Malcolm Hoenlein has served as the unofficial king of the Jews for the past three decades, but a combination of forces threatens his rule.<\/i><\/p>\n
This is the kind of story people tell about Malcolm Hoenlein, a man described to me as \u201cone of the most powerful people, politically, in the United States\u201d and \u201cthe most powerful Jew in the Western world.\u201d One day in the early 1990s, as the United States and Israel were embarking on a campaign to repeal<\/a> the Soviet-backed U.N. resolution equating Zionism with racism, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir hosted a meeting in Jerusalem. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat, was there, and so was Shimon Peres; as the conversation went on, differing views emerged about whether it was time to push for a potentially risky vote in the General Assembly. \u201cAll of a sudden, Shamir says, \u2018Ask Malcolm,\u2019\u201d David Luchins, a longtime aide to Moynihan, recently recalled. \u201cAnd everyone said, \u2018Yes, Malcolm,\u2019 like it was the magic word. So, we went back to the King David and called Malcolm Hoenlein because the prime minister of Israel told us to call him and do what he says.\u201d<\/p>\n By day, Hoenlein is known as the executive vice chairman<\/a> of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations\u2014an unrevealing title that endows him with responsibility for daily management of the umbrella group that serves as the de facto central council of American Jewry. At 66, he has the thinning hair and rimless glasses of a technocrat, which seems appropriate for his identity as the relatively anonymous functionary who supports the heads of the various organizations he represents. Aside from occasional comments to the press, usually in his capacity as a spokesman for the Conference, Hoenlein maintains a low public profile; he is virtually unknown to the millions of Jews on whose behalf he works.<\/p>\n But behind the scenes in Washington, in Jerusalem, and in the power circles of the organized Jewish world in New York, Hoenlein\u2014usually referred to simply as \u201cMalcolm\u201d\u2014is the face of American Jewry. Prime ministers call him. So do, from time to time, presidents. Ambassadors wait, patiently, to meet with him. Hillary Clinton, as a U.S. senator, attended at his daughter\u2019s wedding<\/a>; so did Rush Limbaugh. Billionaires like Ronald Lauder and Mortimer Zuckerman rely on him as an adviser on Jewish affairs. In more than 40 years of quasi-public Jewish service, starting in the Soviet Jewry movement, Hoenlein has built \u201cthe greatest Rolodex in the world,\u201d according to Shoshana Cardin, a former chairwoman of the Conference. \u201cThe value of Malcolm is not that he opens doors,\u201d explained one senior official at a Jewish organization, who first encountered Hoenlein in the 1970s. \u201cIt\u2019s that he\u2019s the clearinghouse. The perception is that he knows everything that is going on in American Jewish life.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike the vast majority of his colleagues and their constituents, Hoenlein is a strictly observant Jew. He wears a black knit kippah every day and has lived for decades in Brooklyn\u2019s Flatbush neighborhood, a hub of American Orthodoxy; he is as fluent in the language of rabbinic politics as he is in Washington lingo. Most Fridays, unless he is traveling, he leaves the world of the Conference behind and traverses the gap separating mainstream, secular American Jewry, and the religious environment in which he was raised. His Conference colleagues don\u2019t visit his house for Shabbat dinners, because they\u2019d have to break the Sabbath to drive back to their homes in Manhattan, New Jersey, or Westchester; he infrequently spends Shabbat with them, for the same reason.<\/p>\n Nearly everyone who has worked with Hoenlein\u2014fans and detractors alike\u2014unhesitatingly described his politics to me as \u201cconservative\u201d or \u201cright-wing\u201d when it comes to Israel, and no one I spoke with thought it likely that Hoenlein was among the 78 percent of American Jews who voted for Barack Obama in 2008. In our talks, Hoenlein would only say that he has \u201cstrong convictions when it comes to the security of the Jewish people.\u201d Beyond that, he refused to discuss his personal politics. He defied anyone to guess how he votes, though he wouldn\u2019t tell me when I asked him point blank. \u201cI have certain views, certain principles, I adhere to,\u201d he said when I asked why he thinks people assume they know what he thinks. His name does not appear on political-donor lookup lists.