Introduction

There is a chasm among American Jews in their views of the Israeli government’s policies and actions concerning Palestinians, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and efforts toward its resolution. In 2020, the Pew Research Center found that while 40 percent of American Jews rated Prime Minister Netanyahu’s leadership as excellent or good, 28 percent rated it as poor, with significant differences according to people’s age and denomination (Pew 2020: 146). Almost equal shares of American Jews thought the U.S. is too supportive of Israel (22%) versus not supportive enough (19%), again with significant differences according to age and denomination (Ibid.: 144). And in 2024, 38 percent thought Israel’s methods of fighting the Israel-Hamas war were unacceptable, versus 34 percent found them to be acceptable (Pew 2024). 

Polarized opinions and attitudes concerning Israel among American Jews are not new. Since the early 2000s, social scientists have analyzed surveys which consistently showed that less observant Jews and Jews under 40 years old feel less emotionally attached to Israel and more critical of it than older and more observant Jews (Cohen and Kelman 2010; Kotler-Berkowitz 2017). Historically, there always existed a diversity of opinions among Jews in Europe, Russia, and North America on whether to work toward increasing Jews’ civil, political, individual, and collective rights in areas of Europe and Russia where such rights were precarious or nonexistent, or to prioritize creating a Jewish state. Ambivalence over Zionism continued after 1948 among certain American Jewish organizations which prioritized Jewish newcomers’ integration into American society and civic life, but Israel became a point of unity in advance of the 1967 Six-Day War (Waxman 2016; Barnett 2016). However, Israel again became a source of disagreement after its 1977 elections and the formation of the first Likud-led government, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and increasingly since the breakdown of the Oslo Accords peace process in the late 1990s. In Dov Waxman’s Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel, he described the shift as a gradual end to the typically uncritical support for Israel which had existed since the lead-up to the Six-Day War (Waxman 2016).

This article is part a scholarly conversation about the increasingly political and politicized ways American Jews express support and criticism of Israel’s government and of mainstream American Jewish and Israel-advocacy organizations. The article focuses on the donor bases of the political action committees (PACs) of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), J Street, and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). These are political advocacy organizations which, first, have a prominent place in the public imagination of Jewish activism and advocacy concerning Israel, second, hold very different positions on Israel and U.S.-Israel relations, and third, have at least one PAC, a legal arm which most Jewish political advocacy organizations do not have in addition to their advocacy and educational legal arms (501(c)(4)s and 501(c)(3)s). The article demonstrates the vast differences in how much AIPAC, J Street, and JVP have raised in donations for their PACs, and from what neighborhoods and cities; what changes occurred to their revenues October 7th, 2023; a rough portrait of each organization’s donor base; and, in the final section, an identity-based argument for why ‘pushback organizations’ such J Street and JVP have become more popular over the last several years. To be sure, this article shows evidence that AIPAC receives vastly greater financial support from Americans than does J Street or JVP, but the final section nonetheless proposes an argument to explain a particular political behavior—that certain American Jews do support organizations which criticize the Israeli government, especially on matters of security and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The article proceeds as follows. The next section provides a brief introduction to pushback organizations, their positions on Israel and Zionism, and what they ‘push back’ against. The following section focuses attention on AIPAC, J Street, and JVP—specifically their PACs. I explain the value of examining organizations with PACs and how each one’s donor patterns is a reasonable proxy for the donor patterns of AIPAC, J Street, and JVP more generally. The section revolves around a comparison of the revenues of AIPAC, J Street, and JVP concerning their PACs, and changes in revenue patterns following October 7th.

Despite a popular perception that J Street’s scale of financing, organization, and lobbying knowledge would pose serious competition to AIPAC, and a fear in many Jewish communities that JVP is a significant force that is rapidly gaining support among young, leftist, and social justice-minded Jews, the data indicates that both views are exaggerations (Waxman 2016; Kampeas 2021; Goldberg 2025). The data indicates that J Street is a far smaller operation than AIPAC with a donor demographic that is unlikely to approach what AIPAC’s donors contribute to that organization, and, that JVP remains marginal in the world of Jewish political advocacy concerning Israel, despite growth in recent years.

The third section shows the highest-revenue cities and zip codes for each organization’s PACs. The geographical distribution of each one’s donor base shows AIPAC’s strength to be wealthy areas with large Jewish communities, J Street’s strength to be the capital region and areas around elite colleges, and JVP’s strength to be single or few donors in small cities on the west coast without significant Jewish communities. Whereas social scientists have demonstrated that age and religiosity are statistically significant predictors of Jews’ extent of emotional attachment to Israel, the data here indicates that certain cities and neighborhoods might also indicate one’s attitudes and broad policy positions on Israel. (Cohen and Kelman 2010; Kotler-Berkowitz 2017; Sasson et. al 2012) 

 The article’s final section explores what motivates people to align themselves with pushback organizations. I propose that ‘pushing back’ is a type of identity affirmation exercise for many American Jews, motivated, at least in part, by a feeling of securing and affirming one’s identity as part of a self-described historically liberal, progressive segment of American Jewry concerned with social justice, racial justice, and minority rights.

