JustASC

Ron Kampeas of JTA and Jeffrey Goldberg weigh in on the debate over Ethan Bronner’s Israeli soldier-son. Both think it would be a horrible idea to reassign Bronner under the pressure of “anti-Israel propagandists.” And they defend the idea that reporters can separate their personal attachment from their coverage of the conflicts to which their assigned. Ron sees another danger:

This initiative is a big fat welcome mat for folks who want to marginalize and even criminalize Palestinian reporting [by which he means reporting by Palestinians for western news outlets -- asc], a phenomenon I addressed here.

Listen up: This is a standard that would essentially kill the concept of the “local hire,” rob us (the global “us”) essential insights into conflicts around the globe, and reduce media credibility just when it needs as much reinforcement as it can get.

This is compelling stuff, and made me think twice about agreeing with the Times’ ombusdman that Bronner should be reassigned. But I responded to Ron’s post with the following comments, which I post while acknowledging that I can be convinced otherwise:

Western news organizations tolerate, as opposed to prefer, “local hires” because they are affordable; they have certain skill sets –language, mostly, and hard-won experience on the ground—that their own home-grown staff do not; and they have access to areas that are hostile or inaccessible to outsiders.

The whole concept of a “foreign correspondent” was for decades based on the idea that we send one of “ours” over “there.” The fact of his or her “otherness,” it was long felt, would only enhance the reporting — they would presumably have the skills to tell the country’s story, but keep a critical distance by dint of their “foreignness” and thus tell their story more objectively and dispassionately than a local hire could be expected to. In fact, it was seen as an occupational hazard were a reporter to “go native.”

Ron, you are suggesting a different model—a globalized newspaper, that instead of sending its own staff overseas outsources its reporting to “local hires.” I’m not sure I see the difference between that and merely carrying dispatches from other foreign news outlets. Why shouldn’t the Times just close its Israel bureau and translate articles from Maariv or Haaretz in some sort of reciprocal arrangement? It would be cheaper, and certainly the average Israeli native reporter has more “essential insights” into the region than a guy who has been imported from outside, even if that guy was there for a number of years.

If media had infinite means and universal access to hotspots, they would certainly eschew the whole notion of local hires, and prefer instead to dispatch correspondents who were hired, trained and promoted according to the same standards of its local and national staffs. Local hires are a capitulation to reality, not a journalistic ideal by any means.

In the case of the Times bureau chief, I don’t think you have to be a “savage partisan,” to use Bill Keller’s phrase, to worry that a transplanted American reporter who has become fully integrated into a society might be in danger of losing his or her critical distance. Or to suggest that local hires may not be the ideal way to cover a conflict.

The son of New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner has enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces. The Times’ ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, takes up a debate that I discussed earlier here. Critics of Israel, as opposed to pro-Israel activists, seemed to have raised the issue of Bronner’s son’s service first.

Before rendering judgment about whether the boy’s service represents an untenable conflict of interest for Bronner and the Times, Hoyt acknowledges, and quotes others who say, that the Times‘ Israel coverage is often considered biased by activists on both sides. He also notes that, for people who presumably aren’t predisposed to judge Times coverage for ideological correctness, Bronner’s credentials, track record, and professionalism are impeccable.

That being said, Hoyt concludes that the Times should reassign Bronner, on the grounds that no matter the quality of Bronner’s work, readers would rightly detect a conflict:

But, stepping back, this is what I see: The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.

I have enormous respect for Bronner and his work, and he has done nothing wrong. But this is not about punishment; it is simply a difficult reality. I would find a plum assignment for him somewhere else, at least for the duration of his son’s service in the I.D.F.

Times executive editor Bill Keller disagrees. He writes that the Times’ has other reporters whose biographies might appear to pose a conflict with their assignments, but that the paper’s editors are able to discern when such ties are untenable and when such ties actually enhance the reporter’s understanding of a beat:

My point is not that Ethan’s family connections to Israel are irrelevant. They are significant, and both he and his editors should be alert for the possibility that they would compromise his work. How those connections affect his innermost feelings about the country and its conflicts, I don’t know. I suspect they supply a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack. I suspect they make him even more tuned-in to the sensitivities of readers on both sides, and more careful to go the extra mile in the interest of fairness. I do know he has reported scrupulously and insightfully on Israelis and Palestinians for many years. And I have no doubt that if a situation arose that presented a real conflict of interest, as opposed to an imaginary or hypothetical one, we would discuss it, and he would not hesitate to recuse himself.