<\/p>\n \u201cI am quite sure Malcolm is a principled, pro-settlement right-winger,\u201d said Jonathan Jacoby, a former official with the progressive Israel Policy Forum. \u201cI don\u2019t think he\u2019s ever pretended to be anything other than what he is ideologically.\u201d But Jacoby, like almost all of the dozens of people I interviewed, gave Hoenlein and the Conference\u2019s lay leadership credit for holding together a 52-member coalition that encompasses the political breadth of the Jewish community, from the left-wing Americans for Peace Now to the right-wing Zionist Organization of America\u2014a unified front that, for the last half-century, has been one of the cornerstones of the American Jewish community\u2019s political power.<\/p>\n Lately, though, the Conference\u2019s position as the sole voice on behalf of American Jewry has been challenged by the rise of J Street<\/a>\u2014the two-year-old lobbying group that casts itself as a progressive alternative to established Jewish groups and that has become the chief venue for Jews who wish to indicate full-throated support of the approach the Obama White House has taken in the Middle East. The fledgling group\u2019s political loyalty was rewarded last summer with an invitation to join a small group<\/a> of Jewish communal representatives invited to the White House for a meeting with the president\u2014a move that also telegraphed the administration\u2019s disregard for the established hierarchies. While still tiny compared to the powerhouse organizations that are represented by the Conference\u2014among them AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, and the major religious branches\u2014J Street\u2019s evident ability to thrive outside of Hoenlein\u2019s orbit strikes at the notion of a single unified \u201cJewish\u201d voice. \u201cYou can\u2019t speak for everyone\u2014nothing gets a hundred percent vote,\u201d Jeremy Ben Ami, J Street\u2019s executive director, told me. \u201cI\u2019m not saying this to invalidate either Malcolm Hoenlein or the Conference, but to speak for an entire community is presumptuous.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, nearly a hundred members of the Conference will convene in Manhattan for a daylong retreat to refine their positions three key topics: the Iranian nuclear threat, the anti-Israel boycott and sanctions movement, and the state of the U.S.-Israel relationship. But with the American Jewish community perhaps more deeply\u2014and publicly\u2014at odds over its relationship with Israel than almost at any time since the Jewish state\u2019s creation, J Street is almost the one subject guaranteed to produce consensus. Increasingly, there is a sense of disquiet within the established Jewish world from those who feel the Conference has been slow to counter J Street\u2019s publicity machine<\/a> with its own public campaign.<\/p>\n This is, in part, the result of the unique structure of the Conference, which every two years rotates its chairmanship\u2014well-known public figures like Mort Zuckerman have filled the position\u2014to keep peace among its various constituent groups. But it is also due to the personal style of Hoenlein, who understands the value of flying under the radar. Several times in the course of a series of interviews we conducted over more than two months, he paused to tell me that his reputation for keeping quiet about sensitive, backchannel negotiations\u2014over, say, the fate of Jonathan Pollard, the American convicted of spying for Israel\u2014helped him cement his access. Yet what to him seems like appropriate circumspection contributes to the widespread suspicion, particularly on the left, that he uses his position to pursue his own private agenda when it comes to Israel and the wellbeing of the Jewish people. Indeed, it has become something of an open joke even among his own friends. In March, I ran into Hoenlein at a conference in lower Manhattan; he was chatting by the buffet table with one of his longtime backers, an attorney and former Conference chair named Kenneth Bialkin. Hoenlein introduced me as \u201chis biographer.\u201d \u201cGet rid of him, he\u2019s a pernicious guy!\u201d quipped Bialkin, giving Hoenlein a jovial slap on the back.<\/p>\n Hoenlein\u2019s insistence on obscuring his own work habits also helps him maintain an almost magical aura of top-secret insiderdom. In March, I attended an off-the-record breakfast briefing the Conference hosted for Israel\u2019s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, in a plush meeting room at the Weizmann Institute of Science offices in a midtown Manhattan, one floor below the modest suite the Conference sublets from the Jewish Agency. After the breakfast wrapped up, Hoenlein invited me to accompany him back upstairs for an impromptu interview. When we arrived, he pointed me toward a colleague\u2019s darkened office, rather than into his, apologizing that his office was too messy. I asked if I could at least take a peek inside the inner sanctum, since our earlier interviews had taken place in a bare meeting room. He shook his head, and gestured at the teetering towers of cardboard file boxes visible through the doorway. \u201cYou\u2019d get scared,\u201d he said, deflecting me with a smile, and guided me across the hall.