The Jewish Weekly dePress
Rosenblatt, Gary
The Jewish de-Press Gary Rosenblatt The Jewish "weaklies," Stephen Wise used to call them, and not without reason. There are more than 100 weekly and bi-weekly English-language Jewish newspapers...
...The influence of Jewish organizations —primarily the local federations —on the Jewish weeklies cannot be overestimated...
...The same technique—guilt— -is also used if anything critical is ever written about federations...
...He is right, of course...
...The Sun reporter had not been able to interview the officers or members any more than we had (although not infrequently, people will speak more readily to a reporter from the general press, whose attention they find flattering) but he had plunged ahead with a straight news story, leading with the report that one of the two rabbis had resigned and the second had not been re-hired...
...The shoestring budgets on which the weeklies work are painful in their effects...
...So we decided to print all engagement announcements...
...Indeed, many of those same people who complain most bitterly about the overplay of social news are among the first to insist that their local paper give their organization or their family simcha "adequate" coverage...
...And when you add the local "news"—births, deaths, weddings, bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, graduations, awards, and, most of all, meetings— dinners, breakfasts, luncheons, committees, committees in formation, planning committees, subcommittees, brunches, coffees, teas, ad infinitum, ad tedium, and each, of course, with accompanying photographs—the problem of filling pages solves itself...
...But if you do print what he—and his friends —want you to, he won't subscribe...
...And how Jews feel about such issues matters to the nation...
...And as Robert Cohn, who is editor of the community-owned St...
...press, there is no glamour and little recognition...
...None of the principals would talk to us, even off the record...
...Indeed, most of our critics called us hypocrites (in addition to "racists" and "bigots") for opposing mixed marriages while still running ads for non-kosher food, as do virtually all Jewish papers, incidentally...
...That's a healthy slice of the market, but what the Jewish press achieves in numbers it lacks in impact...
...Federations, they argue, are not only (relatively) super-rich, they are also very sophisticated, and were they to take over the local papers, they would insist on a product more respectable than what so many cities are now stuck with...
...Callers wanted to know how we could possibly carry out our policy...
...But the synagogue was upset with the article, because we had mentioned the fact that it was located in a predominantly black neighborhood...
...The primary dilemma, however, is not the dilemma of sponsorship, but the dilemma of responsibility...
...Not surprisingly, many people in the community were quite upset by the Sun story...
...About a third of all Jewish newspapers in the U.S...
...They also suffer from problems, or dilemmas, of their own making, problems that mirror the dilemmas of American Jewish life...
...Jewish journalism is hardly an easy field to break into...
...There really is no protection from coverage...
...But it cannot offer quite the same sense of involvement with the destiny of a community...
...Among those rewards is the daily exposure to the problems and promise of the American Jewish community—to its power structure, its paranoia, its potential and its priorities...
...The argument in favor of our doing a story was simple: the purpose of a Jewish newspaper is, ostensibly, to report news, and this was certainly news...
...What about a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew performed by a priest in church...
...No problem...
...Finally, since everyone was aware of the fact of the split, would we not look foolish were we to ignore it9 On the other hand, as we were repeatedly told by officers and members of the congregation whom we contacted, this was a "private matter," an internal dispute which did not affect the community at large...
...Each day it receives reports on national and international events from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency...
...indeed, the instinct to protect and insulate the community from the outside world may even backfire...
...Catch-22: if you don't print what the local notable wants you to, he won't subscribe...
...Either way, then, the Jewish papers are hardly independent...
...I write from the special vantage point of my job as editor of a Jewish weekly, as a person who, five years ago, was writing close-ups and sports copy for TV guide and who'preferred, and chose—eyes open—the professional and personal satisfaction of being able to concentrate on analyzing the Middle East or exploring various aspects of Jewish community life...
...began a typical letter...
...And the reason that is most often proposed is, not surprisingly, the financial condition of the Jewish newspapers...
...The budget does not permit the paper to hire reporters or to cover events first-hand...
...The papers were berated for low journalistic standards and sloppy typography, sneered at as gossip gazettes and mocked as repositories of publicity handouts...
...The fear that a federation may decide to buy out or go into competition with an independent Jewish weekly is very real...
...He told me that while publicity may not be news to me as a journalist or to him as a reader, it is certainly top news in the eyes of the federation, and he criticized my judgment in not running the material moi e prominently...