 The article relies on a few primary data sources. Financial data is from publicly available IRS 990 Forms and from OpenSecrets. OpenSecrets might be familiar to readers as The Center for Responsive Politics or The National Institute on Money in Politics, two organizations which merged in 2021 to become OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan, independent, nonprofit organization which publishes information on how much lobbying organizations raise, from whom, and what congressmembers and congressional and presidential campaigns they support. The data obtained from OpenSecrets includes all-time donations to each organization’s PACs, including the names, zip codes, cities, professions, and employers of all donors, donation amounts and dates, and what congressional or presidential campaigns donors directed their gifts to, if any. Second, I refer to interviews I conducted with founders and directors of the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, Americans for Peace Now, J Street, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, IfNotNow, Open Hillel, and JVP. These conversations took place between 2021 and 2025 over zoom and the phone and are almost all anonymized. Finally, the last section refers to The New York Times’ “Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election” (Park et al. 2021).

Brief Background on Establishment and 'Pushback Organizations'

Younger and less observant Jews are less likely to feel a strong emotional attachment to Israel. Pew’s 2020 survey found that only 48 percent of American Jews aged 18-29 described themselves as very or somewhat attached to Israel, compared to 63-66 percent of Jews aged 50 years and older (Pew 2020: 36). Jews aged 18-29 were also 15 percent less likely to think that caring about Israel is an essential part of being Jewish (35% vs. 50-52%) (Ibid.) Figures were similar when Pew asked the same questions in 2012 (Pew 2013:57). 

Younger American Jews are also more likely to be critical of Israel’s government. A 2024 Pew survey found that Jews aged 18-34 years were about 10 percent less likely than the overall American Jewish population to have a favorable view of the Israeli government (54% v. 45%) and about 10 percent more likely to have a favorable view of the Palestinian Authority (12% v. 21%) (Pew 2024). And whereas 74 percent of Jews overall favor the U.S. providing military aid to Israel in its war against Hamas, only 61 percent of Jews aged 18-34 feel the same way (Ibid.) For those under 45, their living memory of the Jewish State is of a regional military power that has always enjoyed bipartisan support from American policymakers and consistent support from the White House on the international stage, ranging from facilitating diplomatic accords with Arab states to shielding Israel from hostile resolutions at the United Nations.

 For an increasing number of liberal and secular Jews whose identity is intertwined with social justice and racial justice values, solidarity with Palestinians is at the forefront of their relationship to Israel, especially in a time when Israel is often portrayed through the lens of settler-colonialism and the norm of anti-colonialism. Thus, many younger and liberal Jews who see social and racial justice as intrinsic to their identity and to Jewish ethics feel alienated from longstanding Jewish-community and Israel-advocacy institutions such as the Jewish Federations of North America, AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Birthright for what they perceive as those organizations’ unconditional support for the positions and actions of the Israeli government on matters concerning security, Palestinians, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

Many express their views through pushback organizations—advocacy and activist organizations that generally oppose mainstream Jewish and Israel-advocacy organizations’ positions on Israel and U.S.–Israel relations. Foremost among pushback organizations of the last couple decades is J Street, founded in late 2007. Its founder, Jeremy Ben-Ami, explained at the time that “a small minority of American Jews who are the most vocal, single-minded, right-wing, and uncritical in their support for Israel” “dominate what politicians hear” from the community (Blum Leibowitz 2009; Ben-Ami 2010: 54). That segment of American Jews, according to Ben-Ami, took the form of organizations which “pay lip service to a two-state solution” but damage Israel’s security by defending its policies which are counterproductive to peace (J Street 2008: 3).

J Street’s raison d’être was to be a strong ‘pro-Israel pro-peace’ voice in Washington to advocate in favor of a two-state solution (J Street 2008; Ben-Ami 2010). Its position from the onset was that

The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is a major obstacle to the achievement of Israeli-Palestinian peace […] Military rule over millions of Palestinians who lack civil and political rights represents a daily infringement on the basic rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people, and has been extremely detrimental to Israel’s democracy, security, economy and regional standing (J Street n.d.2).

However, its official positions on its “Occupation, Annexation & Settlements” webpage do not differentiate between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, from which Israel withdrew unilaterally in 2005. J Street advocated that a negotiated peace agreement and a two-state solution must be the central goal of U.S. policy in the Middle East, and that U.S. assistance to Israel should be conditioned on an end to Israel’s settlement expansion and for it to take steps toward resuming negotiations toward Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the creation of a Palestinian State (Newsweek 2008; Ben-Ami 2010; J Street n.d.3). Ben-Ami’s timing was propitious, as his approach aligned with and provided Jewish-community ‘cover’ for the Middle-East policies of the recently-elected President Barak Obama.