<\/p>\n Over the course of our interviews, I discovered that Hoenlein\u2019s desire for privacy extended not just to journalists but to dignitaries: In April, as we were wrapping up a conversation in a Jewish Agency meeting room overlooking Third Avenue, he directed his next visitor, American diplomat James Cunningham\u2014the current U.S. ambassador to Israel\u2014into a cramped, windowless space nearby and kept him waiting for a few minutes after their 5 p.m. appointment so that I could finish my questions.<\/p>\n Now, though, Hoenlein\u2019s demeanor belies a degree of anxiety about the future. Over the last two months, the Obama administration\u2014whose chief voices on Israel include Daniel Shapiro and Dennis Ross, men who know and have worked with Hoenlein\u2014has proven willing to deal directly, and harshly, with the Netanyahu government, most recently on the question of new construction in East Jerusalem, bypassing American Jewish groups in the process. When President Barack Obama was ready to reach out to American Jews in the wake of that disagreement\u2014and in advance of the new round of shuttle diplomacy<\/a> that began this weekend\u2014he sent a letter<\/a> to the Conference reaffirming his commitment to the special relationship between Israel and the United States. Following protocol, the president addressed his letter not to Hoenlein, but to the current Conference chair, Alan Solow<\/a>, a Chicago lawyer who has been one of Obama\u2019s most faithful supporters in the Jewish community. The letter did not apologize or even take note of the friction that resulted from the administration\u2019s decision to take Netanyahu to task after a low-level committee approved a new housing development during Vice President Joe Biden\u2019s visit in March. Hoenlein said he was far from placated. \u201cI\u2019m not calm. Honestly, I don\u2019t see anybody, left or right, who feels comfortable at this moment,\u201d he told me. \u201cI think people sense that a lot of the plates are shifting right now.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Every day, Hoenlein gets into his Conference-leased Lexus and drives himself from his modest street in Brooklyn across the East River and into midtown Manhattan. He makes calls on the way from the old flip phone he uses for talking. He carries a BlackBerry, and is quick with email, but the currency of his trade is live contact, by which he transmits an effective mix of information, advice, and empathy. By nature, he is a coalition-builder, and he revels in the horse-trading aspect of working with politicians\u2014the daily exchange of information and favors that, over time, constitute political capital. His conversations sound like this: \u201cDo you know what the status of the Armenian resolution is? No? Oh, boy. Better get ready. Right, right. Right. Both houses? Both houses? Both houses? Right. Right. But what about in the Senate? I don\u2019t know. That\u2019s why I\u2019m asking you. Because I got a couple calls from the Turkish Jewish community, and I got calls from \u2026 Right, that I knew. Right. Right. Right. Hold on a second. Right. No, I know. OK. Then everything\u2019s fine. Yeah, that\u2019ll be better for us, too. OK, thanks a lot. I will call you back. Yeah. OK. Bye.\u201d<\/p>\n Hoenlein has been a force in New York politics since he arrived from Philadelphia, in 1971, to work with the Soviet Jewry movement, and over the years he managed to develop close relationships with everyone from the Republican former Sen. Al D\u2019Amato to Hillary Clinton, calling and encouraging them to support this or that initiative or to engage in the elaborate game of assembling co-sponsors for bills. Yet Hoenlein, a political chessmaster who prides himself on working well with members of both parties, has repeatedly found himself cast as an antagonist to Obama during the president\u2019s first year in office, and he is more acutely sensitive to criticism now than ever. \u201cSo, are you going to hang me out to dry?\u201d he asked me, only half joking, the first time we met.