Repeat Offender

NEXTBOOK — November 26, 2008

Was there ever a more favorable time to be an American in Germany? I wasn’t here during the Berlin airlift as the sky filled with small parachuted packages of raisins floating down from U.S. bomber planes. So maybe then. But the symbolic weight of Obama’s win seemed to redeem us all in German eyes. On the eve of the election, the editor of Der Spiegel captured the consensus when he said that America was seen here by most as “a horrendous country that betrays its own values every few years.” Overnight, it seemed, this disdain had changed into jaw-dropping awe. My German landlord sent me an excited email in the early hours of November 5, writing, “A new period of american government style! I’m keen to see the changes in your home country!” The best part? That broken toilet my wife and I have been bugging him to change? “Now I’m refreshed and fit again. So on Friday or Monday the Hausmeister will pass to see and judge the toilet ‘system’ . . .”

Underneath all these good vibes, though, I detected something else as well: jealousy. The scene from Chicago earlier this month was so moving because it signaled that American democracy had matured. It was a giant collective stride—through tens of millions of pulled levers—toward overcoming our nation’s greatest birth defect. For Germans, as anyone spending time here could quickly tell you, there is a constant and obsessive self-examination of their own burdensome history. Not a night passes without a Holocaust documentary on television. Memorials abound. Schools have integrated the war into all levels of their curriculum. Yet, still, this heightened awareness does not seem to have lessened the fear of an ever-resurgent anti-Semitism. There will most likely never be a Jewish chancellor here to provide, in one fell swoop, an immediate rebuke to the past. But that’s not the problem. It’s the nature of anti-Semitism itself that always seems to be shifting. And a little-covered debate that roiled the German parliament this past month—overshadowed, as most things were, by the Obamania—showed once again the slipperiness of the particular prejudice Germans are fated to continue confronting.

They That Were Lost

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW — October 12, 2008

In the eighth century B.C., a hundred years before the Judeans were dropped by the river of Babylon, a different Jewish tribe, the Israelites, were also marched out of their ancient kingdom to begin a long exile. Unlike their Baghdadi brethren who would go on to write the Talmud, these Jews would spend the next 2,700 years isolated in the small mountain villages of Kurdistan. “They that were lost,” as the prophet Isaiah described them, mostly illiterate peasant farmers, their long history and distinct language almost completely unrecorded.

Lost, that is, until Yona Beh Sabagha, the very last bar mitzvah in the bustling Kurdish border town of Zakho. Little did he know it in 1950, but the burden of being the last would define his whole life. Kurdish Jewry in Iraq would soon end as 18,000 people left for Israel, escaping the backlash triggered by the Jewish state’s founding. With them, they took Aramaic, Jesus’ tongue and once the lingua franca of the Middle East, which persisted in Kurdistan even after Arabic conquered the region. As Yona experienced his family’s decline in Israel — his father, once a prosperous merchant in Zakho, was reduced to manual labor as members of the Kurdish community were maligned as primitives — preserving the dying language became his mission. The boy who spent every morning in Zakho’s synagogue watching his grandfather, the town cloth-dyer, lost in ecstatic prayer, grew up to become a respected academic who wrote the definitive dictionary of Neo-Aramaic, the last phase in the language’s evolution.

Dropped Ball

NEXTBOOK — September 24, 2008

The owners of the Jets and Giants football teams decided last week to reject a bid by the German insurance company Allianz for naming rights to their new Meadowlands stadium. It seemed there was little else they could do after the New York Times reminded everyone that this was the company that, among other wartime sins, allowed the Nazis to take out an insurance policy on Auschwitz. New Yorkers (and the tabloids, screaming in their name) couldn’t understand how the owners—especially the Tisch family, fifty percent stake holders in the Giants—hadn’t anticipated the emotional blowback.

Here in Germany, no one really seemed all that interested in the story—neither the Jews nor anyone else. From over here, it’s the persistence of such a reflexive response that seemed unusual. The head of a major Jewish institution here hadn’t even heard about the brouhaha when I asked him his thoughts. After all, this isn’t the first stadium Allianz has tried to brand. One of the largest and best-known soccer venues in Germany is Allianz Arena, home of Bayern Munich. It was named in 2006 without so much as a single editorial in opposition.