J Street is the most prominent organization to ‘push back’ against Israeli-government policies and mainstream Jewish and Israel-advocacy organizations, but it was preceded by Americans for Peace Now. APN was founded in 1981 to support the Shalom Akhshav [Peace Now] movement, formed a few years earlier in Israel to pressure Prime Minister Menachem Begin to advance peace accords with Egypt. After the Israel–Egypt peace treaty, Shalom Akhshav fought against settlements in the occupied territories, the 1982 Lebanon War, and, after the Palestinian Intifada uprising in 1987, advocated that Israel negotiate with the Palestinian Liberation Organization as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people (Feige 1998: 90; Peleg 2000). APN promoted these positions among Americans, American Jews, and in the U.S. Congress.

Timing was in its favor as well, as many American Jews were unhappy with the rightward and ethnonationalist direction Israel had taken since the late 1970s. Prime Minister Begin, in his support of the Jabotinsky-inspired idea of Greater Israel, oversaw the significant expansion of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In this context, APN and the New Israel Fund, established in 1979 to support Israeli civil-society organizations focused on equality between Arab and Jewish Israeli citizens, became increasingly attractive to those American Jews whose liberalism and dovish views on Israel aligned with those of these new groups.

More recent pushback organizations include Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, founded in 2002 as a grassroots ‘two-state solution’ group which joined J Street in 2010; IfNotNow, a movement begun in 2014 largely by supporters of J Street U, J Street’s college arm, who were dissatisfied with Jeremy Ben-Ami’s response to Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza; Open Hillel, a college movement during the 2010s which ‘pushed back’ against the policies of Hillel International concerning Israel; and the far left and anti-Zionist JVP. JVP was established in 1996 as a dialogue group in the Bay Area, expanded to nationwide chapters around 2010, and has since grown in revenue, chapters, and staff (Verduin 2015; Goldberg 2025). It views Israel as an apartheid state, considers its establishment to be the source of its many conflicts with Arab countries and the Palestinians, supports the boycott-divest-sanctions movement (BDS), and calls on the U.S. to end all support for Israel (JVP n.d.1, n.d.2, 2020; Shaeffer Omer-Man 2019; Vilkomerson 2015; Ross 2011; Ming and Glantz 2011; Verduin 2015). JVP does not view Israel or Zionism as central facets of Jewish identity.

What these organizations have in common is the view that mainstream and longstanding American Jewish organizations have provided tacit support for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and have thus helped to perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are out of step with most American Jews’ views of Israel (JStreet 2017, n.d.1-2; APN 2016; Friedman 2013, 2017; NIF 2022B; INN n.d., 2019A). They advocate that the U.S. condemn Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and settlement-building, and certain among them, including J Street, have advocated for conditioning U.S. military support for Israel on it ending the occupation (APN 2021; Susskind 2021; JStreet n.d.2; INN 2019B, 2020; JVP 2024A). In 2024 and 2025, concerning the Israel–Hamas war, J Street and New Jewish Narrative, an organization which resulted from the 2023 merger of APN and Ameinu (an older group with the same positions), advocated that the U.S. demand Israel pursue negotiations with Palestinian leaders, while JVP and IfNotNow called for an unconditional ceasefire from Israel (APN 2024; JStreet 2025; Ben-Ami 2024; JVP 2024A). JVP and IfNotNow’s positions included no corresponding demand that Hamas release the hostages it kidnapped on October 7th, 2023.

Mainstream and centrist institutions, for their part, such as AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (hereafter ‘the Conference of Presidents’), the Jewish Federations of North America, the AJC, the ADL, and Hillel International have been the leading representatives of America’s Jewish population for decades—some for over a century. They do not often comment on Israeli government positions, but when they do, they typically support or align with its positions on matters related to security and the conflict. They oppose any external pressure on the Israeli government to take particular positions concerning security and peacemaking, including the use of U.S. diplomatic or military support as leverage to pressure Israel to make concessions for the purposes of peacemaking with the Palestinian Authority or Arab states.

AIPAC is the most significant of these organizations. Since its beginnings in the early 1950s, its primary mission has been to strengthen U.S.–Israel relations, and toward that goal it lobbies congressmembers and candidates to adopt legislation favorable to Israel and its policy preferences (Waxman 2010, 2016; DeWind and Segura 2014). Among its more well-known lobbying campaigns was its powerful but failed effort to oppose the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal, a central foreign-policy effort of President Obama (Rynhold 2021). AIPAC has consistently supported the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and of settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights as legally part of Israel, legislation against boycotts of Israel and settlements, and has consistently opposed the recognition of Palestine as a state (AIPAC 2019, 2020A, 2020B, 2021, 2025). In its view the impediments to peace are Palestinian leaders’ refusal or inability to end violence from Hamas and other terrorist groups, their payments to terrorists, and their rejections of peacemaking negotiations, including peace offers proposed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008 and the peace framework proposed by President Trump in 2020 (AIPAC n.d.).

