By Jonathan Mark

When Yiddish papers still were dailies, and we were young enough to have grandfathers, my zaydeh took ill and asked, upon entering the hospital, that we save him his papers. My dad or I would go to the newsstand, get the old Yiddish broadsheets, and stash them in the car's trunk. The old man grew weaker, the trunk filled, then the back seat filled too. When he died, it was hard, but throwing out his papers was when we cried.

Then the Jewish papers died, too. The trouble wasn't that just that the old Jews were dying, what was dying was the art of the paper. Unlike my grandfather's generation, Jews stopped thinking of the Jewish paper as "my paper," as something to save if you missed a week. There weren't writers to love, or that you'd want to punch in the nose (but writers you'd miss, if gone), or stories to clip or bring up at Shabbos lunch.

As Gary Rosenblatt wrote when he came to revive The Jewish Week ten years ago, in a world of sinister threats to the Jewish people, the sheer boredom of Jewish life -- more exactly, the boredom with which newspapers chose to tell the spectacularly unboring story of the Jewish people -- was as sinister a threat as any.

Garrison Keillor, of Prarie Home Companion, speaks of a newspaper trend, even to this day, away from two-fisted, back-alley story telling, replaced instead by articles like "What Is Good About Our Community and Our People," a lot of "unreadable 9th grade term papers about How People From Many Lands Are Working Together To Solve Problems In Our Neighborhoods."

Newspapers, said Keillor, must "depend on crime reporting, exposure of government scandal, and a few irreverent columnists: that's meat and potatoes."

Instead, in the Jewish community, we got sermons. Literally, Jewish journalism, and religion writing in the big city dailies, was reduced to repackaged sermons. In Jewish papers articles were afflicted with a garden-party tone reminiscent of polite synagogue bulletins in which, at every event, "a wonderful time was had by all." All that, even in the most tumultuous decades in Jewish history that saw us go from refugees and genocide to the attempted Zionist redemption and a Jewish return to history.

These were decades that also saw unparalleled social disruption, with bedrock religious traditions collapsing along with a sense of a common Jewish civilization. It was a remarkable Jewish story-there just wasn't a Jewish Week, or any other decent Jewish newspaper in those days, to tell the story, to frame it.

In the glory days of Yiddish papers there was passion, purpose and intimacy - so much so that readers said the magic words: This is "my paper." Not "a paper," but "my paper," not just read on the subways and discarded, but read on the sofa on Friday nights and brought to the table for Shabbos lunch. Jewish writers were accosted on the street, and some writers were even loved.

There was no "my paper" when I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s. When I started to write, in the late 1970s, there were good Jewish writers, like Paul Cowan and others, but they were working in non-Jewish publications. In 1979 I sold some pieces to The New Yorker and the Village Voice, Jewish pieces that non-Jewish publications thought were fine enough, even as there were no Jewish newspapers to write for.

At the same time, Yossi Klein Halevi was writing brilliantly in the Voice about the uniquely Jewish intersection of Borough Park and East Village streets. In 1980, Halevi had an idea for a new Jewish newspaper, New Jewish Times, and he recruited me and Israel Lemberg, now a CNN producer in Jerusalem, to edit it with him. The idea -- and it was shared elsewhere in Jewish newspapering, as in every good generation -- was to break the rules and start all over again.

"We looked for Jewish nightmares," remembers Halevi.

We looked for dreams, lost and found, Jews with stories to tell. Into the pages of New Jewish Times came coverage of Jewish murder cases; accounts from homeless chasids; Russian Jews who were beat up in Kiev; yeshiva dropouts; Satmar loan sharks; Yiddish characters who whiskey-spiked the coffee of pretty women in the Hungarian pastry shop. We wrote of Israelis conquering their new frontier, and old school paranoids (or so we thought then) who imagined a world of retro Jew-haters.

We did interviews not just with communal presidents but with underground fugitives, such as Abbie Hoffman (who was above-ground posing for our subscription ads). On the editorial staff were veterans of the publishing world, and young unknowns such as Candace Bushnell, who went on to create Sex In The City. To reach non-communal types, New Jewish Times worked up a radio program on WBAI, featuring editors and guests.

Halevi recalled that the office, a large loft on lower Fifth Avenue, became "a drop-in center for people with obscure obsessions," Jews who kept the passion if not the practice, outlaws and kabbalists, Jews with nowhere to go but who saw in the paper a hometown, the old neighborhood.

We were far from outlaws, ourselves. On the contrary, we saw Jewish journalism as something sacred, beyond profession. If in light of the last century it is our calling to see every Jew as of infinite value; if Israel, and making the world safe for Jews -- uniting Jews, and nourishing Jewish possibility -- is the defining challenge of this generation, if the media is the theater for how this story is told, then reporting that story in a uniquely Jewish newspaper, and making Jewish papers financially viable, is equally sacred, too.