<\/p>\n In the 1990s, it was right-wing critics, largely from the religious Zionist wing of the Orthodox world, who accused Hoenlein of being too soft on issues like Pollard\u2019s release. But the simmering resentment on the progressive Jewish left that built up during the Bush years over the rightward drift of established Jewish organizations boiled over during the Obama campaign. The first warning came in September 2008, when Hoenlein extended an invitation to Sarah Palin to speak alongside Hillary Clinton at a rally outside the United Nations protesting Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions. Clinton, then still New York\u2019s senator and by that time campaigning for Obama, angrily dropped out<\/a>, and Palin was subsequently disinvited. Hoenlein told me he was simply trying to be inclusive, but he was nonetheless widely blamed<\/a> for ruining a major event with what looked like a Republican ploy.<\/p>\n After Obama hosted Jewish leaders at the White House\u2019s Roosevelt Room last July, to discuss Israel, Hoenlein was cited<\/a> by the New York Times<\/i> as the president\u2019s toughest skeptic. Obama sat in the middle of the gathering; Solow sat immediately to his right, Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, to his left. Photographs<\/a> reveal that Hoenlein, wearing a sharp black suit, sat at the cramped opposite corner of the polished wood table, as far away as he could have been seated from the president in a gathering of fewer than two dozen people. \u201cMr. Hoenlein told the president that diplomatic progress in the Middle East has traditionally occurred when there is \u2018no light\u2019 between the positions of the United States and Israel,\u2019\u201d the Times<\/i>\u2019s Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported, citing two unnamed participants. \u201cBut Mr. Obama pushed back.\u201d The episode still rankles Hoenlein, who brought it up to me as an example of how he has become a lightning rod for partisan disputes. \u201cAll I said was that history teaches us that when there is daylight between us it is harmful,\u201d Hoenlein told me. \u201cHe said, \u2018For eight years there has been no daylight, and for eight years there has been no progress.\u2019 I said no, there was Annapolis, disengagement.\u201d<\/p>\n Hoenlein prides himself on his ability to find a way to work with almost anyone and bristles at being painted as the political opponent of a Democratic president who still retains support among a majority of American Jews. One of the anecdotes he most likes to repeat in defense of his bipartisan reach is about a phone call he once got at home from then-President Jimmy Carter. In its original version, Carter calls and asks Hoenlein for advice on how to handle negotiations at Camp David. In our interviews, Hoenlein said he was called more than once, but the first time, he thought it was a prank. \u201cI picked up the phone and they said it was the president calling, and I remember saying, \u2018Who is this really?\u2019 \u201d Hoenlein recounted. \u201cAnd then I hear this voice on the line, going\u201d\u2014he paused and gathered his tongue for an attempt at slow Georgia peach\u2014\u201c\u2019Maaal-cumm, you got uh minute?\u2019\u201d In this telling, the president overheard Hoenlein\u2019s son in the background asking who it was, asked to speak with him, and invited him down to the White House to play with the first daughter, Amy. \u201cWell,\u201d Hoenlein continued, \u201che said he goes to a yeshiva and doesn\u2019t play with girls.\u201d I heard the story twice from Hoenlein, once in early March and again in late April, by which time I had discovered it has been an enduring favorite: Cynthia Ozick, writing in the New Leader<\/i><\/a> before the 1980 presidential election, noted that Hoenlein told it to her two or three times in a single sitting.<\/p>\n The Conference itself has its roots not in partisanship but on the presumption that the capacity to speak with a single voice on Israel would greatly benefit the American Jewish community\u2014mainly by saving busy politicians in Washington the bother of talking to dozens of individual groups. It was established in 1954 in response to a request from John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower\u2019s secretary of State, that Jewish leaders figure out among themselves what they wanted him to hear about Israel rather than coming to him one at a time.