The Conference of Presidents is another historically significant Israel-advocacy organization. It is comprised of leaders from about fifty national Jewish organizations including AIPAC, the AJC, the ADL, and Hillel International, working together to “advance the U.S.–Israel special relationship, bolster Israel’s security and prosperity,” and help the U.S. counter “threats posed by a nuclear Iran, global terrorism, antisemitism, and the delegitimization campaign” against Israel (Conference n.d.). It was established in the 1950s, like AIPAC, with the vision that America’s Jewish organizations should speak as one voice to the U.S. president of the day concerning Israel, and thus it traditionally lobbies the White House and State Department (Waxman 2016; Oren 2007). Like AIPAC, the Conference holds that Israel’s many good faith attempts to negotiate peace with Palestinian leaders have been met with “maneuvers to avoid direct negotiations,” and that the “onus is now on the Palestinian Authority to demonstrate that it is interested in true peace” (Conference 2012, 2022).

The AJC, ADL, B’nai Brith International, Hillel International, and the more recent StandWithUs can also be considered establishment, centrist Jewish organizations with positions on Israel that are generally uncritically supportive. Each of these organizations supported the AIPAC-led campaign to oppose the Iran nuclear deal (Rynhold 2021; BBI 2015; Prince 2015), applauded the Trump administration’s recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and of some settlements in the West Bank as legally part of Israel (AJC 2017; ADL 2017; BBI 2019A; Hillel 2017; StandWithUs 2017), supported anti-BDS legislation (BBI2019B; AJC 2023; ADL 2016; StandWithUs n.d.; Bandler 2015; Baltimore 2022), and hold the Palestinian Authority responsible for the ongoing state of the conflict (AJC 2017B; BBI 2019C, 2020; StandWithUs n.d.2, 2020; Guttman 2011; Jaffe 2013). One point to be emphasized is that these organizations are not inherently right-wing or hawkish, but have drifted that way as successive Israeli governments have drifted in rightward and ethnonationalist directions since the late 1970s, and intensely so since 2019.

 Comparing the PACs of AIPAC, J Street, and JVP

Greater engagement in policymaking in Washington is part of ‘pushing back.’ In interviews with directors and former directors of J Street, J Street U, APN, Open Hillel, and Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, they described successful advocacy and lobbying in Congress and state legislatures by AIPAC and other major American Jewish organizations on matters related to boycotts of Israel and the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism.¹  In their view, establishment organizations had long been able to influence the positions of congressmembers and congressional candidates.²  Indeed, according to a former ADL director,

The ADL has been drafting model legislation since the 1960s. […] It has drafted a number of legislations, such as the hate crimes law, the anti-boycotting-Israel legislation, and others. We do the research and legwork and we consult with experts in the field […]. When we provide this to somebody willing to take it forward into a legislative context, all the work is done for them. And that’s really very welcome […].³

According to one director of AJC,

People at AJC make contact with elected officials all the time, at the local, state, and federal levels. In my role in New York, we constantly meet with state senators […] and diplomats. […] Our national political outreach team meets constantly with very high-level elected officials and political appointees about issues of concern […]. 

Our advocacy is very, very welcome. […] I see it in my New York work with our elected officials as well as diplomats. […] It’s a common thing that they reach out to us and invite us to speak with them. […] the legislative and diplomatic community is eager to work with us. For example, our Black-Jewish clergy roundtable works with the Attorney General’s office in New York.⁴

A former AJC director explained,

Either Congress or the Department of Justice would reach out to us or AJC would reach out to them. […] The AJC had a legislative director who was also responsible for the Executive Branch. We also had an unofficial ‘dean of connections’ with members of Congress. […] On particular issues relating to antisemitism, sometimes there would be requests from a congressional committee that an AJC expert speak to Congress.⁵

According to an early J Street staff member, “When we first started J Street, there wasn’t an organization from the pro-peace camp with a robust political arm raising money for candidates or engaging in the electoral process,” referring to lobbying as well as PAC activity.⁶  A former director of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom explained that it was “a 501(c)(3) which organized, advocated, provided education and training, but was prohibited from lobbying and endorsing political candidates” due to not having a 501(c)(4) or a PAC.⁷

In fact, AIPAC only founded AIPAC PAC and United Democracy Project (UDP), its Super PAC, in 2021. A Super PAC is a type of PAC created through the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that may receive unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, labor unions and other PACs for the purpose of financing political activity including election campaigns (FEC n.d.). The significant difference between regular PACs and Super PACs is that regular PACs are limited in how much they can raise from individuals and can donate to candidates per year—hey can accept a maximum of $5,000 per year from any individual donor and they can donate up to that same amount to any electoral campaign—but they can coordinate their campaigns with candidates, while Super PACS have no donation limits yet cannot coordinate with election campaigns. Indeed, AIPAC’s UDP Super PAC has received many individual donations of more than $100,000.

