Full disclosure: Rabbi Gilad Kariv is a friend. I like him. I admire him. I have watched him for years skillfully fight the good fight on behalf of Israel’s Reform movement and the causes of religious pluralism and freedom, women’s rights, racial tolerance, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, human rights, and democracy in the Jewish state.

After having run for the Knesset three times over the past ten years, Rabbi Kariv will become in his fourth run a Knesset Member in the center-left Labor Party in the up-coming election. Current national polls show that Labor will earn at least six mandates. Gilad (#4 on the list) will become the first non-Orthodox rabbi ever to serve in the Knesset.

After Gilad secured his spot, the ultra-Orthodox political parties went ballistic against him. Shalom Yerushalmi, political analyst for Z’man Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew current affairs website, wrote that representatives from the right-wing religious parties Shas, United Torah Judaism, and the Religious Zionist Party threatened to boycott Gilad and the Labor Party, refuse to include him in a Knesset minyan, and called the Reform movement a “dangerous cult” that seeks to destroy the foundations of Judaism. They charged that Israeli Reform “represents distorted religion,” that “to come near him [i.e. Gilad] is a danger,” that he is “an idol in the sanctuary.” Israeli social media writers called Reform Jews “scum of the earth, scoundrels,” and that we “should all go to hell.”

Gilad’s candidacy has struck a raw nerve among the ultra-Orthodox because Israeli Reform Judaism increasingly represents the liberal values and inclusive attitudes of an ever-growing number of Israelis who want to celebrate egalitarian non-Orthodox Judaism. Recent surveys show that 13% of all Israeli Jews (800,000) identify as Reform whether or not they are formally members of synagogue communities. This is roughly the same percentage of Israeli Jews who identify as ultra-Orthodox.

Gilad provokes the ultra-Orthodox community’s wrath, hatred, and fear because they do not accept the voice of the “other.” Though we are of the same people, the ultra-Orthodox regard Reform Jews as “strangers.” We are outsiders even as we live enriched Jewish lives. Theirs is a hatred of difference, of dislike of the unlike, and that hatred drives them to autocratically suppress all other Jewish religious streams in Israel outside the ultra-Orthodox world.

Gilad has worn many hats in his public life, career, and devotion to Israel’s security, democracy, religious pluralism, and Jewish character (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Kariv). He was in the IDF Intelligence Corps. He is an attorney with expertise in constitutional law who appeared many times before Israel’s High Court of Justice as Director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), the Israeli Reform movement’s social justice arm. He is an Israeli ordained Reform rabbi who for more than a decade served as the Executive Director of the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism (IMPJ) and helped grow the Israeli Reform movement. He helped lead the effort to establish an egalitarian prayer platform at the Kotel (Western Wall) culminating with the government officially recognizing egalitarian prayer there.

For the past decade, Gilad has overseen the development of the Israeli Reform synagogue movement of more than 50 congregations, a Young Adult Leadership Forum, a pre-military young adult study and leadership training program, a youth movement and summer camps, early childhood education centers, teacher training programs, progressive Jewish curricula in public schools, and an active social justice movement.

Gilad’s election to the Knesset shines a light on the cultural, religious, and political battle for the heart and soul of the State of Israel between the ultra-Orthodox and non-Orthodox. That battle is emblematic of contrasting visions within Israeli society as a whole, between religious oligarchy and religious freedom, totalitarian religious extremism and religious liberalism and diversity, the political right and political left, tyranny and democracy, an exclusive society and an inclusive one, the rigid pull of the past and an unfurled thrust into the future, ghettoized isolation and expansive hope. Gilad has been at the center of that struggle for years.

I hope that more Israelis will decide to vote for the Labor Party ticket on March 23 not only because Gilad is a prominent member of the ticket, but to restore the center-left to its historic place in Israeli politics and to be in a position to advocate for and legislate on behalf of liberal Jewish and democratic values.

I am thrilled that Rabbi Gilad Kariv will be a Member of the next Knesset, and I wish him every success.