Keller’s piece is also notable in the anger he directs at the “savage partisans” among the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian crowd, each of whom is convinced that the Times is biased against their side. He writes:

It’s not just that we value the expertise and integrity of a journalist who has covered this most difficult of stories extraordinarily well for more than a quarter century. It’s not just that we are reluctant to capitulate to the more savage partisans who make that assignment so difficult — and who make the fairmindedness of a correspondent like Ethan so precious and courageous.

Phew. There’s more. And in this describes the logical consequences were the Times to begin to apply identity litmus tests to its reporting staff: 

Readers, like reporters, bring their own lives to the newspaper. Sometimes, when these readers are unshakeably convinced of something, they bring blinding prejudice and a tendency to see what they want to see. As you well know, nowhere is that so true as in Israel and the neighboring Palestinian lands. If we send a Jewish correspondent to Jerusalem, the zealots on one side will accuse him of being a Zionist and on the other side of being a self-loathing Jew, and then they will parse every word he writes to find the phrase that confirms what they already believe while overlooking all evidence to the contrary. So to prevent any appearance of bias, would you say we should not send Jewish reporters to Israel? If so, what about assigning Jewish reporters to countries hostile to Israel? What about reporters married to Jews? Married to Israelis? Married to Arabs? Married to evangelical Christians? (They also have some strong views on the Holy Land.) What about reporters who have close friends in Israel? Ethical judgments that start from prejudice lead pretty quickly to absurdity, and pandering to zealots means cheating readers who genuinely seek to be informed.

That’s a little unfair. I think the question about a foreign correspondent with a soldier-son in the army of the nation he is covering is a little different than the objections of partisans, like Philip Weiss, who have baldly suggested that Jewish reporters can’t cover the Mideast with professional detachment. I think the question about Bronner’s soldier-son, even if asked by someone who is convinced Bronner is too pro-Israel (like Stephen Walt), is fair. We ask such questions about former soldiers covering the military, or Congressional correspondents with spouses who serve in government. The attacks on the Times for Bronner’s coverage have been vicious, but this doesn’t seem to be the discussion in which Keller should be settling those scores.

I think Keller provides a reasonable response to the Bronner question: Judge the writer on his or her work, and not on the biography. Insist on full disclosure, but also insist that the writer does his or her job professionally.

And yet, if I were a paper as important at the Times, covering a hotbed of controversy like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I would worry about the constant distraction that will arise when a reporter’s son is serving on one side of a conflict he is meant to cover objectively. Bronner may be a good man and a superb reporter, and no Times reporter will ever escape the ideological judgment of the critics, but I’d be wary of any reporter whose family is so invested in the narrative he is covering. Aren’t foreign correspondnets regularly rotated so they aren’t tempted to “go native,” or is that an obsolete practice? 

I’m with Hoyt in reassigning Bronner – not because it will appease the “savage partisans” but because it will represent what seems like a good journalistic practice.

My old Forward colleague Lisa Keys writes about Jewish gourmands’ bacon fetish: Is it sacrilege? An inevitable symbol of our post-ethnic, multi-identity era? A cynical marketing ploy on the part of hipsters?

Writes Lisa:

And to many Jews, the allure of pork is simply irresistible. “It’s the ultimate taboo,” says Dan Levine, who as “Porky LeSwine” is the co-founder of BbqJew.com, dedicated to news about North Carolina pork barbecue, a topic which enjoys religious-like devotion. “Where we live, pork is in so many dishes,” says the Chapel Hill resident. “It’s a flavoring ingredient in everything from vegetables to cornbread.”

The “ultimate taboo” also makes a great marketing tool. “It gives us a bit of identity and sets us apart in the barbecue world,” says David Rosen, a co-founder of Jubon’s, a competitive barbecue-making enterprise with a name that plays on the words “Jew” and “Ubon’s,” the Yazoo City, Mississippi, barbecue restaurant that mentored the team. The team mascot is a yarmulke-wearing pig, and its slogan is, “At least the salt is kosher.” “It’s a little controversial, but so what?” Rosen says. “We’re not out to offend.”

Of course not. Who would possibly be offended by a yarmulke-wearing pig?