AIPAC had previously avoided participating in congressional campaigning and instead directed its supporters to send donations in support of specific congressional candidates to other PACs (Kampeas 2021). Its leadership decided in recent years that as politics had become increasingly polarized, AIPAC could best advocate for strong U.S.–Israel relations by explicitly endorsing its preferred congressional and presidential candidates and funding them directly. JVP also established its PAC, JVPAction PAC in 2021, whereas J Street established JStreetPAC at the organization’s very beginning, and its Super-PAC, J Street Action Fund, in 2022 (JStreet 2022C). Donors can give as much as $5,000 per year to AIPAC PAC, J StreetPAC, and JVPAction, as is the case for all regular PACs, but there is no limit on donations to the Super-PACs UDP and J Street Action Fund.

Table 1 shows that during the roughly three-year period from November 2021 to December 2024, the timeframe shared by the PACs of all three organizations, AIPAC raised $176 million for its PACs; J StreetPAC raised $5.2 million; and JVPAction PAC raised only $170,000. More than 14,000 individuals (and many corporations) gave to AIPAC’s PACs, compared to 2,000 donors to J StreetPAC, and 753 donors to JVPAction PAC. There is a significant difference in the size of donations as well. The median donation to AIPAC’s PACs was $800, far greater than JStreetPAC’s median of $500 or JVPAction PAC’s median donation of only $20. To provide a little more information, AIPAC received twelve donations of $1 million or more to UDP, from nine individuals and one corporation, Kraft Group LLC, and 240 donations of $100,000–$750,000, from 150 individuals and 20 corporations—almost half of the latter split evenly between California and New York. In contrast, J Street’s received no million-dollar gift to its Super-PAC, and only six gifts of $100,000 or more. JVPAction PAC’s largest gifts were $5,000, which it received from only ten individuals.

Table 1: Amounts raised, number of donations, number of unique donors, and median donation amounts to the PACS of AIPAC, J Street, and JVP, from Nov. 1, 2021 to Dec. 31, 2024.

It is important to emphasize that AIPAC, J Street, and JVP each have two non-PAC branches which raise significantly more than their PACs (Table 2). Their 501(c)(4) branches engage in broad-issue advocacy and some political activity and lobbying, but the latter cannot be their principal purpose, while their 501(c)(3) branches, namely the American Israel Education Foundation, the J Street Education Fund, and Jewish Voice for Peace Inc., are intended for educational purposes and cannot engage in partisan campaign work. The value of focusing on their PACs is that detailed information on donations to PACs is accessible to the public, such as the names, city of residence, professions, and employers of donors, and the amount and date of their donation, as well as any campaign they directed their donation toward. In contrast, AIPAC, J Street, and JVP must only make public the annual sum totals of their non-PAC legal branches. Thus, focusing on the PACs allows for a like-for-like comparison of an important component of each group’s fundraising and of the geographical distribution and wealth of their supporters.

Table 2:  Total amounts raised by the different legal branches of AIPAC, J Street, and JVP.⁸

While the data from Table 1 indicated that AIPAC’s message is far more resonant with the public than that of J Street and JVP, the data in Table 2, showing revenue for each group’s other legal branches, complicate the picture concerning JVP in particular. First, a couple comparisons emphasize just how large AIPAC is. The Jewish Federations of North America, probably the largest Jewish-community institution in the U.S., raised between $250 million and $265 million for most years between 2018 and 2022.⁹  That institution helps to fund many ongoing programs in Jewish communities across North America, such as schools, summer camps, community centers, integration and employment programs, loans and scholarships, and food banks, whereas AIPAC, focused on Israel, raised more than half of what the Federations raised over the same period. Second, the National Rifle Association, which also solicits donations from the public, raised between $77 million and $120 million per year between 2020 and 2023 for its advocacy and educational branches—less than what AIPAC’s comparable branches raised.

It is thus not surprising that J Street and J Street Educational Foundation raised less than 8% of what AIPAC’s non-PAC branches raised. What is surprising is that, in 2023, JVP’s educational branch raised almost $11 million, more than three times the previous year and significantly more than the combined revenues of J Street’s advocacy and educational branches. At the same time, JVP’s PAC and political arm show steady, though less dramatic, growth since 2019. To be sure, there are other signs that JVP is growing. From 2023 to late 2025, its chapter count increased from 45 to 100 and it increased its budget from $5 million to $9 million (Goldberg 2025). It remains small, though, and certainly smaller than is thought in the public imagination and feared in many Jewish communities (Ibid.; Glueck et al. 2024; AJC n.d.; Kogen 2017). Its advocacy and educational branches collected roughly $3–4 million from 2020 to 2022, less than half of J Street’s revenues over the same period. And, although donor numbers for its non-PAC branches grew from 25,000 to 30,000 from 2021 to late 2024, and its membership grew from approximately 20,000 to 40,000 over the same period, one wonders why in 2021 it had 25,000 donors yet only 20,000 members, and in 2024 it had 40,000 donors yet only 30,000 members (JVP 2024B).¹⁰  Given that membership requires a donation of only $18, what explains why a significant and growing share of JVP’s donors decline membership? One plausible reason is that many donors are not Jewish. One former director explained that donors can opt-out of being a member when they make a donation.¹¹  They said,

We have a very diverse donor base. Some of our white Christian and Arab donors opt out of being a member because they feel like it’s not their organization. […] they don’t identify as members.