[Note: This latest column by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President Emeritus of the Union for Reform Judaism and a regular columnist in the Israeli daily Haaretz, is an important read in advance of the Israeli elections on March 23. I’m posting it because only those who have a subscription to Haaretz can read it, and it ought to be read by every American Jewish leader, especially in the organizations he mentions. If you know such leaders, please forward this to them.]

Just as Trump normalized the Proud Boys, Bibi is normalizing the neo-fascist Kahanists and their anti-Arab hate. But instead of outrage from AIPAC and U.S. Jewish groups, there’s apologetics, or silence

No more excuses, please.  

Not for the vicious racism and neo-fascism of Itamar Ben Gvir and the band of thugs that he has gathered around him.

Not for Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in a despicable display of political narcissism, stage-managed a merger of right-wing parties that will bring Ben Gvir and his racist cronies into the Knesset.  

Not for AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee, which were critical of Ben Gvir in the past, but, in this Israeli election campaign, have chosen to remain silent.

And not for other American Jewish groups and leaders, who are too often detached and indifferent as an Israeli party promotes extremism, mob rule, and anti-Arab hatred, with the blessing and support of Israel’s Prime Minister.   I am tired of the excuses, the explanations, and the thoughtful “analysis,” all of which fall far short of what is required at this moment: explicit, unequivocal, full-throated condemnation of Ben Gvir and everything that he stands for.

This is a fateful moment for the Jewish world. In 1975, when the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed that Zionism is racism, Jews everywhere came together to assert, in outraged protest, that no, it is not. Now, almost half a century later, Ben Gvir, a candidate for the 24th Knesset, spouts racist slogans and justifies them as the natural extension of Zionist and Jewish values.

And thanks to the efforts of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and his colleagues in the “Religious Zionism” party — which is neither religious nor Zionist — seem assured of at least five seats in Israel’s parliament.  

It may be too late to prevent their election. But it is not too late for American Jews to join with the great majority of Jews in Israel in denying these quasi-criminals the legitimacy that Netanyahu has shamefully bestowed on them. They are distorters and corrupters of all that is sacred and holy in Jewish tradition, and they must be branded as such.   

For those unfamiliar with the background, this is a story that begins with Rabbi Meir Kahane, an American immigrant to Israel who was elected to the Knesset in 1984. In that year, Kahane spoke at an election rally in the Arab-Jewish city of Akko. As reported by Ben Caspit in Ma’ariv, Kahane began the rally with these words: “Shalom Jews, shalom dogs.”

Everyone understood who Meir Kahane was. He celebrated terror and embraced anti-Arab violence. He made no attempt to hide his views or his intentions. Michael Eitan, then a Likud Knesset member, drew up a chart demonstrating that the legislation proposed by Kahane was similar to the Nuremberg laws. Kahane sought, for example, to establish separate beaches for Jews and Arabs and to prohibit Arabs from having sexual relations with Jews.   Kahane’s disciple, Itamar Ben Gvir, mentions his mentor at every opportunity. Ben Gvir lacks Kahane’s flamboyance and charisma, and, as a matter of practicality, has slightly toned down his rhetoric; Kahane was ultimately banned from politics by the courts, and Ben Gvir hopes to avoid that fate. But his racist message is the same.  

Ben Gvir is infamous in Israel for hanging in his living room a photograph of Jewish mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein, who carried out the 1994 massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron. Ben Gvir eventually took the picture down last year, not because it was wrong but for the sake of “a right-wing victory in the elections.”

In 2019, when Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party was running for the Knesset as part of a coalition with other far-right parties, AIPAC tweeted that it viewed Otzma Yehudit as “racist and reprehensible,” and noted AIPAC’s longstanding policy of refusing to meet with the group. It associated itself with a similar statement by the American Jewish Committee.

This time around, however, both groups have refrained from critical comments, as have most other American Jewish organizations and leaders.  

But this is a serious mistake. In 2019, Ben Gvir’s election to the Knesset was a long shot. This year, he is considered a sure thing, thanks to the intervention of the prime minister. Netanyahu has attempted on previous occasions to create mergers between the Kahanists and other extremist parties, but his efforts in this round of elections have been far more successful. 

