The Jewish establishment, "as an organized community [has] failed" to create a "type of liberal Zionism" among a younger generation of American Jews, said Peter Beinart, a journalist and author, in a lecture Sunday night in the Hassenfeld Conference Center. The lecture and subsequent question-and-answer session was sponsored by J Street U and J Street Boston and co-sponsored by the Journalism program, the Brandeis Zionist Alliance, the Brandeis Democrats and the Peace, Conflict and Coexistence Studies program.

Beinart received notice in the American Jewish community for his essay published in the New York Review of Books last year titled "The Failure of the Jewish Establishment." According to the event's Facebook page, the Sunday talk followed in the wake of the success of that article.

According to Beinart, "There has been this enormous effort to desensitize, to distract, young American Jews from the realities of what an occupation actually is, what it means in people's lived experience to have a state over which they have virtually no power, controlling most of the important decisions in their lives."

This attempted desensitization of American Jews toward the issue of the occupation in the West Bank, Beinart argued, marks a profound failure in producing a "liberal Zionist."

"A liberal Zionist [is] someone who feels a deep attachment and devotion to the words in Israel's Declaration of Independence: that she will be a nation in pursuit of freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the Hebrew prophets," said Beinart.

"I want my son to love that vision of Israel and to defend those principles in Israel's founding documents against anyone who threatens them; not only President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Secretary General of Lebanon Hassan Nasrallah but also, indeed, Israel's own government if it violates them," he added. Beinart said that the American Jewish establishment includes organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Anti-Defamation League.

Characteristically, the establishment organizations are composed of individuals who formed their ideas about Zionism between the years of 1967 and 1982. During these years, the occupation was very new, the Ultra- Orthodox Haredi population and the Russian immigrant population in Israel were smaller than they are now, and Israel was "in some ways, a more innocent place," said Beinart.

The establishment is comprised of "relatively secular" individuals who support Israel because the country is said to share America's liberal democratic values. Beinart said, however, that there is very little confrontation or public reckoning with Israel's actual policies that are "imperiling Israel's future as a Jewish democracy."

According to Beinart, "Israel within its 1967 borders is a democracy," but "Israel beyond its 1967 borders is not a democracy; it is an ethnocracy, a state in which your right to vote and have citizenship ... is dependent on your religion and your ethnicity."

Beinart added that the current establishment is not "reproducing itself" in the next generation of American Jews. Zionism, he said, is only very "vibrant" in the Orthodox community, which is growing as a percentage of the United States Jewish population. This Zionism, however, is based on an attachment to land rather than a liberal democracy, he said.

In the non-Orthodox community, however, Zionism is in "collapse," according to Beinart. This is due in part to assimilation as well as high levels of alienation and disaffection that American Jews feel from Israel.

Additionally, the narrative of Jewish history that is taught to Jewish children is one that does not acknowledge that Jews currently have power in the form of the state of Israel, according to Beinart.

The traditional Jewish narrative includes the Maccabees and Mordechai, who triumphed over villains in the Hannukah and Purim stories, respectively.

These narratives, however, do not mention the massacres that the Jews conducted after they were saved in the stories, according to Beinart.

Beinart concluded his speech with a message of action for young American Jews. "It is your generation's responsibility to preserve [Israel]. Not simply to preserve Israel as a place on the map but to preserve a certain conception of Israel that Theodore Herzl had, and that Israel's founders had and that is today in peril. . You should be in Israel and the West Bank today struggling for Israeli democracy in its hour of peril."

During the question-and-answer session that followed his speech, Liza Behrendt '11, co-founder of the Brandeis chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, asked how the decision by Hillel to not include Jewish Voice for Peace under the Hillel umbrella last month would affect the broader Brandeis community.

Beinart responded by saying that he does not believe a person has to be a Zionist to live a meaningful Jewish life. Zionism should not be a litmus test for entrance to Jewish organizations, he added. Additionally, shutting out anti-Zionist groups, he said, is not an effective response.

"You have to engage [anti-Zionist groups], you have to argue about it, you have to try to show ... that there are things in the Zionist tradition that are radically different from what you see in this Israeli government."

In an interview with the Justice, Gideon Klionsky '11, who attended the event said, "I agree with him on a lot of counts, [such as] the need to create a Palestinian state, ... but the branding of that as sort of a new Jewish voice and claiming that necessity on the part of J Street is a little bit misleading, a little bit false."

Mateo Aceves '11 said after the event, "I think he spoke very well, and he spoke about profound issues and I think he spoke about them in a really meaningful way, and that's not a tenor that I have generally heard discussions on this campus about Israel.