HOWARD EPSTEIN – LETTER FROM ISRAEL: All the News Fit to Print
“All the news that’s fit to print” has for over a century appeared on the masthead of the New York Times (“NYT”), but the truth has been very different. Between 1939 and 1945, the NYT published over 23,000 front-page stories, 11,500 of which were about World War II. Of those, just twenty-six were about the Holocaust.
If only it had Jewish owners, you might say. But it always has. From the first, Adolph Simon Ochs, through son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, to today’s Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr, the paper’s publishers have always been Jewish. As Jackie Mason might have said, they did not want to look too Jewish. So too Jewish a line has been something the rag has always eschewed.
This dafka attitude lost the NYT few Jewish readers. The paper is the left-wing of the Democratic Party in print form, and American Jews are Dems (and vote Democrat) no matter what. And no matter what means despite a left-wing that looks like a Corbyn-inspired Labour Party. Indeed, in many ways, both the Dems and the NYT are worse than that.
And all of this in America. The America that used to be known as “The Golden Medina” – the golden country – because it had one great advantage over the lands from which the Jews had come: less anti-Semitism. That place is no longer so easily discernible. According to last month’s American Jewish Committee’s report, over the past year alone, American Jews’ fear of anti-Semitism has caused 40% of them to change their behavior. That might appear to be almost one half of them in a year, but it necessarily excludes the haredim, who have not cast off their traditional garb. Accordingly, the percentage of secular US Jews bowing to hostile forces is truly much greater than a half.
By this time next year, much more than the 17% who (according to the AJC) say they now avoid “certain places, events or situations”, the 22% who now avoid making themselves visually identifiable as a Jew and the 25% who now refrain from posting Jewish-related content online, will be less identifiably Jewish. We are not talking here about Hungary or Poland or certain pockets in England. It is in the former golden land for the Jews where they are now fretting about the safety of their kids, and making conscious decisions about how to live and appear to live. The American dream has become a living nightmare.
American universities have been unsafe places for Jews for several years now, yet it has recently become so much worse that Jewish students are increasingly undertaking their studies online. (This a far cry from Bristol University, where determined efforts led to the removal of an overtly anti-Israel academic.)
Well, as ye sow, so shall ye reap. And if you slavishly, abjectly and uncritically support those who are antagonistic to you, you will not weaken them but encourage them. If you give them tacit approval for their damaging behaviour towards you, the result will not be less vilification and increased respect. And so it has proved. Which brings us back to the NYT.
In 2018, Barri Weiss, a brilliant writer and editor in the opinions department of the NYT, wrote on the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, where she became bat mitzvah. The murder of eleven Jews led to her book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” which won her the 2019 National Jewish Book Award. One year later, she resigned from her illustrious position at the NYT citing “bullying by colleagues” and an “illiberal environment”. Her 1,500 word letter to publisher, A G Sulzberger, contained a devastating analysis of NYT employees and company leadership, describing a “hostile work environment” where co-workers had insulted her or called for her removal. Reply from Sulzberger came there none.
All the news that’s fit to print from a newspaper that offers an unfit working environment for Jews.
Last week, the NYT, ran an article: Whose Promised Land? A Journey Into a Divided Israel, referring to “incompatible factions” and the “grievances of people living in the country”. Immediately, young Israelis, in particular, fought back. They flooded Twitter with joyous pictures and videos of Israeli life with ironic captions about their allegedly “sad” and “miserable” lives. They started a media campaign against the NYT and pointed out that Israel was ranked the 12th happiest country in the world by the World Happiness Report. (The USA was ranked 15th and the UK 19th.)
They might also have pointed out that rampage killing in the US is up. In the first five months of 2021, gunfire killed more than 8,100 people in the United States. That’s 14 more deaths per day than the average toll during the same period of the previous six years. Further, the suicide rate in the USA is 14.5 per 100,000 people, the fifth worst out of 38 OECD countries. In Israel it is 6/100k, the fifth best.
I have written before about how young Israelis are to be seen in the streets and on public transport carrying powerful weapons; yet their society is not so sad and divided that rampage killings are a part of Israeli life, or death. That’s something that is uniquely American.
There’s some news that’s fit to print.
© November 2021 – Howard Epstein – Author, Traumatised Nation: How America Got to be So Violent
