I spent two hours with Gene at the Farmer's Market on Fairfax Thursday morning. Then we exchanged some email.
Gene writes me: I'm curious about [Rob Eshman's] views of Jewish journalism. Incidentally, thank you for not asking me "what do you think of his editorship of the Journal," which is not an infrequent question. For the record, I think he's a terrific editor and is doing a great job.
Good writing was the central focus of the Journal when I started it. My judgments may have been faulty, but the concern was paramount.
Steve Weinstein, for example, was a writer, not a journalist. He was lured away from The Journal within a year by the LA Times to write features about popular culture; Joe Domanick had no reporting experience either, but turned out to be an exceptionally good reporter and magazine writer. He was pulled away by the LA Weekly and the LA Times. Columnists were seen by me as writers who would serve as the spine of the paper. I started with Yehuda Lev, who was a wonderful writer. By the time he moved to Rhode Island, he was old and tired and spent, though occasionally produced something wonderful.
Marlene Marks, who had wanted to be the editor of the paper, came by about a year after we had been publishing. Her husband had jusr died. She wrote two rather boring, sophmoric pieces about Judaism and the community, which I turned down. I told her to write about being in the hospital when she heard that her husband had died, and her anger at the doctors and rabbi, etc. She did, and was off and running. Her columns were about herself and women and being a single mother in LA, and in the first few years they were pretty terrific. Later she became a celebrity and her columns were a bit ponderous and full of herself.
During the last year that I was at the paper, I couldn't bear to read them and asked Rob to take over the responsibility (this was before she developed cancer).
Anyway, I could cite many other writers---Steve Leder, David Margolis, Dov Aharoni, JJ Goldberg, Teresa Strasser, Rob Eshman, Eric Silver, Helen Davis--all of whom I brought to the paper because of their writing. Stephen Leder, who is rabbi at Wilshire Blvd. Temple, was then an assistant rabbi who wrote the Torah Portion, which had been guarded by the Board of Rabbis, who zealously made sure every rabbi who wanted got a shot at it. Most of the writing was dreadful until Leder came along; at which point I dispensed with the Board and signed him on. Read some of his columns; they were very good. The Federation, the Board, the publisher of the newspaper all pressured me to rotate, but I stayed with Steve until he had to bow out because of time.
The same thing applied to Dov Aharoni, an extreme right wing Orthodox rabbi. I don't think he and I agreed on a single issue; but he was a wonderful writer. The Federation in the person of Stanley Hirsh, who was also a member of the newspaper's board of directors, pressed me not to run him: He was too extreme, too divisive. We kept publishing him until he withdrew to attend law school. Even when it came to hiring reporters, such as Naomi Pfefferman and Julie Fax, good writing was a central factor.
I approached JJ Goldberg and asked if he'd write for us if I could put together a consortium of Jewish newspapers to pay him a decent salary. He agreed and I called David Twersky, who then edited the NJ newspaper, and asked him to help line up some papers. That's how JJ came to write a column.
On the other hand, [a right-winger], who has a large following in LA, asked if he could write a column for us. I had published a few pieces by him, but found his writing pompous, overblown and boring. I turned him down because of the writing, though he was convinced it was because I disagreed with him about policy. What he didn't understand was that I was desperate for good writers on the right (Aharoni was a case in point), but unwilling to publish bad writing.