At first, the article reminds me of the comedian Nick Kroll’s joke: “You know who likes fried chicken? Black people. You know who else likes fried chicken? EVERYbody.” (Full disclosure: I grew up in a nonkosher home. Bacon is freakin’ delicious.)

It’s not the bacon-eating that bugs me — rather, it’s their need to wrap (sometimes literally) their bacon-eating around Jewish symbols and references (L.A.’s Gorbals restaurant serves “bacon-wrapped matzo balls, pork belly braised in Manischewitz, and Israeli couscous pudding with bacon brittle”).

I react to this trend the way I did after reading an essay at Jewcy that celebrated the hipster Jews’ embrace of the pork taboo. Here’s what I wrote in response:

Why does this Jewcy bacon fetish sound so — trite? It’s like the secular kibbutzim that would hold a Yom Kippur feast. It sounds like rebellion, but seems more like a plea for attention — and attention from the very people they were presumably rebelling against, the way a grade school boy will yank the hair of a girl he likes. The kibbutz could have just ignored Yom Kippur altogether. Now THAT would have been rebellion.

Instead, the Yom Kippur feast, like Jewcy’s bacon obsession, is based on a need to broadcast “the type of Jews we aren’t,” as opposed to the “type of Jews we are.” So while you consider bacon “a completely gratuitous and delicious rebellion FROM a defining tenet of Judaism,” what are you FOR, exactly, beside proudly and loudly flouting those tenets? When the Reform movement issued its Pittsburgh Platform in 1885, which nullified the laws of kashrut, the goal wasn’t just to rebel or celebrate forbidden, um, fruit. It was a principled stand, intrinsic to their understanding of “modern spiritual elevation” — to which they felt the ancient laws were actually a hindrance.

 What I’d love to read is your essay, not on why it’s so “hilarious” and taboo to eat bacon, but how your relationship to food and tradition — the kosher and the trayf. the sacred and the profane — shapes who you ARE as a Jew, not who you AREN’T.

Norman Samuels, a Rutgers prof and past president of the New Jersey Jewish News board, has an article up on Tablet about Israel-Turkey relations:

The hope that a moderate Islamic party in democratic Turkey would become a model for the Middle East and indeed for the Muslim world is still a necessary bet. But supporters of Israel will have to swallow the reality that the energy of international Islam will constrain the ability of any Islamic party to be seen as close to the Jewish state. Israel maintains ambiguous ties to other Muslim countries, ranging from its cold peace with Egypt to its publicly cold but privately close ties to Jordan. Turkish-Israeli relations will not return to their earlier status, but if a new relationship based on mutual respect and common interest is to be built, there will have to be a recognition that Israel may now need Turkey more than Turkey needs Israel.

I drive a 2005 Prius (as I discussed here), and have taken the recent bad news about Toyota with a mixture of relief (my model is apparently okay) and deep hurt. My car has never given me any problems (kinahora, as we say in Japanese), and I’ve always seen Toyota as a beacon of quality, durability, and accountability. If you can’t rely on Toyota, what can you rely on?

What’s next — abstinence-only education actually works?

Not to pick on my old colleagues at the Forward, but I got a kick out of this headline:

Israel, Hamas Respond Differently to Goldstone

The ZOA and Marty Peretz say Obama dissed Israel when he failed to list Israel in remarks given on Jan. 15 about countries extending aid to Haiti. Can you spot the glaring discrepancy that makes this complaint total b.s.?

From the ZOA release, quoted by the R0ute 17 blog (curiously, the release is not on the ZOA web site):

“The Zionist Organization of America is critical of the fact that President Barack Obama” for having [sic] “mentioned several other countries helping Haiti but conspicuously omitted one whose assistance to Haiti has exceeded that of all others apart from the U.S. itself – Israel.”

Here’s what the president said:

At the airport, help continues to flow in, not just from the United States but from Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, among others. This underscores the point that I made to the President [of Haiti] this morning: The entire world stands with the government and the people of Haiti, for in Haiti’s devastation, we all see the common humanity that we share.

Here’s the rub: The president’s remarks were given at 1:08 P.M. EST on Fri., January 15. According to the IDF Spokesperson’s Office and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the IDF Aid Delegation in Haiti did not land in Port-Au-Prince until Friday evening, and opened for operations on January 16.

This is an unfortunate sign of the times: Mindy Stein, National President of Emunah of America (the women’s religious Zionist organization), is asking UPenn Hillel to rescind a speaking invitation to Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of J Street, and asking others to do the same. Apparently Penn Hillel is feeling the heat on this one –  director Jeremy Brochin has posted a statement “Regarding Presentation of J Street at Steinhardt Hall.”

