This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

What I like about this show is that we have an audience of kind of Washington insiders that watches it pretty religiously,

but we also have a ton of people outside of Washington who just kind of want the news and but are interested in politics.

And so I think the guests that we have today is somebody who kind of everybody in Washington is very familiar with.

Jeremy Benamee, who's the executive director of J. Street.

But for people outside of Washington, probably not that familiar.

So we wanted to have him on to talk about J. Street's kind of place in the political firmament now.

Because this was an organization that was founded in 2008 as both pro-Israel and pro-peace.

And right after it was launched, Netanyahu invades Gaza again.

They came out hard against that invasion. And there was a massive amount of pushback, but

it also, its mission at the time was to create space for Democrats to say, I don't think

that Netanyahu should be, it actually wasn't Netanyahu, actually, in 2008, was it?

It doesn't matter.

I don't think Israel should be attacking Gaza

at this moment without being called you know Israel haters or anti-Semitic it created this space

for them and Jeremy was kind of a perfect person to be able to do that uh because of a lot of different

things but one of them is his crazy family story maybe we can talk a little bit about that with him. But his great-grandfather, a great-great-grandfather, left Russia

under persecution in 1882. Wow.

Comes to what was then Palestine, mandatory Palestine. There, and we can put up X-1, I think it is.

His family's part of this, iconic 1909 picture of an auction.

They're auctioning off the land that becomes Tel Aviv.

...