...if there were no mention, we'd send a polite note asking for the name of the officiating clergymen...
...And what about mixed engagement announcements9 Does one judge who is and who is not a Jew by the names of the couple...
...Some of the spice will go out of community life and the voice of the mavenck will be heard more rarely...
...No other issue arouses such intense emotional debate among such a wide variety of Jewish people...
...Should the independent Jewish papers ever stop printing," wrote Tom Tugend of the Los Angeles Heritage, one of the independents involved in the controversy, "the community's channels of information . . . will be dammed even further...
...And then, one bright Saturday morning, the story appeared in full detail in the Baltimore Sun, the city's morning daily...
...if that's not being a hypocrite, I don't know what is...
...Yet pursuit of that need, to the exclusion-of all others, would make cheerleaders out of journalists, and would insure that the field would not attract people of merit and that the community would never rise above its present depressed level of public discourse...
...But, withal, a community that deserves better and requires better...
...Looking back, I sometimes question the wisdom of working out the paper's policy in public...
...There is no area of American life these days that does not have direct bearing on the condition and destiny of the Jewish community...
...A standard interpretation in the aftermath of the Los Angeles episode: best to keep the federation happy lest it decide to take over the press...
...a minister, no...
...We tried one several years ago, a story that involved exposing the host of the local "Raisins and Almonds" Jewish radio hour, who was actually a Hebrew Christian missionary...
...Bernard Postal, the dean of American Jewish journalism, has noted that in the 1950s, when the Jewish weeklies began to regain some of their earlier prestige, they found "their capacity for meeting the informational needs of a fast changing Jewish community questioned and challenged...
...There are so many complex problems we face—Soviet dropouts, Israeli policies, the structure of our own community—and there is an abiding need to promote Jewish loyalty and unity...
...These problems are so obvious that most conversation on the' matter does not focus on whether or not the Jewish press is a quality press, but rather on why it is in such sad shape...
...In December 1974 (four months after I came to the Jewish Times), an engagement notice came to my attention...
...Hence even where papers are not overtly controlled by federations, the subtle control is there, just beneath the surface...
...On a practical level, we could determine the couple's status quite simply by seeing from the announcement who performed the ceremony...
...The basic instinct of the journalist is to uncover...
...I needed them to survive, and in order to survive," he said sadly, "I gave in and gave them the society news they expected and wanted...
...The first Jewish periodical in any language to be published in America was The Jew, an English-language monthly, which appeared in 1823...
...So it comes down to a sense of balance, a balance between truth and morale, between public discourse and communal responsibil ity, between serving the needs of the community as it perceives those needs and serving needs that may not be widely perceived, that may even be devalued...
...What right have you to decide whose engagement you will announce...
...There are few editorial positions, the salary does not compare to the secular Gary Rosenblatt, whose work appeared in our June issue, is the 30-year-old editor of the weekly Baltimore Jewish Times...
...Investigative reporting is an impossible dream...
...And, sad truth to tell, there's scarcely any demand for anything of substance either...
...More recently, a Jewish student journalist was more direct in his assessment: "The . . . American Jewish press," wrote Neil Reisner in Response last year, "consists largely of organizational press releases, unedited wire service reports, social news and, to put it bluntly, crap...
...The sad truth is that after years of reading only "puff pieces" in the Jewish Times, uncritical articles often written by the various organizations themselves, these congregants felt that our modest contribution to objective detail was a betrayal...
...the readers learn to depend on the general press rather than the Jewish press for "Jewish" news...
...And if, significantly, those priorities do not include a vital Fourth Estate, on a good day that can be seen as an exciting challenge...
...if there's a problem, you can always fill the gap with a recipe, or a press release telling what third-rate singer is opening next week at what fourth-rate hotel...
...Some say that the loss of independence will spell the end of true journalism, such as it is, in the American Jewish press...
...But the incident is quite largely a harbinger of things to come in other cities...
...Others maintain that, given financial stability through federation control, the local papers will improve tremendously...
...almost all such news in every Jewish newspaper comes directly from this source...
...So it was that we at the Baltimore Jewish Times agonized recently when two rabbis of our largest synagogue were at loggerheads and their congregation was divided into two camps...
...After all, they said, what synagogue does not have politics and internal bickering...
