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They endlessly leafleted my college's campus and, since I look plausibly Jewish I guess and was somewhat acculturated by various gfs (yeah, you Jewish gals are the best), got proselytized at by J4Js a fair amount. They were a bit unlucky in that I had left Christianity behind shortly before....
J4Js is financed and 'strategized' by Christian Right churches, principally the Southern Baptists. They're an offshoot of the late Seventies/early Eighties Christian Right wave of activism. In their first few years they picked off a small bunch of American Jews, but most of them seem to have walked away after a few months or years. Their successful period was the wake of the 1988-1992ish wave of immigration of Russian Jews into the U.S.- I think at their peak around 1995-96 they claimed about 20,000 members in their congregational religious arm, and last I checked that was down to 12,000 in ~2001. They're now focussed on proselytizing and 'converting' the elderly Jewish population that chose to remain in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.
If you understand their target audience to be elderly Russian emigrees whose essential beliefs are contempt for Soviet Communism and little tangible connection to Judaism- no raising in it, little sense of the religion or full ethos, many are part Jewish and/or simply don't have any Semitic features- and whose life in the U.S. (or, in part, Eastern Europe) seems absurd even to themselves, then this pamphlet comes across as not that crude a play at what these people resent and their experience and the alienation they feel.
Another thing to point out is the resemblence of the message in this pamphlet to Libertarian/Objectivism in its political ideology. Let me point out that Ayn Rand was born Alissa Rosenbaum in the Ukraine and raised secularly. After her family fled the Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. she became a writer and found this brand of politics, which makes no sense whatsoever unless you realize that it is simply an embrace and brewing together of all secular ideals opposite to those of Soviet Communism. It's a reactionary movement to Soviet Communism. Also don't forget that via their Southern Baptist funding, J4J is forced to work to benefit the Christian Right/Republican political effort too. Russian emigrees tend to fall for the Republican tough-on-enemies/anti-'socialism' line anyway; they see American things through the lens of their harsh Russian experience and take some time to understand the full situation here. (Russian emigrees are a mainstay for Sharon's hardline politics in Israel, btw.)
As far as I can tell, the American Jewish community's response to J4J has basically worked- there was a strong concerted effort for a year or two in the mid-Nineties- and, while the arguments and social pressure impositions weren't necessarily fair either, mainstream Jewish folk as a group now do regard J4Js as the intellectually flakey and socially/religiously marginal affair that seems inherent in its shaky foundations.
The generous way of looking at 'Messianic Judaism' and J4Js is that they're a social and religious group for people on the margins of American (or Orthodox, in the rest of the world) Judaism who are or represent the part of Ashkenazi culture and society that isn't fully Jewish. Ashkenzi Jewish culture was, after all, a hybrid, with inmarriage and semi-absorption of some Slavic and Balkan people and groups, probably some Chazar groups, indeed a bit of all population groups of Eastern Europe. These people today getting together under the banner of J4Js and such could be regarded as being the descendents of people of those inmarried groups, and, finding themselves not fully Jewishly committed or convinced or obligated or fated, nor fully apostate for that matter, they're choosing this particular state of socioreligious limbo or intermediacy.
It may, in all fairness, be appropriate for such people. What is wrong about it is its marketing and its politics toward people who are not part of it- and the trail of responsibility for that leads straight to the American Christian Right.
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