I interview Orthodox Rabbi Michael Berenbaum (born 1945) Friday afternoon, June 25, 2004.
Here's an excerpt:
"Would you be surprised to learn that Malcolm [Hoenlein] threatened The Jewish Week (NY) that if they published an article about a slush fund he kept that he would financially destroy the paper?"
"No."
"What's your critique of JJ Goldberg and the Forward?"
"I don't think he has yet established an Op/Ed page that reflects dramatic opinion in the [style of] The New York Times and Washington Post. That you have an understanding of the issues and you shape an agenda. There are enough people writing enough powerful stuff that the Forward should be able to do it. There are usually two or three good stories each week and the rest of the paper is not worth reading. The Culture section is sometimes very good. JJ hasn't fully established his own voice."
"Is he that good of a journalist? I always found his columns tame."
"He may be too tame. Lipsky was anything but tame."
"What's your critique of Gary Rosenblatt and The Jewish Week?"
"Gary earned his place in Gan Eden [world to come] by virtue of what he did on the [Baruch] Lanner thing. He's too tame. He often comes off as if he is ball-less. When he had some good journalists working for him, he restrained them from covering anything too controversial. He had Larry Cohler [renowned investigative journalist]. I helped train Larry. You've got to let him do his stuff and stick by him and 99% of the time you will end up with something of worth. Larry was essentially driven out. He found out that Gary was without balls. Larry may sometimes be without brains but he is never without balls. Gary tends to be tame and timid.
"The Jewish Week doesn't have a good Arts section or a good book review section. Jewish life in its intellectual sphere is flourishing. How a paper like that in New York isn't covering books and literature and arts and dance and theatre at the epic-center of where that is exciting, I don't understand. I don't understand that with my friend [Rob Eshman] at the Jewish Journal. How can you not cover this? Stuff gets covered in The New York Times book review or the New York Review of Books but The Jewish Week doesn't say a goddamn thing about it. The Jewish Journal doesn't say a goddman thing about it."
"They do but they assign spineless book reviewers such as Sandee Brawarsky."
"For example, compare the review of David Myers book by [Rabbi Daniel] Bouskila [in the Jewish Journal] with the way [Samuel Moyn] from Columbia reviewed it in the Forward and you see the difference between something that is serious and something that is not serious. In the areas I know well, these guys [Rosenblatt, Eshman] are not committed to it. Even if you were Gary and you wanted to play it safe, you could raise every issue you wanted to raise through the book review section that you don't want to review elsewhere."
"It's so bad. The Jewish press is so bad."
John writes: Of course Gary lacks balls. He's the editor of a Federation paper. If you want to keep these kind of jobs, especially long-term, lacking balls is a requirement.
Just like if you want to set up an independent web site covering the porn industry and pissing off very scary people, having massively oversized balls and being slightly insane is a requirement ("Boogie Nights" was on cable last night, reminding me of that fact.)
It takes all types to make a world, even in journalism. Would the papers be better if they employed a series of editors with journalistic balls, each of whom got fired after three months on the job? (Maybe, but...)
The question isn't whether the federation rags are journalistically daring or not, the question is whether there are alternatives. Till the Forward and the web publications and blogs came along, there weren't alternatives. And frankly, there would be no Forward if there wasn't a very rich Jewish macher who is willing to bankroll a paper that is critical of, among other things, rich Jewish machers.
It's all about the money -- or lack thereof. That's why the Internet is a boon, because the start-up and support costs are so low.
