The self-declared mission of J Street, the dovish "pro-Israel, pro-Peace" lobby that just concluded its first national conference this week, includes redefining the meaning of the term "pro-Israel." For too long, the organization's founders and supporters argue, right-wing elements in the Jewish community have abused the term to hijack the debate and tarnish mainstream, sensible advocates of a two-state solution.

Yesterday I appeared on a panel at J Street, where I debated Matthew Yglesias on what it means to be pro-Israel, as well as J Street's role in this debate. My main argument was that the Jewish community needs a group like J Street to keep the most extreme elements from defining "pro-Israel" too restrictively, to provide a counterweight against the natural inclination of any ethnic community toward tribalism, and to provide political space for the territorial compromises needed to create a two-state solution.

This week I've been attending the first national conference of J Street, the "pro-Israel, pro-Peace" group which I first wrote about last year. I'm working on a longer piece about the organization's identity crisis that should appear sometime soon, but there have been two events thus far worthy of special note.

First was the speech delivered by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism and one of the most prominent liberal Jews in the country. Yoffie, who had initially welcomed J Street's emergence, dramatically broke with the organization over its morally equivocating position on the Gaza War last December. J Street claimed that “While there is nothing ‘right’ in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing ‘right’ in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them.” These words, the self-proclaimed "dove"  replied, were "morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve."

So it is perhaps unsurprising that Yoffie was booed at this week's conference for condemning the United Nations investigation into alleged war crimes, known as the "Goldstone Report," as "fatally flawed." Furthermore, he said that "you cannot be a moral agent if you serve an immoral master, and Richard Goldstone should be ashamed of himself for working under the auspices of the U.N. Human Rights Council." This sort of passionate language in defense of Israel and critical of its defamers, unremarkable at mainstream pro-Israel and Jewish conclaves, has been almost entirely absent at this week's J Street conference. Indeed, the greatest applause lines at all of the panels I've attended are those that criticize Israel and lament the fate of the Palestinians. (Allison Hoffman of Tablet has more about the conference attendees's negative reaction to Yoffie).