I nominate The Jewish Week editor Gary Rosenblatt for a prestigious Rockower "Most Overrated" Award. Not one journalist for a Jewish publication has been willing to criticize Gary on-the-record to me. Gary holds too much power, and too many purse strings, and is just too nice a guy. All they want to tell me is that he is the Dean of Jewish Journalism. This is how Neil Rubin puts it:
"The current editor of that paper, Gary Rosenblatt, is widely seen as the profession's dean of ethics and fearless of reporting whatever the news may happen to be."
Now, either Gary Rosenblatt is a god like figure unworthy of criticism, or the Jewish journalists I spoke to are cowardly.
Anyway, today things changed. I spoke to Yossi Abramowitz, the first guy with the balls to put his criticisms of Gary on the record.
Yossi brought Gary his JNF expose in 1996 and Gary told him to get lost, and subsequently blackballed him from the paper. The series was nominated for a Pulitzer and led to a complete overhaul in how the JNF did business. It lost $12 million in donations that year. Twelve Jewish papers ran Yossi's JNF story but not The Jewish Week (though they did put their top investigative reporter on the story, Larry Cohler-Esses).
