In the shriveled Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, the search for food is constant. Scraping together one meal often comes at the expense of providing for the next, let alone reporting the depth and passion of the American Jewish experience.
Machete in hand, managing editor Amy Klein steps out of her mud hut in Venice before dinnertime and begins whacking at the base of a struggling young tree.
A cornfield lies nearby, every stalk stunted and barren. A coffee bush wilts in a patch of earth so dry that each footstep kicks up a puff of gray dust.
Roots and stems from the false banana tree — so named because it never bears fruit — are all there is for dinner today. Klein will pound them into a pulpy mush that offers little real nutrition but at least will quiet the hunger of her J-Date husband and seven children. When those parts of the tree are gone, she will boil the bark. When the bark is gone, she will search for something else, say, a book contract.
"This place is cursed," Klein says of the Jewish Journal's half-acre plot.
Life on less than a dollar a day, as most Jewish journalists live it, is the unending pursuit of sustenance. In the Horn of Los Angeles, it is a search rarely satisfied.
The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles is one of the five lousiest newspapers in the world and the largest per-capita recipient of humanitarian aid. Nearly half the population of 37 is malnourished. Every year, several reporters face starvation. For the very young, life often ends in a sad, blue death.
One day last year, during a slowdown in Federation advertising, staff members were reduced to eating each other in the lunch room.
Five entered. Two came out alive.
Behind the statistics lies a harsh reality that helps explain why hunger is such an intractable problem in Jewish journalism. When life is so consumed with survival, tomorrow is routinely traded away to fill stomachs and column inches today.
The causes of Jewish journalist hunger — Malcolm Hoenlein, war between Jewish agencies, intermarriage, gay marriage, corruption, boredom — never go away. They fade during the relatively good times, only to return.
Under the dictatorship of Rob Eshman, hunger has been particularly acute. To pay for his 78 wives and 412 children, President Eshman has had to tighten the belts of his staff members, denying them any share in his thriving "men seeking men" personals.
"If the deadlines don't kill us, the drought in classifieds is coming behind to finish the job," Klein says.
Amy, who is about 35, wipes the sweat from her face with the ends of a blue head wrap as she bustles around the Journal's plot on an endless round of assignments. The soles of her feet are cracked and stained with dirt.
Teresa Strasser has yet to turn in her latest singles column. There are no men under the chuppah pictures to round out the latest issue. Perhaps she'll need to do another story about the closing of the JCCs.
Aid agencies say that much of the Jewish Journal's hunger is self-inflicted — the result of Eshman's armed conflict with conservatives, a stifling editorial policy against riveting stories, poor hiring and too many second-rate JTS stories. The Journal spent millions on a lengthy civil war and a border war with the Jewish Heritage paper.