...It involved a Jew and a non-Jew, and I notified the mother of the Jewish partner that we would not be printing the announcement...
...And the weeklies —unable to compete because they lack the staff to do the reporting—have retreated even deeper into their parochial shells...
...From the Sun we expect such things, but not from our own...
...Because the weeklies are not merely the unhappy victims of cruel fate...
...There are more than 100 weekly and bi-weekly English-language Jewish newspapers in this country which reportedly reach some 700,000 subscribers—or roughly one out of every eight American Jews...
...Why pick on us...
...Yet it is ironic that the American Jewish community—well-educated, well-read and with so many prominent journalists in the general media—has produced a press of its own that is, by and large, a source of embarrassment...
...Editorial cowardice and lack of depth were other complaints...
...Even the best of the papers were patronized by the communities they sought to serve...
...the void is filled somewhat by the general press...
...So we let things slide...
...Less dramatically, not a month goes by that we do not get a complaint from a local Jewish organization which, after begging us to do a story on its work, becomes upset with a sentence or phrase which it finds unflattering in an otherwise positive article...
...The local papers average somewhere between 12 and 36 pages a week...
...That is, of course, a difficult challenge...
...was The As-monean, started in New York by Robert Lyon in 1849 as a "family journal of commerce, politics, religion and literature...
...It was accused of being unable to meet the task of helping American Jewry cope with its concerns, conflicts and doubts, and unprecedented new needs and responsibilities...
...Who do you think you are...
...And little time, and less money, and still less respect...
...We generally receive very little feedback from our readers—perhaps four or five letters and as many phone calls a week...
...But while I thought I was reiterating a longstanding policy of the paper, I was, in fact, creating one...
...One synagogue, for example, pleaded with us to do a story about its valiant struggle to maintain members m a changing neighborhood...
...Well, it's worse than that...
...William Frankel, editor of the world-renowned London Jewish Chronicle, stated the case most simply when he asserted that "a newspaper is independent only when it is financially independent...
...But they made it clear that they would have been still more upset had we done the story, even though it would have attracted less attention...
...But I chose it, and I do not ask for sympathy...
...The papers look better graphically, they're hiring more young people, and a significant number of women now have positions of authority...
...As for marriages, we maintained our stand against publishing wedding announcements "not performed in accordance with Jewish tradition...
...There's scarcely room for anything else, anything of substance...
...The early Jewish papers in this country were often noble efforts created to air controversy...
...It was dedicated to the "diffusion of knowledge on Jewish literature and religion" and promised "to give circulation to everything which can be interesting to the Jewish inhabitants in the Western hemisphere...
...A rabbi, fine...
...How, then, does the paper fill space...
...One editor told me several years ago how, after acquiring a weekly newspaper and spending a great deal of money to develop a quality editorial product, replete with original feature stories, he was informed by communal leaders that they were not especially interested in his innovations...
...It may have been a cathartic experience for the community, but it was a nightmare for me...
...Louis Jewish Light, as well as public relations director of the federation in that city, has pointed out, though the independent papers pride themselves on "being free of constraints of the Jewish establishment," they often "sacrifice their vaunted journalistic integrity in pursuit of economic survival...
...According to Postal, there has been a tremendous improvement of the Jewish weeklies in recent years...
...It was begun by Solomon Henry Jackson, a New York printer, and was primarily intended to combat missionary influence...
...Others note that the Jewish press is now monitored by the White House and scanned by the general press...
...But the Jewish Times is a Jewish publication and its raison d'etre is the perpetuation—not the dissolution—of Judaism...
...On a personal level, the closest I have ever come to being "threatened" by the local federation was several years ago when the former public relations director came to complain to me about the placement of federation campaign releases in our pdper (which is, incidentally, privately owned...
...After months of bitterness, the federation finally backed off and decided not to solicit ads for its newspaper, the one part of the plan the independents had found most threatening...
...That can make Jewish journalism far more than a job...
...It's okay for you to advertise non-kosher eating houses...
...Yet when I hear my colleagues who edit federation-sponsored newspapers describe the kind of flak they get for printing the most innocuous stories—one was severely chastised for reporting, in a filler item, a local philanthropist's large gift to a local synagogue, on the grounds that the report appeared to endorse non-federation philanthropy—I am ever grateful that the director of the local federation in my city is wise enough to realize that the . more credible we are as an independent paper, the better it is for federation—whose work we naturally support...
