Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat from New York, on June 3, 2021. Photo by eenah Moon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

By Jacob Kornbluh January 26, 2024

J Street, the self-described pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby, has rescinded its endorsement of New York Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman for “singling out” Israel for blame in the war in Gaza and accusing it of genocide.

The group removed his name on Friday from a list of 122 members of Congress it endorsed in the 2024 election cycle. 

Bowman, 47, first elected in 2018, is facing a tough primary battle against George Latimer, Westchester County’s popular executive, who is backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 

Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, said that many of its endorsees, like Bowman, have called for a permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war, but that his denunciations of Israel made it impossible to continue endorsing him. “When the rhetoric, the framing and the approach go too far, that’s where we are going to hold our line,” Ben-Ami said. “And that’s when we felt that Bowman crossed the line here.” 

Immediately after the war started, Bowman — while issuing a strong condemnation of Hamas — joined several of his colleagues in condemning Israel and calling for an immediate cease-fire. “As horrific as Oct. 7 was, those events also did not occur in vacuum,” Bowman wrote in an email to his supporters in November. And in recent weeks he accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Bowman is aligned closely with “The Squad,” four House Democrats — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — who have made particularly pointed critiques of Israel.

J Street, which stands to the left of AIPAC, supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Like President Joe Biden, the group has supported Israel’s military campaign in Gaza — a response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in Israel, which killed more than 1,200. It also recently called “for a negotiated stop to the fighting to bring freedom to the hostages and relief to the people of Gaza.” According to the enclave’s health ministry, more than 25,000 people have been killed since the start of the war. 

‘Called out in real time’

Ben-Ami said in an interview that too often at gatherings in protest of the war, participants launch unfair attacks against Israel and Jews. “The rhetoric around genocide, the singling out of Israel, and at times Jewish people, that happens in some of these events — that needs to be called out in real time,” he said. 

J Street said it had reached out to Bowman and made their concerns “clear” about some of the events he has attended, and some of the language used at them which the group finds unacceptable. In December, Ben-Ami told Jewish Insider that the organization will not reevaluate its endorsements mid-cycle, maintaining that Bowman was “still within our parameters for endorsement.”

But Ben-Ami said on Friday that “the accumulation of statements and positions over the past three months have made clear the differences in approach are significant.”

He pointed to Bowman’s recent introduction at a panel discussion of controversial anti-Israel scholar Norman Finkelstein — who has accused Jews of exploiting the Holocaust to legitimize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians — as “the last” inappropriate statement that prompted this move.  

A Bowman representative decline to comment. Bowman has in the past pushed back against those who take issue with his criticism of Israel, saying no one should ever suggest that he is “OK with the killing of Jews.” And he has noted that he hasn’t called Israel an apartheid state, as many critics of Israel do. 

Bowman’s Jewish supporters and critics 

Endorsements can sway voters and attract donors. But Bowman has also received significant direct monetary support from J Street since 2020, when he defeated Eliot Engel, the longtime chair of the House Foreign Relations committee. J Street raised more than $39,000 for his 2022 reelection campaign through its web portal, and sent an additional $100,000 through the J Street Action Fund.

It took him on a trip to Israel in 2021, which included meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, and a tour of the city of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Bowman faced backlash over the trip from the left, including the Democratic Socialists of America, which considered expelling him after he voted in favor of funding Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system in 2021. 

Bowman has always retained some Jewish support.

Allies, who call themselves “Jews for Jamaal,” have come to his defense when he’s criticized as anti-Israel. And The Jewish Vote, a group formed in 2018 by leaders of Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, endorsed Bowman earlier this week.

But the lack of mainstream Jewish support for Bowman could have an impact on this year’s race in his deep-blue district, which includes the southern part of Westchester County and a small portion of the Bronx in New York City. The two-term congressman won the 2022 Democratic primary with just 54% of the vote against two rivals.

But even as it withdraws its endorsement, J Street is not turning its back on Bowman. Ben-Ami said that J Street has committed not to endorse any candidate in the primary, and that the group still “looks forward” to working with him in Washington. And Ben-Ami criticized AIPAC for pledging to spend millions in support of Bowman’s primary challenger. He said such a move foments division over Israel and benefits “the MAGA movement and others on the far right whose agenda we deeply oppose.”

Alicia Singham Goodwin, JFREJ’s political director, said it is disappointing to see J Street “retreat from this fight, rather than stand up to AIPAC.”

“Unfortunately, this is yet another in a series of poor decisions that J Street has made in recent months, and one they’ll certainly regret,” she said.

Bowman directly addressed AIPAC’s support for Latimer at his campaign launch on Wednesday. “You know what we have got to say to AIPAC? Bring it on yo,” he said. “AIPAC, bring it on yo. We are not scared.” 

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