Motivated by his desire to win votes for a Likud-led coalition that will make him Prime Minister again and grant him immunity from prosecution for the criminal charges that he faces, Netanyahu did not hold back; he twisted arms, pressured allies, and made promises of power and money to bring together Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party. Ben Gvir is number three on the Religious Zionism list, and as noted, is virtually certain to win a Knesset seat.  

But not only will Ben Gvir follow Meir Kahane into the Knesset. Netanyahu has officially announced that if he forms the next government, Ben Gvir and the Religious Zionism party will be part of his coalition.

Netanyahu apologists, both in Israel and America, say: Politics as usual. No big deal, they claim. Bibi is just doing what everyone would do.  

But it is not politics as usual. It is a political earthquake, an indication of the moral degradation that has transformed Benjamin Netanyahu into a Trump-like figure and a caricature of a Zionist leader.

And it is most assuredly not what everyone would do. When Meir Kahane was in the Knesset, he was a pariah, shunned by every major party across the political spectrum. When he would rise to speak in the Knesset, Yitzhak Shamir, the hardline Likud prime minister, would walk out in protest, followed by most members of his party. Legitimacy for Jewish racism? Never. Acceptance on any level? Absolutely not. 

Kahanism was an embarrassment, an impure growth on the outer fringes of Zionism. And Israel’s political establishment – right and left, Likud and Labor – was intent on keeping it there.

But not Netanyahu.  

Bibi, as American Jews are observing with horror, is turning into Donald Trump before our very eyes.

Just as Trump aligned himself with the most violent, reprehensible elements of the American far-right, Bibi has embraced the most violent, reprehensible elements of the settler community. Just as Trump legitimized the militias and the white nationalists, Bibi has legitimized the Arab-haters and the racists on the margins. Just as Trump excused and normalized the Proud Boys, Bibi is excusing and normalizing the Kahanists and the criminal cohorts that champion them. And just as Trumpism radicalized the Republican Party and destabilized American society, leading ultimately to violence and insurrection, Kahanism, if it enters the inner sanctum of Israeli political power, will pose a similar threat to Israeli society. 

Am I overreacting? I do not think so.  

Consider the following: In order for Netanyahu to form a government, he will need a coalition of 61 Knesset members, drawn from the Likud, the Haredi parties, the Religious Zionism party, and Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party. (Bennett has not ruled out joining a Netanyahu government, and in my view will ultimately do so.) According to current polls, Netanyahu is within a seat or two of the 61 he needs. 

If he gets those seats, and he might, he will be prepared to pay a very high price to Bennett, Smotrich, and Ben Gvir to assure their loyalty. And this means he will be completely dependent on them, every minute of every day, for the existence of his government.  

How does Netanyahu justify a coalition that includes Ben Gvir? He says that Ben Gvir will be in the coalition but not in the cabinet. Take note: Benjamin Netanyahu is expecting the citizens of Israel to be grateful to him for taking an unrepentant Kahanist into his coalition but not giving him a government ministry. And, by the way, Netanyahu’s assurances mean nothing. If Smotrich demands a cabinet position for Ben-Gvir as his party’s price for entering the coalition, Netanyahu will agree.

And that is why American Jews must find their voice and condemn Ben Gvir in the clearest terms. And an interesting question, of course, is why they haven’t already done so.  

Responding to questions from Haaretz, UCLA professor of Israel Studies Dov Waxman offers a number of interesting thoughts, including this theory: American Jews have not expressed outrage over Netanyahu’s ties to Ben-Gvir because they have simply given up on the prime minister. He long ago stopped caring about American Jews, and they in turn have stopped being shocked by anything that he does.

Waxman is an astute observer of the American Jewish scene, but he is wrong about that.  

It is a mistake for any Jewish group to suppose that American Jews have lost the ability to be shocked or outraged by the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu. Yes, the majority dislike him. But most remain closely tied to Israel, and as jaded as they are by Netanyahu’s antics, they still see an embrace of neo-Kahanism as a big step too far.  