...It was not always so...
...And each week the local branches of the multitude of national Jewish organizations provide enough publicity releases to fill the Sunday New York Times...
...My own belief is that we erred in not doing the synagogue story ourselves...
...There are some, however, who take a rather different view...
...The general journalist knows that the answer to "If not me, who...
...People cancelled subscriptions...
...It was during that period that the Yiddish press flourished, and the English language weeklies were deposed from their central role...
...What I learned from the whole episode was that the subject of intermarriage is a raw nerve in the Jewish community...
...How does one write about sensitive issues in a way that encourages the development of a well-informed and sophisticated Jewish community without at the same time confusing people who may not have the background or the commitment to deal with honesty...
...A second basic commandment: Thou Shalt Avoid Religious Issues...
...That way we would not have to check the family's lineage, and we would be giving mixed couples the benefit of the doubt that the non-Jewish partner might be planning to convert before the marriage...
...The barrage of official self-congratulations will resound more dully and participatory democracy in our major communal decisions—anemic in the best of times—will breathe ever more faintly...
...In the first case, he's angry with you...
...But The Jew lasted only two years and no other Jewish journal appeared until 1843 when Rabbi Isaac Lesser of Philadelphia founded The Occident, a monthly devoted primarily to religious ar- • tides from "a traditional viewpoint but containing news items, as well...
...But the fact remains that the improvements of recent years have been almost exclusively limited to technology and appearance, and the new visibility of the Jewish press is more a reflection of its potential —and of the political stature of the American Jewish community —than a testament to the quality or clout the Jewish press has achieved...
...This condition, I've learned from colleagues around the country, is quite common...
...We agreed to do the story and several weeks later printed a moving and very positive account of this brave little congregation...
...He also said that the campaign workers like to see their pictures in our paper and that if we didn't print them, it was possible the workers wouldn't work so diligently in the future...
...and so on...
...man told me that if things did not improve, "the entire situation will have to be Reassessed," which I interpreted to mean that the federation might decide to expand its house organ, mailed to every campaign contributor, so as to include more federation news...
...He sharply criticized the Jewish press in America for its tendency to give in to pressures from "machers," who command, Thou Shalt Print Everything We Say—whether or not it is news—and, Thou Shalt Hallow and Glorify Our Name...
...The controversy was even discussed in local beauty parlors and other fashion places...
...That story took two reporters almost three weeks of full-time work to complete...
...Federations have power, and its use—or even the threat of its use—in the world of the Jewish press can easily change all the rules...
...In Los Angeles this past year, the federation, feeling adequate coverage of its activities was not provided by the three independent papers, expanded its house organ and went into direct competition with the others by reporting on national and international news and by soliciting advertisements...
...Both casual and detailed observation show quite clearly that the basic problems of the Jewish weeklies remain: the papers still avoid controversy, still avoid questioning the activities of Jewish leadership, whether in America or Israel, still engage in no investigative reporting (there is not one full-time investigative reporter in the entire field), still do not engage in first-hand reporting of any kind...
...in the second, he has no respect for you...
...Sound terrible...
...Naively, I did not expect much reaction...
...The independents protested bitterly and launched a campaign in the name of freedom of the press from "macherdom," as they called it, and Big Brother control...
...It can even raise sensitive issues of personal responsibility...
...And what if the non-Jewish partner in an engaged couple is studying diligently for a halachic conversion, should you exclude him...
...Virtually every paper I've seen has undergone a dramatic and positive metamorphosis in the last two years...
...General journalism can be stimulating, rewarding, educational...
...Typically, a tiny staff—often just two or three people—do everything, including the sale of advertising, the editing, layout, and physical makeup of the paper...
...She wrote a letter to the editor criticizing my position...
...Jewish journalists operate with a set of unwritten but binding commandments...
...Ironically, it was the large-scale immigration of European Jews to this country at the turn of the century that spelled the end of prestige and impact for the American Jewish weeklies...
...is almost surely "Somebody else...
...The Jewish community wants to be protected from controversial publicity, to be protected from public—especially non-Jewish— scrutiny...
...The first commandment: Thou Shalt Not Wash Thy Dirty Linen in Public...
...Without a doubt the single sharpest controversy involving the Jewish Times centered on our decision not to print mixed-marriage announcements...
