“Like Israel, the authors have often had to defend the right of their theory to exist.” With that quip Thursday evening, Jane Wales, president of the World Affairs Council of Northern California, kicked off a talk on “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. They spoke in the chandelier-lined Terrace Room of the swank Fairmont Hotel atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill.

Philip Weiss has called the book serious, cold, and stunning. Ditto for W&M’s presentation. I would add to that list: remarkably polished. Each man spoke for about 30 minutes and then fielded audience questions and I didn’t hear either of them stumble or utter a single “um” or “eh”.

The audience reaction was less raucous than I expected. It wasn’t raucous at all, actually. People listened attentively in complete silence until about 45 minutes in when there was a light sprinkling of applause at Mearsheimer’s suggestion of a viable Palestinian state. The crowd was uniformly polite and, judging from the sizeable lineup for book signatures, at least somewhat supportive.

In a way it was heartening to see the room packed with influential-looking people: almost exclusively middle-aged to elderly, white, mostly in suits and evening wear. On the other hand, in a room of several hundred, I was probably one of just a dozen attendees under 30—likely due in part to the World Affairs Council’s unfortunate decision to charge for tickets. So to Farrar, Straus and Giroux: add more campuses to W&M’s tour. Most students won’t be willing to shell out $26 for a book, but it would be a smart move in terms of intellectual and cultural impact.

The younger and sprier of the two scholars, Walt defined the Israel Lobby (like any other interest group; not monolithic; not composed exclusively of Jews), calling it “as American as apple pie,” an oft-repeated line designed to ease concerns the authors are somehow painting American Jews as a dangerous fifth column. They are explicitly not doing that.