Two factors are at play here. First, Israel’s extremist settlers are little known in America, but Meir Kahane is the exception, even 30 years after his death. For American Jews, Kahane is one of their own — a homegrown phenomenon who travelled the path from activist to fanatic on American soil before bringing his racist medicine show to Israel. American Jews remember Kahane, understand him, and despise him, just as they despise those who embrace his teachings and traffic in his anti-Arab vitriol.   Second, American society has been consumed in recent years with a struggle against racism, and American Jews have played a leading role in that struggle. Ben Gvir represents racism run wild, and American Jews will refuse to disregard or whitewash in Israel what they struggle against every day at home.

Let us be clear: An insignificant percentage of Israelis support Ben Gvir and his neo-Kahanist philosophy. As Israel’s political establishment has always proclaimed, Kahane, Ben Gvir, and their supporters do not represent Israel and do not represent the Zionist enterprise. They are, in fact, the antithesis of everything that Jews hold dear.

But there is no denying the danger that now exists. Benjamin Netanyahu, putting his personal interests before the interests of the state that he leads, appears to be creating a space for the Kahanists to emerge from the muck. If he succeeds in activating Ben-Gvir’s movement of degenerate Jewish radicalism, it will not be easy to deactivate it and return it to the depths from which it came.

And this means that American Jews must pound on the table, supporting the anti-Bibi forces that want Ben Gvir to remain the outcast he has always been.

Yes, American Jewish religious and communal organizations usually refrain from involving themselves in Israeli elections. Nonetheless, there are times when Zionist principles, Jewish values, and common decency require Jews of all persuasions to speak up. And this is one of those times.  

Eric H. Yoffie, a rabbi, writer and teacher in Westfield, New Jersey, is a former president of the Union for Reform Judaism. Twitter: @EricYoffie

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-i-m-tired-of-u-s-jews-excusing-netanyahu-and-his-proud-boy-allies-1.9558667

I often think about my heroes, especially in tough times, about the moral compass that guided them and the courage that sustained and fortified them. I have a long list. Many, though not all, were religious figures who challenged prevailing public sentiment and entrenched political power that were obstacles in the way of justice and human rights.

I have just published a blog at the Times of Israel that considers two kinds of politics as encapsulated in the title above. To read the blog go to https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/covenantal-politics-vs-the-politics-of-power/

Following the death of the last of my mother’s generation this past year, my cousins came across two letters from Israel that my mother wrote to our family in late 1970 when she lived for a few months in the heart of West Jerusalem at the now permanently closed Eden Hotel only steps from Zion Square. My cousins scanned and sent these letters to my brother and me.

Our mother died five years ago at the very old age of 98 years, so reading her correspondence from more than 50 years ago was a sudden throw-back to a much earlier time in my life and in the life of the State of Israel.

My mother jumped off the page in her characteristic way as a keen and engaged observer of people and an enthusiastic visitor in the Jewish state in that period of national euphoria following Israel’s lightning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. This was her second visit to the State of Israel. During the first, in 1965, Jerusalem was divided, East Jerusalem, the Old City, and the West Bank were part of Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was controlled by Egypt from which the Fedayeen never ceased crossing the border to attack Israelis.

My mother described Israeli life as she encountered it then, the economic deprivations most Israelis felt, the steely Israeli acceptance of the ever-present threat from hostile neighbors, the Israeli personality characterized by the sabra fruit of the cactus, prickly on the outside and sweet within, and her amazement of all that Israel, still a young nation of only 22 years, had accomplished since the pre-statehood period and the establishment of the State in 1948.

In reading my mother’s letters I missed her and felt again her energy, passion, and love for the Jewish people, the State of Israel, and our family there and in the Diaspora. I also miss the Israel she encountered in that time.