...Yet only if the Jewish press operates according to the norms of the general press will it merit the respect accorded the general press...
...A privately-owned paper kow-towing to a large advertiser is no less sorry a spectacle than a federation paper pandering to the basest instincts of campaign cynicism...
...the weeklies concentrate still more on announcements rather than news...
...I don't think I was being paranoid...
...If a newspaper cannot exist without a subsidy, it were better it did not exist at all...
...Was he trying to make me feel responsible for the potential failure of the annual campaign if I decided not to run all the pictures submitted of campaign workers...
...By the time the Yiddish press began to flounder, the weeklies were no longer geared to provide the needed journalistic skills that had atrophied over time...
...It certainly is none of your business whose children marry whom...
...Moreover, in the face of abundant rumors and gossip m the community, we could provide an objective report and a valuable service to the community by covering the matter...
...The first English-Jewish weekly in the U.S...
...That is why the general press has lately begun to give considerably more space to Jewish news...
...the basic instinct of the Jewish community is to cover up, to prevent a shandeh far di goyim, a scandal in the eyes of the Gentiles...
...Two other commandments were touched on by Murray Zuck-off, the highly respected editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, during a major address he gave this past winter at an international conference of Jewish journalists in Jerusalem...
...At the time, the P.R...
...The state of the economy, the energy crisis, politics, education, affirmative action—they all matter to Jews not only as citizens, but as Jews...
...They warned us not to set ourselves up as some sort of religious tribunal...
...I decided to print her letter and then defend the policy by including an editor's note...
...How does one reconcile the ethic of journalistic honesty with the ethic of Jewish responsibility...
...It does have its rewards, not measurable in terms of wealth or prestige...
...It seems to be an inexorable cycle: the failure of the weeklies leaves a void...
...It's more than a shame...
...The problem is a sensitive one and raises some difficult questions: is a local Jewish newspaper obliged to publish every wedding announcement it receives...
...are now operated^by local federations and the general consensus is that in the next decade that percentage will increase...
...It ceased publication when Lyon died in 1858, but other privately owned weeklies covering local, national and international news soon followed, most notably the New York Jewish Messenger (18571902), The San Francisco Gleaner (1855) and The American Hebrew (1879...
...The American Jewish press became a popular punching bag," he observed...
...One may be permitted to wonder what out-of-favor aide at the White House is stuck with poring through the pages of announcements that fill so much of our papers...
...Heads or tails, you lose—and so does he, and the community...
...It doesn't take too many meetings to fill that space...
...In that note, I wrote that the Jewish Times had "no plans to change our policy of never printing—knowingly— mixed engagement or wedding announcements" and concluded, "if the families involved wish to publicize an intermarriage, they may do so in the general press...
...Besides having the clout of the Jewish establishment behind it, the federation paper has a tremendous advantage over the independents—a large built-in mailing list, including every campaign contributor...
...People are just dying for an excuse not to contribute," I've been told, "and by your criticizing our x, y or z policy, you're providing them with an excuse not to give, and you may be hurting Israel and the Baltimore Jewish community...
...During the next several days I sought the advice of a number of rabbis and Jewish leaders, locally and around the country...
...We explained the policy in an editorial the following week, and though it still holds, it is still criticized...
...The Jewish journalist knows there is no one else...
...Our rationale—that there is a distinction between editorial and advertising material and, more important, that not all branches of Judaism abide by kashrut but all do oppose mixed marriages—was perhaps too fine a distinction...
...It will apparently take years for us to live down our old reputation as a repository for press releases, to reeducate people's perceptions of . what a Jewish newspaper can and should be...
...And within three or fours day we had received more than 90 phone calls and at least as many letters in response, almost all highly critical...
...In a scholarly 1962 essay, Rabbi David Silverman found the Jewish press professionally incompetent and, at best, dull: "There is a flatness of tone and editorial comment," he wrote, "and the lack of regional features tends to make them indistinguishable from one another...
...We had been scooped...
...People tend to write letters to newspapers and magazines only when they're incensed by an article they've read...
...If you start calling people up like Smith or O'Connor to find out if they're Jewish, they cautioned, you'll also have to call up every Cohen and Goldberg to make sure the mother is Jewish as well as the father...
...that can make of it a calling...
...This development is hotly debated...
Vol. 3 • November 1977 • No. 1
