How representative organizations can effect an erasure: Ilad Omar and AIPAC's claim to represent American Jews

Comment published on New York Times blog in response to Times article, “Pelosi and Democratic leaders condemn Omar statements as anti-Semitic,” February 11, 2109:

Ms. Omar was not criticizing Jewish influence in American political and cultural life (something that as such is real enough though presenting no cause to oppose), nor any persons or organizations that are Jewish for being Jewish.  

She is calling into attention to something else that is also a problem for many Jews: the Jewish right and its influence. Rarely opposed, AIPAC is the most-powerful Washington lobby. Along with the Anti-Defamation League, which combats anti-semitism and prejudice understood in neoliberal terms, it is at the forefront of the Jewish right.  

Its function has been to define and redefine the meaning of Jewish identity in one of more three terms: Judaism as a religion; the Holocaust as event legitimating claims of the moral privilege of ontological victims; and "Zionism" as the defense of a national security state allied to US regional oil interests.  

The losers include Jews themselves. A once common possibility has all but disappeared: the secular, left-learning, intellectual Jew with strong commitments to contemporary European and American artistic and intellectual culture. Judaism itself had abandoned this field and so became irrelevant.

With conservative's triumph, under the onslaughts of economic success and social acceptance, among figures of the Jew as a type, the shrewd businessman survived, that of pariah or dissident became rare.  

The victorious right won by equating being Jewish with their own agenda. They are wrong.