I spent my first year of rabbinic school in Jerusalem three years later (1973-74). I landed at Lod Airport on June 29, 1973 while Nixon attorney John Dean was testifying in the Watergate trial. I studied there until May 13, 1974. On the flight home, the Maalot massacre grabbed the headlines and shook the Jewish people. I learned of that horrific attack when I landed at LAX the next day. It involved two-days of Palestinian terrorist hostage-taking of 115 Israelis in that northern Israeli town, and ended in the murder of 25 Israeli children.

That event continued a traumatic turning-point year in Israel’s history. In the early days of the war that began on the afternoon of October 6, 1973, Israel was almost overtaken by Egypt and Syria in a coordinated surprise attack on the Jewish people’s holiest day in a war Israel might well have lost had the United States not sent massive re-armaments on the tenth day of the war. Israel’s fortunes then turned and the near disaster became a battlefield triumph ending in an American imposed ceasefire to save Egypt’s surrounded army from total  humiliation and prevent the IDF from occupying Damascus.

To gain a sense of the trauma that the war inflicted upon Israelis, who lost 2,656 soldiers and suffered overall causalities of 11,656, I recommend viewing the recently produced Israeli 10-episode season of “Valley of Tears” (עֵמֶק הַבָּכָא – originally named שְׁעַת נְעִילָה – “Ne’ila time” – HBO Max; dubbed over in English) that tells the story of the fighting on the Golan Heights in graphic detail. A second season is planned to focus on the war in the south.

I was then a 23 year-old student in Jerusalem. Classes were canceled until after the war, and like most of my classmates who volunteered at a wide variety of vital businesses and charitable causes filling in for Israelis defending the state, I spent every night from 10 pm to 6 am helping the skeletal staff of the Berman Bakery in Jerusalem bake nightly 60,000 loaves of bread, much of it sent to soldiers at the Egyptian front.

I’ve often imagined how Israel, the Palestinians, and the Middle East would be different had PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership been willing to accept Israel’s existence in those years and agree to negotiate an end-of-conflict peace deal for a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and had Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and her government been willing to accept a Palestinian State on its borders. Few were imagining such a possibility then.  

Fifty years is a long time and much has transpired since my mother wrote her letters from Jerusalem. She was in her early 50s then, vital, engaged, enthusiastic, optimistic, and loving. I miss her, and I miss too the Israel of those years, a less polarized nation despite the trauma of war, terrorism, political and cultural division that would eventually challenge the state and the Jewish people.   

The International Criminal Court in The Hague just announced that it would be opening an investigation against Israel and Hamas to consider charges that war crimes may have been committed by Israeli soldiers and Hamas militants against each other’s civilian populations during the 2014 Gaza War. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately characterized the investigation as pure antisemitism. Palestinian members of Israel’s left-wing communist Hadash Party accused Israelis of having committed said war crimes. For years Israel has accused Hamas of deliberately firing thousands of rockets against Israeli civilian population centers and situating its own arsenals and militants in the midst of Gaza’s civilian neighborhoods.

What do we make of this?

The issue is complicated – what else is new in Israel? – but it’s important to understand what the International Criminal Court is, what is its jurisdiction, what is the historical context that gave rise to the 2014 Gaza War, what Israel did and why, what is Hamas’ modus operandi vis a vis Israel, what culpability Hamas has, and what exactly this investigation might mean for Israel and individual Israelis.

For a thoughtful discussion of the many issues involved, as a start, I recommend you listen to the February 11, 2021 weekly “Promised Podcast” out of Tel Aviv and specifically to the episode called “The Courts of Public Opinion & the Other Kind” edition.

Noah Efron (host and professor at Bar-Ilan University where he was the founding chairperson of the interdisciplinary program on Science, Technology and Society), Don Futterman (co-host, journalist and Education Director of Israel’s Moriah Fund), and Allison Kaplan Sommer (Haaretz journalist), discuss this issue in a 13-minute segment starting at 34 minutes 5 seconds and continuing to 47 minutes.

