Yesterday's News Tomorrow

A few years ago, Luke Ford self-published a series of interviews with a number of past and present fellow toilers in the vineyards of Jewish journalism. His tome is entitled Yesterday’s News Tomorrow. You get the idea.

Most Jewish newspapers are owned by local Jewish federations, which makes them bland. Investigative reporting is a no-no (heaven forefend, it might hurt the fund-raising campaign), and comment about Israel is by and large reflexive and unreflective (i.e., supportive of whatever the current government in Jerusalem wants).

Ford’s title was meant to be ironic and dismissive, but when I read Rob Eshman’s column in the Feb. 16 edition of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal (which, it is worth noting, is not owned or operated by the Los Angeles Jewish federation) entitled “Shutting Jewish Mouths,” the phrase took on a different, positive light.

Eshman, the Journal’s editor-in-chief, considered the heresy (at least so far as some of his ink-stained counterparts are concerned) that a Jewish community shorn of its left wing will, like a wounded bird, find itself flying in circles.

Eshman’s reflections were sparked by a peevish and sullen little pamphlet penned by Alvin H. Rosenfeld called “Progressive” Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism, issued in December by the American Jewish Committee. Had The New York Times not given it major play at the end of January, the screed would probably have disappeared down the memory hole.

In Rosenfeld’s crabbed view, progressive Jews are fomenting a “new anti-Semitism,” which he defined as making statements which challenge Israel’s “legitimacy and right to an ongoing future.” Among his targets are Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, and Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner.

Eshman opens his essay by recalling an Americans for Peace Now rally he organized 20 years ago in Beverly Hills, at which actor Richard Dreyfuss was confronted by an enraged mob of Jewish onlookers who drove him from the stage. His “crime”: calling for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

What was heresy 20 years ago, Eshman notes, is today Israeli government policy, and to forget that lesson is to deny a “crucial dynamics of Jewish history”:

From the biblical prophets down through modern times, we are a people who have canonized those who scold and chastise the established order, who envision a different world…

The tradition of sharp criticism turned on one's own people still lives -- in Hebrew. The Israeli press has always been far more contentious toward Israel than American Jewry. Nothing Judt or Kushner has proposed hasn't already been written in Israel…

By squashing left-wing criticism, the mainstream makes the world safe for opinions far to the right. Has the AJCommittee taken a stand against Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli minister who has called for the forced expulsion of Israeli Arabs from their towns? No, it has not; though one could argue Lieberman's opinions endanger a democratic Jewish state at least as much as Kushner's.

But from where I sit, the most insidious effect of the AJCommittee is the message it sends to the majority of Jews, and non-Jews, who support Israel but don't always agree with its policies. That message is: there's only one way to show you care for the Jewish state -- our way.

Given that choice, the silent majority of Jews drift away, and the mainstream organizations then bemoan the fact that most Jews, especially Jewish youth, aren't involved on behalf of Israel.

It's very hard to sell smart people on the idea that the best way to support the strongest democracy in the Middle East is to shut up.

-- Posted by Adam Simms