The assumption of Stein’s upset, and Jennifer Rubin’s here, is that J Street is so far out of the mainstream that they should be denied forums by Jewish organizations lest they be given “legitimacy.”  But even if you accept as true the worst things its critics are saying about J Street (and for a good summary, go to  J Street’s own web site here), I’m not sure what harm is done by renting a hall to a person at a university and letting Ivy League students figure it out for themselves. What are we protecting them from, exactly?

As for the legitimacy argument – I’m not even sure what that means, or who gets to decide. What are the “spoils” of gaining legitimacy? In this context, I think ”legitimacy” means you are perceived as speaking to or for a Jewish audience, one that is significant in terms of size or influence, and thus your ideas themselves need to be taken seriously or at least into account. Those who challenge J Street’s legitimacy want to deny this significance or influence, or nip it in the bud. Why? What’s at stake? What harm do they anticipate should J Street be seen as representative of a certain population or idea?

Honestly, I would like to see J Street’s critics articulate this for me. I think if they are going to challenge J Street’s legitimacy, they should also explain the specific effects should J Street gain legitimacy. And not just say “it’s not in Israel’s interests.” Jews and Jewish groups, like Israelis, remain deeply divided in terms of politics. Ostensibly, one side or the other will turn out to be wrong and thus “bad for Israel.” But we don’t challenge their legitimacy. What is it about J Street?

Here’s the text of Stein’s letter to Brochin, which she distributed to a synagogue listserv in Teaneck:

I implore you to reconsider and rescind your invitation to Jeremy BenAmi, the Executive Director of J Street. When Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, was invited to address the J Street Conference in October, Israel’s response was that he should decline the invitation. In an article, “J Street and Michael Oren: It’s about legitimacy”,

 [Actually, the article was titled "J Street and Michael Oren: It's about legitimacy, stupid" -- ASC]  

dated October 21, 2009, Ami Isseroff wrote: “One could argue that addressing J Street was an opportunity for dialogue. It would allow Ambassador Oren to address J Street supporters, many of them college students, and explain why J Street policies are not “pro-Israel” and are in fact harming Israel and why comparing IDF soldiers to Nazis is not “pro-Israel.”

[Stein's punctuation is iffy, but Isseroff's original quote ended here. -- ASC]

However, his presence, as well as Ben Ami’s presence on your campus, would give them the legitimacy that they are so desperately seeking and would present them as a”Kosher” pro-Israel organization.

J Street is generously funded from Arab sources and support from the American Iranian Council, and the Israeli government has determined that the policies J Street advocates are not in Israel’s best interests.

Mindy Stein

National President of Emunah of America

Member of the Conference of Presidents

Penn Hillel’ statement on the J Street invitation is after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

28 Days, 28 Ideas is a collaboration of six blogs and organizations that will be putting forth daily ideas “to transform the Jewish future.”

Day 1 belongs to Jewish journalism. Ami Eden of the JTA suggests more collaboration, but not of the “let’s have fewer but better Jewish media” variety:

The bean counters out there might say: Did the Forward, New York Jewish Week and JTA need a total of four Washington reporters during the 2008 election season? Why not just share one, or maybe two? I’d put it another way: Keep all four, but instead of having them chase the same stories, bring them together to create that robust D.C. bureau of my dreams, capable of competing with any media entity in the world and, more important, producing the sort of specialized, high-quality content that would attract more readers, keep Jews better informed and, if done properly, create new revenue streams that weren’t there when we all were doing our own thing.

Along those lines, JTA’s philanthropy blogger/reporter Jacob “The Fundermentalist” Berkman is formulating a proposal for creating a new Jewish philanthropy news service — Little Tin Box — that would bring together the reporting of several media entities. The assumption is that readers (and business interests) would be better served if three or four reporters working independently for their respective publications found a way to coordinate their efforts to create a specialized brand featuring more reporting and new premium content.

Here’s  another story out of Teaneck. It’s about a “nonprofit organization that provides religious and community activities and counseling” that neighbors somehow suspect is another way of saying “synagogue.”

Organizers seemed to deny that for a while, but their tactics are shifting, and now they have “applied for several variances from the zoning board, which would allow Etz Chaim to designate part of the Queen Anne Road property as a house of worship.”