Go to https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9wcm9taXNlZC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Byb21pc2VkLnJzcw/episode/MGYwMzg5YmMtNTA1NC00NGY2LWEyMGItNGY2Mzg1YjNlZmZi?hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwiF3rOwiOruAhXfCTQIHQ0TDXgQieUEegQICRAF&ep=6

[Note: This report published by Peace Now concerning the settlement expansion activities of KKL-JNF in the last two years should alarm everyone who understands that a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the ONLY WAY to best assure Israel’s long-term security, democracy, and Jewish character and bring justice to the Palestinian people.]

Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) has been involved in settlement activity. There were years when the role it played in settling the West Bank was central and relatively significant (mainly by land acquisitions and funding of different kinds to projects in settlements). In other years, its role was not pivotal to the development of the settlements. In recent years we see that KKL-JNF raised significantly its involvement in the settlement activity, allocating millions of shekels to the settlements and allowing the settlers to use KKL-JNF to promote their agenda to take over Palestinian properties and to expand the settlements.

Main activities:

1. Land Purchase – allocating some NIS 88 million for dubious land purchases in the West Bank.
2. Taking legal actions to evict Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (see the Sumarin Family case).
3. Funding for settlement projects

For the full report, see – https://peacenow.org.il/en/settler-national-fund-keren-kayemeth-leisraels-acquisition-of-west-bank-land

The analysis of the Trump movie from January 6, 2021 by Jason Stanley of “Just Security” (February 4, 2021) in the article (link below) is chilling and terrifying. This piece ought to be read and considered by everyone, especially the leadership of the Republican Party in Congress and State legislatures as a warning.

Given the concerted Republican legislative efforts (more than 100 bills in 28 states) to suppress voting in future elections, because Republicans don’t believe they can win national elections otherwise, could spell the end of American democracy.

My gratitude to Congressman Adam Schiff who sent me this article:

Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda

I love the following piece by Andrew Sillow-Carroll, the editor of The Jewish Week, about how we Jews pay such close attention to who among our fellow Jews are prominent in public life, and how we feel pride in relationship to some and shame in relationship to others. I’ve often pondered the pride-shame phenomenon and whether other religious and ethnic groups do what we Jews do relative to their own.

Pride and guilt are particularly powerful baked-in ingredients of American Jewish identity. Our best writers (Malamud, Roth, Ozick, Bellow, Englander, etc.) reflect on this frequently. Why? In an age of increasing diversification, independence, and autonomy, we might think that what one Jew does here has little or no effect on the identity of another Jew there. But it isn’t so and, I believe, never has been.

The Talmudic observation/supplication/dictum“Kol Yisrael aravim zeh bazeh – Every Jew is a guarantor for one another” is cited multiple times in our literature (Babylonian Talmud Shevuot 39a, Sanhedrein 27b; Sifra Bechukotai 7:5; Mishneh Torah on Oaths 11:16; Or HaChaim on Deuteronomy 29:9; Shaarei Teshuvah 3:72, etc.). I taught this Jewish life-principle to kids and adults in my community every chance I got. It’s a bedrock element in the notion of Jewish peoplehood and why the vast majority of American Jews care so much about Jews when they suffer in other parts of the world, when Israel is in trouble, and when Israeli government policies run counter to traditional liberal democratic and prophetic moral values vis a vis others.

We Jews couldn’t have survived as a people for 3600 years without our tribal identity and moral preoccupation for our own and for others. The pride and shame, increasingly and sadly, have evened out. We have Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and we have Stephen Miller. We have Dr. Jonas Salk, and we have Bernie Madoff. The list goes on.

Hopefully, our Jewish role models (public and personal) exuding goodness, decency, and moral progress influence us and our kids far more than those embodying corruption, hard-heartedness, and greed. If they don’t, we have only ourselves to blame. There I go again – see how baked in are both our tribal identity and moral conscience and proclivity to feeling shame when any of our people does wrong?

Enough said – enjoy this piece by Andrew Sillow-Carroll, editor of The Jewish Week (February 7, 2021):

“My colleagues at JTA, the Jewish news service, recently ran a feature, “All the Jews Joe Biden has tapped for top roles in his administration.” Allison Kaplan Sommer, who writes for Haaretz, was amused, tweeting: “When you see the headline, ‘All the Jews Joe Biden has tapped for top roles in his administration’ – do you think: ‘Jewish or Israeli publication’ – or ‘antisemitic website’? It’s a close call.”
 