<\/p>\n Julius Berman, a lawyer and prominent figure in New York\u2019s Modern Orthodox community who chaired the group in the early 1980s, recalled being summoned at short notice to a meeting in Washington with George Shultz, President Ronald Reagan\u2019s second secretary of State. \u201cI said, either we get together and we agree, or we go home, because we can\u2019t tell Reagan we\u2019re all over the lot,\u201d Berman told me. By its own charter, the Conference is not an independent Jewish interest group but a vehicle for conveying displays of communal unity. In addition to the newcomer J Street, there are two other Jewish organizations that certainly qualify as \u201cmajor\u201d but have not joined the Conference: Chabad-Lubavitch and Agudath Israel, the central American council of non-Hasidic, ultra-Orthodox Jewry. Levi Shemtov, who heads Chabad\u2019s Washington office\u2014and who grew up down the street from Hoenlein\u2019s parents in Philadelphia\u2014gave me a blunt answer when I asked him why his group remains separate. \u201cI don\u2019t see what we would gain, just that we\u2019d have to clear every statement through a group of people who don\u2019t agree with us,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n The founding executive of the Conference was Yehuda Hellman, a Lithuanian-born Labor Zionist who came to New York to cover the United Nations for Jewish papers in Mandatory Palestine. For 30 years, he took a back seat to the chairs of the Conference\u2014he literally sat in the second row with other staff at official meetings with the White House. In May 1986, he died unexpectedly, at 65, after suffering a heart attack in the middle of a speech to the trustees of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in Chesterfield, Missouri. There was no plan for succession and few paper records documenting the day-to-day affairs of the Conference. \u201cMost of the members were in arrears,\u201d Bialkin, then the Conference chair, told me. \u201cIt was much less formal.\u201d<\/p>\n Partly on the advice of his friend George Klein, a New York investor and prominent Republican donor, Bialkin recruited Hoenlein for the job. Not everyone was a fan of the choice. Ted Mann, a civil rights attorney from Philadelphia who chaired the Conference from 1978 to 1980, sent Hoenlein a letter explaining that he had lodged his opposition with Bialkin. \u201cI told Ken that in my judgment you were the best community relations professional in America but the wrong person for this particular position,\u201d Mann wrote, according to a copy he recently gave me. \u201cI am counting on you to prove me wrong.\u201d Mann\u2019s problem with Hoenlein wasn\u2019t partisan; it was a question of style. \u201cIt comes down to the problem the United States had in 1786\u2014do you want a strong executive or none at all?\u201d Mann explained, in a recent interview. \u201cThe Conference does, even if it doesn\u2019t try to, stifle dissent. But I regard dissent as one of the precious jewels of Jewish life in its 4,000 years.\u201d<\/p>\n Hoenlein, for his part, says he never pretended to be someone who would take direction as a hired hand. \u201cI told them when they were interviewing me that if you don\u2019t want an activist executive, that\u2019s fine,\u201d he told me during a conversation in March. \u201cBut I\u2019m not somebody who would just sit and be a bureaucrat.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n When Hoenlein spoke to Cynthia Ozick for the New Leader <\/i>piece, in 1980, he told her his \u201cobsessions are creative Jewish survival.\u201d It was a lesson impressed on him early by his parents, Ephraim and Erna, who both managed to flee Nazi Germany but were denied entry to Mandatory Palestine and wound up joining extended family in Philadelphia, where they raised Hoenlein and his brother, Steven. The threat somehow remained present, even in America. As a yeshiva boy in suburban Philadelphia, Hoenlein told me, he was offered \u201cliterature\u201d by a neo-Nazi group, presumably on the strength of his German surname. As an undergraduate at Temple University, Hoenlein was quick to join the campus Hillel and went on to organize the North American arm of the World Union of Jewish Students. In 1966, he told me, he was arrested on suspicion of working for the CIA while traveling in Jerusalem\u2019s American Colony, then under Jordanian control. Five years later, he and his wife, Frieda, were held by Soviet authorities in Moldova and deported, via Hungary, as \u201cZionist provocateurs.\u201d<\/p>\n As a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, he specialized in Soviet affairs but left before completing his degree to join the Philadelphia Jewish Community Relations Council, which was launching a new campaign for Soviet Jewry. Al Chernin, the legendary Jewish community-relations activist who hired Hoenlein, taught him the rudiments of grassroots political work. In 1971, Hoenlein was recruited to launch a new umbrella group for organizing various initiatives on Soviet Jewry in New York. \u201cI told him it was the kind of position on which you could either break your neck or launch your career,\u201d Chernin told me recently. Hoenlein\u2019s timing was fortuitous: He arrived just as an ad hoc group was organizing a Hanukkah celebration at Madison Square Garden that came to be known as \u201cFreedom Lights for Soviet Jewry.