For years, I've admired the work of Dr. Jonathan D. Sarna. Today I interviewed him for an hour about Jewish journalism.
Here are some excerpts:
"I think the Forward has become much less objective. It has declined under its new regime. I found it more compelling under the previous regime. There are stories that you find in the Forward that you find nowhere else. I also find stories in The Jewish Week that I don't find well done in the Forward. I think The Jewish Week does a much better job of preserving a sense of objectivity whereas the Forward is taking a liberal party line approach. I think its reporting on Israel reflects a certain point of view.
"Whether it was articles on religion, or [JJ Goldberg's] articles on the National Jewish Population Survey... Almost none of the scholars of the NJPS buy into JJ Goldberg's conspiracy theory about the survey, nor do most of us buy into his view that intermarriage is not a significant issue. It is correct that the definition of intermarriage was changed, but I don't think any serious student of the NJPS can not conclude that intermarriage is a highly significant issue. I do not think there was any conspiracy in the world of the NJPS. There may have been mistakes. I think there are grave problems today with telephone surveys as a genre. I do not think the Forward did a good job of explaining that. The New York Times did it.
"I think the Forward would've been better advised to have gone the Leonard Saxe (head of the Cohen Center of Modern Jewish Studies) direction, and helped readers understand complexity.
"We have not seen anything that resembles Eve Kessler's articles on Jewish religious life [under the Lipsky regime] in the new Forward. She's still working there but she has a different beat. They never replaced her with someone who was investigating in quite so serious a way. They don't even have such a correspondent. The reason is simple. The current editor is not very interested in Jewish religious life. It's not what he thinks the American Jewish community cares about. I think he's wrong.
"I found the Forward more riveting under Seth Lipsky. I respect Seth for creating a new vision of what Jewish journalism could be. I understand he ran afoul of the people who were paying the tune and that JJ is more in tune with the folks who are from the old Forward and have a certain political [socialist] perspective taken from the old Forward. I don't happen to share that politics. It's not surprising that I find the slant of the Forward less to my liking. Seth opened up stories that we have not seen before or since."