A couple of points:

1/Tension is inevitable. Teaneck, with a large and growing Orthodox population, has a few dozen synagogues. They tend to be wedged in right among the residences (unlike other suburban synagogues, where they’re set back on campuses or zoned away from housing stock). That makes sense for Teaneck’s Orthodox community, whose members walk to synagogue on Shabbat and holy days.

The challenge for neighbors and zoning boards, however, is that it throws together private homes and houses of worship and their non-private functions — large crowds for worship, noise complaints from neighbors, parking issues for events held when it’s not Shabbat or a holy day. It’s a formula for conflict.

2/ Modus operandi. We’ve covered a couple of stories about synagogues that start with a minyan that appears to be held in a private home, and inexorably the home morphs into a full-fledged synagogue, usually by design, I suspect. The current law privileges religion (see this primer from a Christian legal association), so once a house of worship gets a foothold in a neighborhood, it is awfully hard to dislodge. I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing, but I don’t like the way some congregations exploit the law and surreptitiously set up shop, asking disingenuously, “You mean I can’t worship in my own home?” It feels — sneaky. (Or maybe that’s the fault of the law, which forces them into subterfuge. Discuss.)

3/ Ask a neighbor.  Zoning meetings often end up being arguments about parking, but I rarely see the opinions of people who currently live in a neighborhood with an Orthodox synagogue. Let me, someone  who lives five doors down from a major synagogue with multiple minyanim, discuss my experience:

On a typical weekday morning, there is a rush for on-street parking as men pull up for morning minyan, usually between 7:00 and 8:15 a.m. And by rush, I mean rush —  guys zip into spaces, grab their tallitot and tefillin, and jog up the block. I’d prefer for safety’s sake that they slow down.

Since it’s early morning, my cars are usually already on the street or in the driveway, and since I’m usually not expecting any guests, it’s no great inconvenience, except the one time in nine years a shmeggegge blocked my driveway.

As for evening minyanim, it mirrors the morning rush, but not as much, and I rarely have parking or traffic issues.

On Sunday mornings there is often a simcha of some sort, usually a bris, or a more relaxed davening. Two hours, say. Again, the street spaces tend to fill up, but it’s at an hour that doesn’t inconvenience me.

On Shabbat, there is no auto traffic at all, of course, but a ton of foot traffic. Sometimes this spills into the streets, which has led to complaints in the area from drivers. (The walkers claim that the Teaneck sidewalks are in need of repair, which is sometimes true, but I detect a sense of ownership, swagger, arrogance [call it what you will] on the part of the walkers — who project a sense that “This is Shabbat, and the streets of this neighborhood are for walkers.” [Full disclosure: I am a walker, and I sometimes share this impulse -- what's nice about Teaneck is that if you are shomer Shabbat, Saturday feels like Shabbat.])

Also on Saturday and holy days, police block off the street directly in front of the synagogue with sawhorses, and a cop directs traffic on the main drag (they also do this on Sunday mornings at the big Korean church a few blocks away on a busier street. FYI: The church is situated away from private homes, alongside a Route 4 entrance ramp, and has a large parking lot). There’s usually a lot of kids playing rambunctiously in the synagogue playground, sometimes a big catering tent set up in the parking lot, crowds of kibbitzers standing on the sidewalks, and, after services let out, big crowds of families and strollers and men chatting it up on the sidewalks and the closed street. I’m far enough down the block that it doesn’t really affect me, although I don’t blame the people who live in a residential neighborhood who don’t want a weekly block party right next door.

Be warned: Near sunset before and after Shabbat, there are clumps of strollers, usually wearing dark colors. I worry about hitting them as I pull into or out of my driveway. I’ve seen some synagogues urge congregants to wear reflective material, but to little effect.

A lot of syangogues host simchas on Sunday afternoons or Saturday night. The smaller synagogues tend not to have catering halls, so that’s not an issue, but there will be other events attracting cars. Parking is not a problem in my neighbohood, however, and only occasionally do I look out the window and think, “There must be something going on at the shul.”

So that’s my experience. Living near a shul is no biggie. But I can’t speak for the people who live closer than I do, or the folks who bought their houses before a shul moved in next door. In the interest of neighborliness, those who are bent on establishing synagogues need to show a little empathy, indulge in a little outreach to the neighbors, and educate their own folks about leaving as small a footprint as possible.