\u201d<\/a> Twenty-five thousand people turned up. \u201cThere was this generation of young people who were either the children of survivors, or were growing up in an environment where their parents were saying, \u2018Why didn\u2019t we do more?\u2019\u201d said Margy-Ruth Davis, a New York political consultant who was one of the first three people to sign on with Hoenlein\u2019s new organization.<\/p>\n Hoenlein earned a reputation as someone who could not only turn people out at rallies but could also find ways to make common cause with people who threatened to upset the unified front he was seeking to project. In the early 1970s, that meant negotiating with Meir Kahane\u2019s Jewish Defense League, an extreme right-wing group that once staged a sit-in at Hoenlein\u2019s office to complain about where they were scheduled to march in that year\u2019s Solidarity Day parade, Davis recalled. Hoenlein wound up with Kahane in his office debating principles. \u201cI was intellectually sympathetic when he started,\u201d Hoenlein told me. \u201cSecurity is vital to the Jewish community, and we don\u2019t take it seriously enough.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1976, he was asked to take over the launch of a Jewish community-relations council for New York, something the city, unlike most smaller Jewish hubs around the country, had never had. The job gave Hoenlein entree into nearly every corner of New York\u2019s Jewish world, from the political fundraising circles of the Upper East Side to the Orthodox hierarchy in Brooklyn to the state\u2019s Congressional delegation. Hoenlein established close relationships with politiciants; in 1981, he and D\u2019Amato shared<\/a> an El Al flight to New York with Menachem Begin. \u201cMalcolm had seichel<\/i>, smarts,\u201d Richard Ravitch, who helped establish the the Community Relations Council and is now New York\u2019s lieutenant governor, told me. \u201cVery few people have that kind of seichel<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n When Hoenlein was approached about taking Hellman\u2019s post at the Conference, he was on the cusp of accepting a job at New York\u2019s Jewish Federation, then as now a wealthy, powerful, established organization. But the Conference\u2014nearly bankrupt and ad hoc\u2014offered an unparalleled opportunity. \u201cI had people from the prime minister\u2019s office to the Lubavitcher Rebbe weighing in,\u201d Hoenlein told me, in March. \u201cMy son said, \u2018Money is never going to be important to you. Where do you think you\u2019ll make a difference? That\u2019s the only thing that will satisfy you.\u2019 \u201d As it happens, Hoenlein is now generously compensated; according to IRS documents, he made more than $385,000 in cash and benefits from the Conference and a related nonprofit fund in 2008, the last year for which forms are available. But he also told me something else: \u201cI believe this is what God decided for me to do.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In February, Josh Block, the spokesman for AIPAC, told me that I could never hope to understand the extent of Hoenlein\u2019s influence without seeing him in action in Jerusalem. Every year, Hoenlein organizes a \u201cmission\u201d trip to Israel and one other country\u2014this winter, it was South Africa\u2014designed to cement relationships between the members of the Presidents Conference and the Israeli leadership. It also has the effect of reinforcing Hoenlein\u2019s role as a broker between the two groups. (Ravitch told me that when he craves \u201ca fix\u201d of firsthand news from the Jewish state, \u201cI\u2019ll call him and ask what the hell is going on.\u201d)<\/p>\n For the Israelis, Hoenlein provides institutional memory, as well as an extra-diplomatic link to Washington. \u201cThe government changes, and the administration changes, but Malcolm is always there,\u201d said Dore Gold, who served as Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s ambassador to the United Nations in the late 1990s. Hoenlein is also seen as the gatekeeper to the extraordinary wealth and influence of the far-flung American Jewish diaspora.<\/p>\n \u201cThe real power behind the throne, both the kingmaker and the one who wields power on a daily basis, is Malcolm,\u201d said Dan Gillerman, who was Israel\u2019s U.N. envoy under Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. \u201cWhenever I wanted anything done or to wield any influence in Washington, I consulted Malcolm. There were times when I thought the request or the alert should be not just the voice of Israel, but the voice of the Jewish community, and in that respect I thought Malcolm had an added value\u2014and often some special connections that did the trick.