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Enter Peter Beinart, a political scientist and former editor of the liberal (and pro-Israel) weekly, the New Republic. At J Street next week he will launch a book, “The Crisis of Zionism” (Times Books), which has already sent plenty of people into a spin.

That is because, though a passionate Zionist, Mr Beinart wants Israel to save its democracy by leaving the West Bank. He therefore calls in the book—and, provocatively, in an op-ed in the New York Times—for American Jews to start calling the West Bank “non-democratic Israel” and to push for a boycott of the settlements there. By doing so, he argues, American Jews who support Israel but not the occupation would clarify a vital distinction.

For close to a century, American Jews have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. In 2004, when asked what best defined their Jewish identity, as many chose “social justice” as chose “religious observance” and “support for Israel” combined. In 2008 they voted for Mr Obama at twice the rate of white Christians. So how, wonders Mr Beinart, did a Jewish community famed for its liberalism come to create a leadership so reluctant to defend democracy in the Jewish state?

His answer is that today’s Jewish establishment did not spring from American Jewish liberalism, but was a reaction against it.

The argument goes like this. After Israel’s victory in the six-day war of 1967, Zionism in America reached a fever pitch. But in the 1970s Israel came to be seen by many around the world, and by chunks of the American left, as a bully. To correct this, some of the community’s leaders came to believe that they had to remind fellow Jews and the world that Jews were victims. Victimhood, coupled with a new emphasis on the Holocaust, displaced liberalism as the “defining ideology of organised Jewish life”.