Will of Iron, Heart of Stone

FORWARD — August 21, 2008

Golda
By Elinor Burkett
HarperCollins, 496 pages, $27.95.

My moment of eye-openng disillusion with Golda Meir came early on in Elinor Burkett’s new biography of the female premier, titled simply “Golda.” The year was 1950, and Golda Meyerson, as she was then known, was nearing 60 and had just returned from her stint as Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. Her son, Menachem, off studying the cello in Yugoslavia, was having marital problems with his new wife. She was pregnant and insisted the couple return to Jeru-salem to have the baby. Meir assumed her daughter-in-law was trying to sabotage her son’s promising music career, so she decided that, as punishment, she would ignore her first grandchild. The baby girl that was born that year, Meira Meyerson, had a mild case of Down syndrome. Meir refused to see her. The child, she demanded, should be institutionalized. “Golda was like a stone,” an old friend confessed to Burkett.

That Israel’s fourth prime minister was a stone is not news. Any of the half-dozen biographies already published, or even her own ghostwritten 1976 memoir, “My Life,” attest to what could generously be described as an iron will. And for a woman who shoved her way into the innermost circle of Labor Zionist leadership, a notoriously egomaniacal group of fiery political men, one can almost forgive her some spitefulness and coldness along the way. Certainly, one wouldn’t want to judge Meir any more or less harshly than her male cohorts. What Burkett tries (and succeeds in) doing is taking a sympathetic but unapologetic look in order to discover what happened when her life intersected with power. It’s not pretty. Anyone expecting the “part Superwoman, a dash of Emma Goldman, a smidgen of Nelson Mandela, all wrapped up in the warmth of our grandmothers,” as Burkett describes the popular image of Meir, won’t find her here. In her place is a tragic, lonely, sickly figure, a terrible mother who cuckolded and neglected her husband, alienated her loved ones and often terrorized her closest friends.

A Mention in Village Voice Blog

Ward Harkavy referred to my 2005 article on the Israeli media in a July 24, 2008 blog post:

Haaretz is a lefty paper, but it is one of three major dailies in Israel. As Gal Beckerman noted in his fascinating inside look at Israeli journalism in the May 2005 Columbia Journalism Review:

Haaretz’s news and editorial pages have serious impact. No one in the power elite can afford to ignore its daily, unsigned editorial. Like the New York Times, Le Monde, and the Guardian, it sees itself as a player, one with a distinct perspective on the country’s often existential dilemmas.

You don’t have to be Jewish to love Beckerman’s piece, which is long, but worthwhile.

Divided Soul

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW — MARCH/APRIL 2008

Rian Malan’s one and only meeting with J.M. Coetzee took place in the early 1990s. Malan greatly esteemed his fellow South African writer, and when Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in 2003, he declared that the laureate had “described, more truly than any other, what it was to be white and conscious in the face of apartheid’s stupidities and cruelties.” But what had struck Malan when he came face-to-face with Coetzee was, as he told The New Statesman in 1999, his asceticism. Coetzee was “a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once.”

The writer is always a result of the man. With Coetzee, this intensity of focus and denial of his own ego have allowed him to create characters whose internal conflicts are perfectly attuned to those of white South Africa. From Waiting for the Barbarians to Disgrace, his novels are complex allegories in which psychology is presented not in its messy, everyday incarnation, but under the intense magnification of the author’s microscope. His protagonists are invented for the specific purpose of illustrating a moral crisis.

I’m not saying that Coetzee’s characters are representational stick figures. But they don’t seem like people you would sit down with to drink a beer. Rian Malan, on the other hand, does seem like such a person—you might take a drag from his cigarette, too. Yet his moral crisis was no less acute than Coetzee’s. And in his only book, My Traitor’s Heart, published just as the drama of apartheid’s final demolition was taking place in 1990, Malan’s project was no different from Coetzee’s. He meant to answer the question posed in his epigraph, taken from a Boer reggae song: “How do I live in this strange place?”