Allison has been writing for Jewish media (that is, Jewish “ethnic” media, lest the conspiracy-mongers get the wrong idea) for nearly as long as I have, and we’ve often joked about the weird nature of our jobs. My version of the joke is that Jewish newspapers and the anti-Semitic press run the same articles, just with different adjectives.
 
Some find this sort of ethnic pride troubling – parochial at best, dangerous at worst. Of course, parochialism is baked into the formula of the ethnic media. I’ve often said that Jewish journalism is like a hometown newspaper, which doesn’t hesitate to kvell (or grumble) when one of its own makes news. For a delightful riff on this, see The Queens Daily Eagle, which runs jokey headlines about Donald Trump like “Queens man impeached — again.”  “People love it,” David Brand, the paper’s managing editor, told The New York Times. “It’s a self-parody of local news, and I think people get that.”
 
Our town just happens to be defined not by a geographic border, but by membership in the Jewish people. So when the rest of the world is reporting that “Jeff Bezos to step down as Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy to take over,” we write, “Amazon’s next CEO Andy Jassy is Jewish.”
 
I’ll admit, this tendency can look small and self-involved. (“World to end tomorrow; Jews to suffer most” is the famous headline joke about Jewish narcissism.) When I worked at JTA back in the 1980s, one reporter had the self-appointed beat of tracking down Jewish victims of massive natural disasters. When she couldn’t find one, she’d say, “There’s nothing to report.”
 
And where do you draw the line? Mark Zuckerberg is Jewish; does everything he do qualify as “Jewish” news? (My answer is no, except when his actions touch directly on Jewish communal preoccupations, like curbing Holocaust denial and other forms of anti-Semitism and hate speech, or when he himself is the victim of anti-Semitic invective.) On a sliding scale of Jewish interest, from lowest to highest, there’s the fact of an appointment, followed by precedent (what Jews have been in this role before?), followed by the significance of their Jewish biography.
 
The best and most defensible kinds of “guess who’s Jewish?” stories are those in which that Jewish biography is unmistakably germane to the news itself. Exhibit A: Alejandro Mayorkas, the new Homeland Security secretary. His Jewish parents brought him from Cuba to the U.S. as a child, and his mother is a Holocaust survivor. Mayorkas, in his confirmation testimony, spoke about that family history, saying it made him “profoundly aware of the threat and existence of antisemitism in our country and the world” and “discrimination of all forms.” It’s not only interesting to us that he’s Jewish, but his Jewishness has shaped how he intends to carry out his job.
 
The flipside of the Mayorkas story, at least for liberal Jewish readers, was that of Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s restrictionist immigration policies. The Jewish media treated Miller’s Jewish upbringing as significant because his politics seemed to be so at odds with the ways the majority of Jews view immigration. It’s our job to discuss how individual and corporate Jewish identity function in the world, and that made reporting about Miller’s Jewishness perfectly legitimate.
 
One of Allison’s colleagues did point out one of the uglier sides of identifying Jewish newsmakers: Essentially, who is a Jew and who decides? It can be a sordid or chutzpadik exercise, looking for hints of a celebrity’s Jewish background, and then “claiming” him or her. The Jewish media found this out the hard way when it gushed about Ella Emhoff, whose father Doug Emhoff is Jewish and happens to be married to Vice President Kamala Harris. The Forward even named her to its “Forward 50” list of influential Jews. The only problem is, Ella Emhoff doesn’t identify as Jewish, as a family spokesperson told the Forward. We all had to change our tune.
 
But the occasional flub doesn’t invalidate the basic exercise. There is value in ethnic pride, seeing co-religionists sitting in places of influence or shaping public affairs in ways that are either consciously Jewish or have an impact just by the fact of their Jewishness. Every minority indulges in this exercise, and no one begrudges the Black or LGBTQ reader who thrills when a member of their community is elevated in one way or the other.
 