New Jewish Times didn't last much more than a year, but around the country new newspapers, such as The Jewish Week (refashioned in 1979, but actually a descendent of several merged Jewish papers dating back to The American Hebrew in 1879) - began taking this cause to a higher level, and going higher beyond that still awaits us.

One challenge is telling the Jewish story in a way that is compelling as a story, as journalism, not just as a p.r. handout. For young Jewish writers coming out of yeshiva, the Torah itself was the model for how to write, even how to write subversively. Of course, much about God is a mystery. We don't know what He looks like. We don't know what He sounds like. But we know the way God writes. Imagine in the dark ages of Jewish journalism, assigning a profile on Father Abraham. How pompous and pious it would have been. But look how God, Himself, chooses to write the Abraham story. The very first quote attributed to Abraham in the Torah is him saying to Sarah, "Now look, I know you're beautiful. When the Egyptians see you, and know you're my wife, they'll kill me but keep you alive."

That was the first New Jewish Journalism. Some are offended by that kind of approach to writing -- but 70 nations rejected the Torah, too, before the Jewish people said yes.

In the Biblical spirit, newspapers have become the prophet speaking truth to the king or high priest, because without a prophet - or an editorial - not only is God voiceless but the people are, too.

The world these days can seem like the opening verses of Genesis, "unformed and void with darkness over the face of the deep." That fear always was right below the surface, even in better times. The first issue of New Jewish Times featured nothing but a nuclear mushroom cloud and the headline, "Next Year in Jerusalem." It's seems less crazy now than it was 20 years ago, but for Israeli children the Purim mask gave way to a gas mask.

What would you write about if the world was coming to an end? My inspiration was Emanuel Ringelblum and his band of brothers in the Warsaw Ghetto. They couldn't put out a Jewish paper, but they did the next best thing. Meeting once a week, and calling themselves "Oneg Shabbos" - with equal parts sarcasm and sentimentality - they took to amassing a weekly archive of the Jewish people. Oneg Shabbos collected everything, the ephemeral, the ethereal, Hebrew candy wrappers and chronicles of hunger; children's poems and dead men's paintings; ghetto theater programs and maps of Treblinka. It was essentially a Jewish newspaper delivered not to your mailbox but to the tin boxes and metal milk cans that they buried in the rubble. Who would find it? Who'd be their audience? Would there still be Jews in the world? For Oneg Shabbos, the act of gathering and telling the Jewish story was heroic enough.

At Ground Zero, in 2001, we had an "Oneg Shabbos" experience all our own. In the ruins, people found, and The Jewish Week wrote about, the fluttering papers that carried to earth a yeshiva's tuition bill; a letter from a summer camp; stories of people worth knowing -- more worth knowing than we might have supposed the day before. In the rubble, someone found a yarmulke inscribed from a wedding, Sept. 9. The ordinary is now extraordinary. In fact, it was extraordinary all along.

Our lives are fragile and fleeting. We are the generation that history will have to walk through to keep the Jewish story alive. These are the days in which Jews are looking to "my paper," a Jewish paper, to tell us who we are, where we're going, and what we have seen and loved.



I asked Jonathan Mark about my interview with Yossi Abramowitz and whether Jonathan was the one who chewed him out over the JNF story (it was not). He replies:

I don't remember having anything to do with any of the JNF stories, outside of office conversations. I may have spoken to Yossi at the time, perhaps to explain my understanding of the paper's position, but it was never within the realm of my responsibilities to veto or authorize a major investigative piece, or these kind of news items. Those responsibilities strictly belong to the managing editor and the editor-publisher, alone. So I doubt I chewed anyone out, as I was peripheral to Yossi's interaction with the paper.

But the idea that one paper publishes what another paper won't is why I don't think of any Jewish paper as being "in competition" with another. I think of the Forward and anyone else, in blog or paper, as brothers-in-arms, each of us better because of the other, just different pieces on the chessboard, but the same color. The idea that someone else would print what another won't creates a pressure on editors that offsets the many other pressures that are at work. Federation or not, each of our papers, and blogs, too, has someone, or something they don't want to touch, or choose not to go with after honest journalistic deliberation. But the more of us that are writing, the more likely the Great Story of the Jewish People will be told, somewhere. I actually hate it when anyone, particularly in Jewish journalism, thinks of Jewish papers as rivals to be undermined. That kind of thinking is in the interests of businessmen, not Jewish writers and journalists. The competition, as far as I'm concerned, are only those that don't read, don't care, don't write, and don't encourage. I don't remember the details of Yossi's experience, but for all my loyalty to The Jewish Week and respect for its choices, I'm only glad that he had other places to go and other success along the way.

Who funded New Jewish Times?


Regarding my rants on Yossi Klein Halevi, Jonathan Mark responds:



