Big Mo’ Is Tempting…

CJR.ORG — March 5, 2008

“It depends what your definition of ‘win’ is,” said Keith Olbermann on MSNBC last night as he watched the Ohio returns roll in. And, in a phrase, Olbermann delineated the journalistic quandary. How to reconcile what clearly looked like a win for Hillary Clinton—with the obligatory rain of confetti and triumphal speech—with the reality that her victories in three of the four primaries yesterday did not really even dent Barack Obama’s commanding lead in delegates, the factor that, more than any other, will determine who secures the nomination in Denver.

As I wrote earlier this week, the days leading up to Tuesday’s contest saw pundits moving away from delegate-counting and talking more about momentum and whether Hillary could recapture it. This was a framing of the race that clearly favored Clinton, since no matter how well she did last night, there was no way she was going to overtake Obama in hard numbers. Her last, best hope was to start looking like a winner again, even if she wasn’t any closer to reaching the magic delegate number. With tangible victories, she could spin a new narrative that portrayed Obama as unable to seal the deal and herself as more capable of beating John McCain.

Big Mo is Back

CJR.ORG — March 3, 2008

After the split decision in Iowa and New Hampshire, when it became abundantly clear that the race for the Democratic nomination would be tighter than any in recent memory, the pundits and news analysts begin doing a lot of math. The dominant conventional wisdom was that this contest was going to turn into a fight for every delegate, both the super kind and your average, everyday kind. “It’s all about the delegates,” we kept hearing on the numerous Super Tuesdays of the last two months. In many ways this was a real departure from how primary races had been covered in the past. Over the past thirty years, the question was always, who has the momentum? Who’s got the money and the attention and the look of a winner? In the past, there was always one person who fit that bill after the first few races. This time around, though, with the two candidates switching back and forth as underdog and frontrunner, the less glamorous but more exact science of delegate counting became the lens through which the fight for the nomination needed to be viewed.

President Bloomberg: RIP

CJR.ORG — February 28, 2008

“I am not — and will not be — a candidate for president.” Can we finally, finally, without any second thoughts, take Michael Bloomberg at his word? The man has been trying to get the press to understand for a long time that he is not running for president, but journalists and editors (based mostly here in New York, I might add) have refused to take the hint. They’ve acted instead like hopelessly romantic Cyranos, declaring their love in long, glowing articles recited underneath the balcony at Gracie Mansion. I can only hope that now, after the imprimatur of a New York Times op-ed by the mayor titled, “I’m Not Running for President…,” that we can move on.

Stengel’s Wrong About Endorsements

CJR.ORG — February 26, 2008

Every election cycle, it seems, someone emerges to criticize the fact that newspaper editorial boards endorse presidential candidates. This year’s critic is Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor. In an editorial in this week’s issue, he laments the fact that in 2004, 418 newspapers ran endorsement (29 percent of all American papers) and that this year, with a contentious race, the endorsement process is bound to continue. He would be just the latest kvetcher in a long line of them, except he has an unusual take on the ills of endorsing. Usually, when people like Al Neuharth, the mastermind behind USA Today, complain about this seasonal ritual, it’s to rage against newspapers who think it’s their place to tell their readers what to think. In the last national election, Neuharth proposed abandoning endorsements and instead running editorials about the candidates that “debate, but not dictate” a choice.

Stengel agrees but he also attacks from a different direction. He argues that we are living through a period when “the credibility and viability of the press are at all-time lows,” partly because readers are questioning “the objectivity of newspapers in particular and the media in general.” It doesn’t make sense, then, to further erode readers’ trust in a newspaper’s objectivity by making a concrete choice of one candidate over another. It will cause readers to be “dubious,” about whether, for example, “the reporter who covers Hillary Clinton can be objective if his newspaper has endorsed Barack Obama.” What he’s saying, basically, is that when a newspaper tells readers who it thinks is best choice to lead the country, which, Stengel rightly notes is “the most personal decision we make as citizens,” it only ends up “undermining the very basis for their business, which is impartiality.”