal and Hoenlein kick things off by applauding the approval issued that week for 24 new units of housing in a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem and go on to discuss everything from how Iran, Hizballah, and their “narcoterrorism contacts” are “threatening our border” (that’s the border of the United States) to the successful test of Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system. Missile defense remains a dubious investment at best, but that didn’t stop the Obama administration from coughing up $205 million Israel needed to implement the project, over and above the more than $2 billion Israel receives annually. This idea of security sounds a lot more like Jabotinsky’s ‘Iron Wall’ than Oslo.
J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami has just written an open letter to the Conference’s chair, Alan Solow, asking him to clarify where the Conference stands on a two-state solution. Maybe this will get the answer Hoenlein denied Hoffman.
Nicholas Jahr is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn and a member of Jewish Currents’ editorial board. In the past he has written for the magazine about comics, film, the diaspora, Israeli elections, and Palestinian nonviolence. His work has appeared in the International New York Times, The Nation, City & State, and the Village Voice (RIP).