By the same token, it’s also the role of the ethnic media to identify wrongdoing among its own, even at the risk of comforting their enemies. A Cuban-Jewish immigrant who now heads Homeland Security is part of the Jewish story; so is the scammer who uses his connections among fellow Jews to pull off a Ponzi scheme.
 
Irving Howe once praised the Yiddish Forward for the “sustained curiosity it brought to the life of its own people.” We owe our readers nothing less.”

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#inbox/FMfcgxwLsSVDrhfhbNvQfnCzFtXNDhXq

“As a late-in-life grandfather, I had my two young grandchildren in mind as the target audience. I imagined them as grownups, reading about the life and times of the man they called ‘Eeepa.’ Perhaps this was important to me because I knew so little about my own grandparents and their immigrant journey from Yiddish-speaking shtetls in Europe to an America that was indeed a promised land for them.”

Stephen B. Shepard’s memoir is called Second Thoughts – On Family, Friendship, Faith, and Writers. It is a compelling New York Jewish story and an important read for anyone interested in the liberal secular American Jewish experience in the last half of the 20^th century and the opening decades of the 21st.

Shepard is the Founding Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, a former senior editor at Newsweek, editor of Saturday Review, and for twenty years the editor-in-chief of Business Week Magazine.

A disclaimer – Steve and his wife Lynn Povich are good friends to my wife Barbara and me. That aside I couldn’t put down the book. I was inspired and touched by it, impressed with Steve’s raw honesty and courage in speaking so truthfully about his life, his capacity for self-reflection after years of psychoanalysis, and the beauty, easy, and crisp flow of his writing which is at once personal and journalistic as if recording contemporary history in which Steve is the protagonist.

Steve writes about his roots as a poor second generation American Jewish kid growing up in a tiny Bronx apartment and his return visit with Lynn and their adult children on his 80^th birthday, his disabled older sister about whom he carried so much guilt, his conflicted relationships with his working class Jewish parents, a near-death experience he suffered as a young man, his evolving and complicated relationship to most things Jewish including Israel, his boyhood love of classic cars that he calls “car lust,” his shared passion with his father for the NY Yankees, his envy of friendships that come so easily to women but with such difficulty to men, his journey from his first career as an engineer to the heights of the journalistic profession that took him to the center of American political and financial power, his critical assessment of what has become of journalism in the digital media market, his love of American Jewish fiction and fascination with the lives of the best of 20^th century Jewish writers, and his trips with Lynn to Israel, Hitler’s Berlin bunker, the Normandy Coast, Vietnam, and the racist American South.

Steve offers a comprehensive, thoughtful, clear-sighted, and morally infused reflection on contemporary Israel, its history, relationship to the Palestinians, and his dimming hopes for a two-state resolution of the age-old conflict. He understands well the political, historical, psychological, and cultural complexities involved, the inhumanity of the occupation, and the impact that the increasingly entrenched right-wing Israeli government and its policies are having upon the soul of Israel as a Jewish and liberal democratic state. He worries about Israel’s future as a Jewish moral beacon light to the world as envisioned by the State’s founding generation.

Steve writes more about his personal life and professional career in his first book, Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path from Print to Digital (publ. 2012). There he tells of meeting the love of his life, Lynn Povich, an award-winning journalist who helped to organize forty–six women in the early 1970s at Newsweek (they met there as colleagues and fell in love) charging “systemic discrimination” against the magazine in hiring and promotion. The case was resolved successfully for the plaintiffs by the US Supreme Court. Five years later, Lynn became the first woman Senior Editor in Newsweek’s history. She wrote the full story about that landmark lawsuit in The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace, which was turned into a television series on Prime Video (2015-2016), and went on to a distinguished career in her own right.

Steve’s memoir deserves a wide readership. His grandchildren are now too young to read and understand what their “Eeepa” has written, but one day I have little doubt that they are going to love it, be inspired by it, be proud of him, and likely will regret that they didn’t have the opportunity to better know their grandfather one-on-one as adults themselves.

That said: Steve – to 120!

You are two-thirds there already.