It is plausible that for the one political advocacy organization under examination which explicitly qualifies itself as Jewish, its share of Jewish supporters diminishes as its base of small donors grows.

October 7, 2023

Donations to each PAC increased significantly after October 7th, 2023 (Table 3). In the fifteen months that followed Hamas’ catastrophic attack on Israel, AIPAC’s PACs raised $100 million from almost 45,000 donations, compared to the fifteen previous months during which they raised $40 million from 8,000 donations—a five-fold increase in the number of donations. J Street’s PAC revenue increased almost three times from $3.7 million pre-October 7th to $9.5 million post-October 7th, as did its number of donations. Thus, it is not surprising that its median donation remained $250 during both periods, far lower than AIPAC’s median donations of $1000 and $500, pre- and post-October 7th.

Table 3: Change in amounts raised by each PAC in the fifteen months before vs. after Oct. 7th, 2023

Table 3 shows that JVPAction PAC more than tripled its intake, increasing from $28,000 to $92,000. Its donation count remained very low, however, despite a substantial increase from 195 donations before October 7th to more than one thousand in the same timeframe post-October 7th. Its median donation remained very low at $20.

Table 4 shows the amount raised per month by each PAC from September 2023 to March 2024. At first glance, it is curious that donations to J Street during October 2023 were half what they were the previous month, and that a similar pattern occurred for AIPAC during December 2023 and again in January 2024. One possible reason is that donors gave more to the organizations’ other branches during those months, which Table 2 indeed shows. Also, American Jews donated to all types of Israeli and Jewish-community relief organizations after October 7th. In a J Street email on October 11th, 2023, the organization advised its supporters to donate directly to relief-organizations in Israel, providing links and descriptions for many (J Street 2023).

Table 4: Amounts raised by each PAC from September 2023 to March 2024.

Mapping Support, from Beverly Hills to Berkeley

This is the first scholarly article to show in detail where these organizations draw their financial support. The information is not only substantively interesting; it is reasonable to assume that the cities and neighborhoods which provide the most support to each PAC are the same cities and neighborhoods from which AIPAC, J Street, and JVP draw their greatest support overall. Table 5 shows the fourteen cities which generated the most revenue for each organization’s PACs since late 2021. For J Street, the table shows patterns dating back to 2007.

A few patterns are immediately apparent. First, Los Angeles County, and New York City are top earners for AIPAC and JStreet, but not so for JVP. Los Angeles County and New York City are only the 8th and 10th highest-revenue metropolitan areas for JVPAction PAC. Second, AIPAC receives near-equal support for its PACs from donors in LA County ($25 million) and New York City ($23 million), whereas for J Street, donors in New York City send its PACs almost double what they receive from donors in LA County ($2 million v. $1.1 million). Third, J Street receives significantly more from Washington, D.C. ($1.3 million) and San Francisco ($1.5 million) than it does from LA County, unlike AIPAC, for which San Francisco and Washington, D.C. are relatively low-revenue cities.

Fourth, all-time revenue for J Street’s PACs, that is, since 2007 (the lower portion of Table 5) show that the organization has always received almost twice as much from New York City than it has from LA County, that San Francisco has always been one of its highest-revenue cities, and that at some point before 2021, Chicago stopped being one of its most important donor cities. Fifth, AIPAC and JVP receive more support from West Coast cities than J Street does, relative to their PACs’ overall intake. One last obvious pattern is that JVPAction PAC raised exactly $10,000, $5,000, and other curious dollar-amounts in several cities. I explain this curiosity later in the section.

For AIPAC, its PACs received the most revenue from LA County, where it raised more than $25 million, New York City, where it raised more than $23 million, and Atlanta ($9 million), Boston ($7 million), Chicago ($4 million) and the communities of Palm Beach Gardens (FL), Highland Park (IL), and Scarsdale (NY) (Table 5). Its twenty highest-revenue zip codes, shown in Table 6, include five in Manhattan, specifically Midtown and the Upper East and Upper West Sides, and seven in wealthy areas of West Los Angeles such as Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Pacific Palisades.

The metropolitan areas which generated the most all-time revenue to J Street’s PACs are New York City, where it raised almost $6.5 million, LA County, San Francisco, and Chicago, where it raised between $2.2 million and $3.2 million, and Washington D.C., where it raised almost $2 million. At the neighborhood level, J Street drew the greatest revenue for its PACs from San Francisco’s Parkside neighborhood, Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Stanford, CA, Lincoln Park in Chicago, and Lenox, MA. During the 2021–2024 timeframe, the Bay Area in particular was among its highest-revenue areas, followed by West Los Angeles, the Boston area, and northeastern New Jersey. But as a point of comparison, AIPAC raised almost as much in its 20th highest-revenue zip code, the 90064 area of West LA ($1.28 million) as J Street raised in its all-time highest-revenue neighborhood, the 94116 district of San Francisco ($1.42 million).