\u201d Even Yitzhak Rabin\u2014who, several people told me, initially dismissed Hoenlein as a \u201ccourt Jew\u201d\u2014eventually found use for him. \u201cRabin was very independent in America\u2014he had a direct line to Clinton, a direct line to the Senate, a direct line to all the newspapers,\u201d Rabin\u2019s former adviser Shimon Sheves told me. \u201cI\u2019m not sure Rabin\u2019s policy was always the same policy of Malcolm Hoenlein, but he was there, and most of the time his presence was very important for us.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, no Israeli government has had to worry about winding up on the wrong side of a public statement issued by Hoenlein or the Conference\u2014despite the fact that severe fissures do occasionally emerge among the leadership. In 2005, the Conference was fiercely riven<\/a> over Sharon\u2019s planned disengagement from Gaza, though eventually the group publicly stated its support. The episode revived calls\u2014heard most loudly from Union for Reform Judaism head Eric Yoffie and Abraham Foxman, the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League\u2014to establish an executive committee that would, in effect, have the power to rein in not just Hoenlein but the group\u2019s lay chairmen and the donors to the independent fund Hoenlein established to pay for the annual missions and for programs like one that offers fellowships for selected journalists to go to Israel. Ultimately, nothing changed. Yoffie, when I met him recently in his midtown office, said he didn\u2019t want to discuss Hoenlein\u2019s politics. \u201cI\u2019m not going to comment on Malcolm. He works tirelessly,\u201d Yoffie told me. \u201cThe personal focus on him or anyone is a mistake and distracts from the real issue\u2013which is the structural question, getting the Conference to be run so that it necessarily reflects the shape of the Jewish community and not the whims of its most active members.\u201d<\/p>\n But that gets back to the political question: Despite recent polls<\/a> that show support for Obama among Jewish voters slipping more rapidly than among the general public, American Jewry remains solidly Democratic, solidly in favor of Obama, and solidly in favor of accelerating movement toward a settlement with the Palestinians. By contrast, those typically counted as the community\u2019s most \u201cactive members\u201d include not just the small, conservative groups whose chief outlet is the Conference, but moguls like Lauder and Zuckerman, both former Conference chairs who have been quite public about their relatively conservative views on Israel. (Neither Lauder nor Zuckerman agreed to be interviewed for this story.) Zuckerman, earlier this year, flirted with a bid for New York\u2019s Senate seat as a Republican, and Lauder last month wrote a harshly critical public letter<\/a> to Obama castigating the administration for calling Netanyahu to the carpet. Other donors to the Conference fund include Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire president of the board of the 92nd Street Y. \u201cI\u2019m not sure where the accountability is,\u201d said Foxman. \u201cThis is an umbrella group, and accountability is serious, because when Malcolm speaks, or Alan Solow speaks, it\u2019s in my name, and I should be aware of it, or have some sense that someone out there is helping make decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In late April, I went to the Conference of Presidents\u2019 headquarters for my last formal interview with Hoenlein and finally cornered him into letting me see his personal office, which faces east, overlooking the buildings next door along 41st Street. We walked past the cubby where an assistant sits, in front of a satellite image of Israel similar to the one that hangs outside the Israeli prime minister\u2019s office in Jerusalem, which is unmarked by any of the various borders that have delineated the country\u2019s territory over the years. For nearly an hour, Hoenlein walked me around not just the room where he keeps his computer, but a small anteroom next door, proudly regaling me with the provenance of scores of photographs and tchotchkes that provided ample evidence of his fruitful collaboration with three decades\u2019 worth of politicians of all stripes. There were pictures of him with Carter, with both Bushes, with the Clintons, with Rabin, with Begin, with Reagan, George Shultz, and James Baker; a large photograph of Israeli Air Force jets flying over the gate at Auschwitz signed to him from Ehud Olmert; countless plaques and ephemera from presidents and premiers in countries with small Jewish populations all over the world. Hoenlein challenged me to guess the identities of some sideburned figures who appeared in old candids; I failed miserably, thrown by the unfamiliar angles and by their youth. In one corner was a black-and-white photograph of an Orthodox Jewish doctor, Rick Hodes, taken by Tipper Gore in Ethiopia; Hoenlein said she told him she thought of him when she snapped it.