Table 5: Highest-revenue cities for the PACs of AIPAC, J Street, and JVP, Nov. 1, 2021 – Dec. 31, 2024.¹²

The tables reveal other differences between AIPAC and J Street. First, wealthy areas of Los Angeles and New York City are much more represented among AIPAC’s most generous locales. Whereas twelve of its twenty highest-revenue zip codes are in West LA and Manhattan, only five such areas are among J Street’s top twenty zip codes (Table 6). Second, whereas the capital region and the Bay Area are absent from AIPAC’s top twenty zip codes, one district of Washington, D.C. is J Street’s fourth-most-valuable zip code, and six of J Street’s most important districts are in the Bay Area. Third, one cannot help noticing that cities home to Ivy League and other prestigious universities are far better represented among J Street’s high-revenue areas than they are among those of AIPAC.

Table 6: The twenty highest-revenue zip codes for the PACs of AIPAC, J Street, and JVP, Nov. 1, 2021 – Dec. 31.

The portrait which emerges of JVPAction PAC is a reliance on individuals who are unlikely to be part of either large Jewish communities or broader communities of support for JVP. First, whereas it receives donations primarily from the West Coast, none of its principal zip codes are in LA or San Francisco. In fact, there is almost no overlap between its top cities and neighborhoods and those of AIPAC or J Street. Second, its highest-revenue cities represent very few donors—only Seattle, Berkeley, and LA had more than five donors each (Table 5). There were only single donors in the Laguna Beach, Woodside, CA, and Scottsdale, AZ, zip codes, while the Palo Alto district represents two donors and the Durham, NC, district represents three donors. The reason why several of its top cities and zip codes show donations of curiously round dollar amounts is because those areas had only one donor.

Not only do many of JVP’s highest-revenue neighborhoods represent one, two, or three donors, but all are in separate cities. The sum of revenues from its top fourteen cities and top fourteen zip codes are almost identical—$111,799 and $100,314—as one would expect when its highest-revenue neighborhoods have so few donors. The finding is not surprising given my conversations with former JVP directors. One explained that their supporters largely do not participate in other Jewish-community organizations: “Being a JVP member is a way for many of its members to be part of the Jewish community.”¹³  In contrast, AIPAC and J Street donors are located in major centers of Jewish life and are part of clusters and local bases of support for their respective organizations. For both, their overall revenues in their top fourteen cities is more than double their overall revenues in their top fourteen zip codes.

'Pushing Back' as Self-Affirmation 

Social scientists have demonstrated that liberalism, universalism, cosmopolitanism, and humanitarianism are the values which draw many American Jews to support civil society and political advocacy organizations which are strongly critical of Israel and sympathetic to Palestinian national claims (Abramson et al. 2025; Waxman 2016; Haklai 2008; Sucharov 2011; Barnett 2016; Wald 2019; Barnett 2016; Weisberg 2019). For instance, in 2008 Oded Haklai examined transnational Jewish donor organizations such as NIF and the Moriah Fund which had provided increasing financial support to Palestinian NGOs in Israel that were strong critics of Israel and promoted Palestinian national claims. Motivating that increased support, he demonstrated, was that (predominantly) Jewish donors had internalized the liberal values of minority rights and pluralism in the United States and Canada, and thus considered the development of Palestinian civil society organizations to be normatively desirable and to contribute to Israel’s security, as it facilitated Palestinians’ integration into society and bolstered its civic culture.

To be sure, the feeling of belonging to a historically progressive American Jewish community active in civil rights and anti-discrimination has become, for many, dissonant with the Israeli government’s rightward drift, and lack of opposition to that drift or its consequences from longstanding mainstream American Jewish institutions. Indeed, pushback organizations frame their positions in ways that signal or refer explicitly to liberalism, pluralism, equal rights, and minority rights. In 2022, J Street stated, “AIPAC does not speak for me. […] The overwhelming majority of […] Jewish voters and pro-Israel voters support justice, freedom, democracy and equality […]” (J Street 2022B). IfNotNow has claimed that “The American Jewish establishment […] claim to serve and represent American Jewry. These groups perpetuate the Occupation when they: fund organizations and institutions that entrench the Occupation […]. […] proving how out of touch they are with the average American Jew” (INN 2018). In a final example, JVP’s website and public communications present the organization as a way to build Jewish community led by equality, freedom, justice, human rights, and anti-racism (JVP n.d.1, n.d.2, 2020; Vilkomerson 2015).

Conversations with directors and founders of pushback organizations supported the idea that driving these groups’ growth was a perception among their supporters that mainstream Jewish and Israel-advocacy organizations were prioritizing communitarian, ethnic, and particularistic values over universalist and liberal ones, and were thus betraying values central to their conception of themselves individually and as part of a community of like-minded liberal Jews historically aligned with progressive causes and minority communities. According to them, alignment with pushback organizations helped to reduce that dissonance and affirm their own, and their supporters’, sense of self as part of a liberal, progressive Jewish community.

Hadar Susskind, president of New Jewish Narrative, formerly APN, described supporters as “the progressive voice in the Jewish community and the Jewish voice in the progressive community.”¹⁴  Being politically progressive is “fundamental to the identity of the group’s supporters,” he explained. And for a coordinator of IfNotNow, in its early days in 2014, when its activists were known for protesting outside the offices of the ADL, the Conference of Presidents, and Birthright,

There was nowhere that felt comfortable for us […] One of the things we were trying to do was create […] a moral movement around the occupation […]. Jews in the U.S. think of themselves as part of a broader social justice world, […] but this creates an ability to live in the dissonance of being progressive on anything but Israel, and for that to be a credible position.¹⁵ 

One director of Open Hillel, the former student movement begun in 2012 at Harvard and MIT and which had, at one point, ‘opened’ Hillels on more than thirty college campuses, said that its mission was “to change the organizational policies of Hillel and other major Jewish organizations, specifically the Jewish Federations […] to have free and open discourse on campus about Israel–Palestine, and showing the plurality of American Jews’ opinions.”¹⁶  Two years previously, Hillel International’s new Standards of Partnership forbade individual Hillels from collaborating with groups or individuals that delegitimized Israel. The Open Hillel director continued, “the Obama presidency made being progressive a cool thing. One of Open Hillel’s biggest events was a speaking tour with Jewish civil-rights veterans […] The event was about racial justice today.”¹⁷

The Pew surveys support the idea that Jewish adults of a younger age, regardless of generation, tend to prioritize social justice over caring for Israel. In 2012 and 2020, Pew found that Jews aged 18–29 were 22–23% more likely to view working for justice and equality in society as essential to being Jewish than they were to think that caring about Israel is essential to being Jewish (Pew 2013: 57; Pew 2020: 66). In comparison, Jews aged 65 and older were only 9–12% more likely to think working toward justice and equality is essential to being Jewish than they were to think the same of caring about Israel.

One director of the AJC described the same dynamic from their perspective at one of the U.S.’ oldest and most respected Jewish institutions. When asked what approach AJC takes to young, social justice-minded Jews who are critical of it and other establishment Jewish organizations, they responded that AJC

Tries to dampen that tendency by promoting its own history of commitment to racial justice and intergroup work, such as regular partnering with Black communities on issues of importance to both groups, helping to found Black–Jewish caucuses in Congress and the Senate, and its ongoing work with Muslim and Asian communities.¹⁸ 

 Furthermore, mapping the financial support for the PACs of AIPAC, J Street, and JVP onto a map of voting results from the 2020 presidential elections shows a possible link between broadly left-of-center political views and support for J Street and JVP. According to The New York Times’ county- and zip code-level results of that election, voters residing in the ten highest-revenue zip codes for J Street’s PACs were significantly more likely to have voted for the Democrat presidential candidate, Joe Biden, than were voters residing in AIPAC’s PACs’ highest-revenue zip codes, and voters in JVPAction PAC’s top-ten zip codes were even more likely to have voted for Joe Biden (Park et al. 2021). On average, about 69 percent of voters in AIPAC’s top ten zip codes voted for Joe Biden, while, on average, 28 percent voted for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. Meanwhile, J Street’s PACs’ highest-revenue zip codes averaged 85 percent support for Biden and barely 12 percent for Trump, while, on average, about 88 percent of voters in the ten highest-revenue zip codes for the far-left JVPAction PAC voted for Biden and only 8 percent voted for Trump. In other words, a greater share of voters in J Street’s PACs’ highest-revenue zip codes voted for Biden than did voters in AIPAC’s highest-revenue zip-codes, and an even greater share voted for Biden in JVPAction PAC’s highest-revenue zip codes. A possible inference is that generally left-of-center political values motivate support for pushback organizations.

In conclusion, it is likely that, for many Jews who align with and support pushback organizations across the political spectrum, those organizations provide them with a space to assert their identity as part of a Jewish community that is historically progressive and whose priorities include concern for minority rights, anti-racism, and civil rights.

Indeed, political psychologists have shown that acting in accordance with one’s values helps maintain personal identity and psychological well-being, and that humans are naturally motivated to try to maintain both the integrity of their identity group and an alignment of one’s values, one’s biographical narrative, and one’s actions (Mitzen 2006; Steele 2008). Social scientists have also shown that for Jews in North America, the collection of values that form their identity is generally a combination of particularist and universalist ones (Sucharov 2011; Haklai 2008; Waxman 2016; Abramson et al. 2025). Although the purpose of this article was to examine the emergence and growth pushback organizations relative to mainstream Jewish and Israel-advocacy organizations and the motivations of their supporters, one might ask about any moral dissonance or clash of values among supporters of mainstream Jewish and Israel-advocacy organizations such as AIPAC. It is possible that for the more numerous supporters of AIPAC, for instance, that organization’s actions do not elicit in them any dissonance between the universalist, liberal facets of their identity on the one hand, and the more communitarian, particularist, Jewish and Zionist facets of their identity on the other hand.