<\/p>\n I did not, however, spot any items documenting the arrival of the Obama administration on the scene. \u201cI can\u2019t say we have regular meetings with the president,\u201d Hoenlein had told me in an earlier session. \u201cBut that\u2019s not his style.\u201d Still, he was quick to add, he has access to Dan Shapiro and Dennis Ross, the two National Security Council staffers with greatest direct day-to-day responsibility for dealing with Israel and through them maintains a channel to George Mitchell, Obama\u2019s special envoy for the peace process. \u201cI certainly think there is an appreciation of the role of the Presidents\u2019 Conference,\u201d said a current senior administration official who works on Middle East policy. \u201cYou can\u2019t be in the role Malcolm\u2019s had for as long as he\u2019s had it and not have a sense of what the pulse is in the community\u2014that\u2019s a role that has value, and that, in particular, may be an important aspect for us right now.\u201d<\/p>\n However, what some members of the Conference would like to see is even greater distance from this White House. Mort Klein, the outspoken head of the Zionist Organization of America, likes to cast himself as the Cassandra of the group. \u201cEvery Jewish organization including the Conference of Presidents should have publicly and strongly criticized President Obama for using language to an ally that has never been used\u2014condemn, assault, affront,\u201d Klein told me. \u201cMalcolm says you don\u2019t want to open a breach. You want to maintain access. I say it\u2019s a crisis already.\u201d Yet even Klein recognized the unavoidable truth that more than half of American Jews still approve of Obama\u2019s performance, including on American-Israeli relations. \u201cHalf the Jews hate him and half thinks he\u2019s wonderful,\u201d Klein conceded. \u201cThere\u2019s no unity. But the leadership does not reflect that.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the past few weeks, Hoenlein\u2019s chief strategy for dealing with the situation has been simply to change the subject, away from the sticky matter of Israel and the Palestinians to one he thinks everyone can agree on: Iran. \u201cThis is not about Israel,\u201d Hoenlein told me, after the walk-through of his office. \u201cThis is about America\u2019s security.\u201d But even on that front, there has been disquiet in the ranks ahead of today\u2019s conference-wide meeting. \u201cSomething has to come out of that,\u201d said Joel Sprayregen, a lawyer who is vice-president of the board at the conservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019ll turn into a discussion about what to do about Iran and the White House, and those of us who have concern will have a chance to voice our feelings on it.\u201d<\/p>\n The current split in American Jewish opinion is not, by general consensus, as vicious as it was during the Oslo period, when Kahanist protesters turned out in New York waving signs labeling Rabin a traitor. But its contours point to a structural shift that may not only involve partisanship. The heads around the Conference table are, for the most part, gray; of the most involved participants, only a handful, including the current chair Solow, are younger than the state of Israel. Most can still remember an era when Jews believed it was necessary to band together as Jews. But times have changed; Jewish issues have, perhaps, become everyone\u2019s issues. In the White House, at least, Hoenlein faces a team made up of people\u2014not just Ross and Shapiro, but Rahm Emanuel, senior adviser David Axelrod, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama chief of staff Susan Sher\u2014with their own longstanding, personal connections in the Jewish world, who don\u2019t necessarily mind reversing Dulles\u2019s prescription and going directly to the people who will offer political support. \u201cThere\u2019s greater sophistication in White Houses about the Jewish community\u2014they no longer need to call Malcolm and say, \u2018Bring us 20 Jews,\u2019\u201d Foxman told me. \u201cThey don\u2019t need it and they don\u2019t want it. But there was a time when it was simply easier for them to pick up the phone and say, \u2018Fill these 20 seats.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For now, though, Hoenlein has tasked himself with finding the way back into the palace. \u201cIt is our job to always try to rebuild the relationship,\u201d Hoenlein told me, earnestly. These days, he has his work cut out for him.<\/p>\n _______________________<\/p>\n Allison Hoffman is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.<\/i><\/p>\n