Presidential Character and Scholarly Priorities

 If you mean to foster tolerance and want to protect the rights of people who hold minority viewpoints, mobilizing the masses, whether based on racial identity or ideology, is not the way to go.

The people left to their own devices.

THE ANNUAL conference of the American Political Science Association will take place in cyberspace on September 9 – 13.  This year’s theme is “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization.”

In a chilling commentary, conference planners caution that longstanding certainty about the US Constitution as “solid and prescient enough to thwart — or at the least contain — the more authoritarian impulses of citizens and elected officials” has been called into question by the presidency of Donald Trump.

I could quibble with the rest of the statement’s woke tone and presuppositions but not with its bottom line conclusion: “America is as polarized now as it was on the cusp of the Civil War because of forces which polarize Americans into ideological, hyper-partisan camps.”

“Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization” has a catchy ring to it. However, in searching for a way forward, the program chairs ask a misguided question: “How inclusive and representative of our country’s diversity are democracy’s institutions and practices?” Pretty diverse, actually. The US Congress has more women than ever before (131); there are 53 African American House Members and three in the Senate; 51 Latinos in the House, 20 House Members who are of Asian or Indian origin, plus an unprecedented four American Indians in the House. The percentage of people of color on the Federal bench is for most jurisdictions in the double digits.

The question political scientists should be asking is: How can we reimagine representative democracy for the remainder of the 21t century – along the constitutional lines envisioned by James Madison.

The Madisonian model of democracy has no greater nemesis today than President Donald Trump. By dint of his character, Trump has manipulated the demos, exploited differences, and spurred destabilization. If you do not believe me dust off Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, take a fresh look at Dye and Zeigler’s The Irony of Democracy, and re-read The Federalist Papers, particularly No. 10.

The point is if you mean to foster tolerance and want to protect the rights of people who hold minority viewpoints, mobilizing the masses, whether based on racial identity or ideology, is counterindicated. This lesson is something America’s responsible elites need to relearn – fast.

Trump’s presidency has played out as foretold. Americans knew about his character before Election Day 2016. Yet 62,980,160 voters put a pyromaniac in charge of an already combustible situation. When Americans contrasted Trump’s character with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s, maybe they saw difference without distinction. They were sorely mistaken. Clinton’s character may be out of kilter. Trump’s is putrefied. Or perhaps by voting for Trump, Americans were saying character does not much matter.

In our dopamine-drenched social media environment, Trump succeeds by mobilizing his doltish supporters even as he goads the hordes who oppose him into self-defeating militancy.

Alongside Trump drones are his more rational enablers who perfunctorily concede that the president’s character is problematic but argue that his policies are worth the discomfiture. I suppose they mean trying to pack the Supreme Court with justices inclined to re-criminalize abortion; or using regulatory authority to reverse irksome environmental laws, or just plain trying to keep America as white as possible for as long as possible.

To be fair, some of his policies on trade, illegal border crossings, and NATO are hardly outlandish at face value.

Like a broken clock, even Donald Trump can’t be wrong 24/7. 

It would be churlish of me as an Israeli not to admit what a relief it is to have a denizen in the White House who does not instinctively challenge every IDF military operation or decry every Jewish home constructed over the 1949 Armistice Line. It is fitting that the US Embassy is now in Jerusalem and that President Barak Obama’s 2013 Iran deal was reversed. Too bad that Trump’s administration seems no less helpless than its predecessors in preventing the mullahs from lurching toward an atomic bomb. And I shudder to think where Israelis would be if the PLO and Hamas had cleverly finessed their response to Trump’s deal of the century instead of rejecting it outright. 

I get that Trump’s America is understandably finished with endless wars in the Middle East. Still, as salesman-in-chief, Trump is delighted to flog F-35s and EA-18G Growlers to the UAE, Patriots to Kuwait, an old guided-missile frigate to Bahrain – and just about anything that goes boom to the Saudis. A welcome byproduct of this transactional approach to US foreign policy is that Israel’s zero-sum conflict with the Palestinian Arabs has been dissociated from its bridgeable differences with the broader Arab world.

Trump’s policies, for better or worse, tend to be divulged in a slapdash, circuitous manner that reflects his disordered personality. Staffers are left scrambling to justify his impetuous actions after the fact.   

His policies and character are intrinsically linked – as they have been for all previous presidents.

September 12 marks the 16^th anniversary of the death of the scholar who literally wrote the book on presidents and character, James David Barber. What better time than to revisit The Presidential Character – Predicting Performance in the White House, first published in 1972.

Barber, who was the chairman of the political science department at Duke University until 1995, was renowned for blending psychology and political science. He hopefully figured that people would factor a candidate’s character in deciding how to vote. “If there is such a thing as extraordinary sanity, it is needed nowhere so much as in the White House,” he wrote decades before Americans sent a self-described “very stable genius” there.

In 2016, voters seemingly ignored Barber’s advice to look for patterns of behavior before casting their ballots. They didn’t have to know that Donald Trump grew up in a home with a mother who was cold and withdrawn, and a father who withheld his love as punishment for perceived failure. A family where cheating and bullying were endorsed, and introspection, soul-searching, and apologizing were inexcusable signs of weakness to intuit that Trump’s personality was psychologically stunted.

Naturally, a person’s character is not determinative; it is not destiny. Humans have the capacity for growth. Or, as Barber put it, “starts, do not define finishes.” Still, he hypothesized that a president’s early life would be an essential element among a confluence of factors affecting presidential style, specifically: rhetoric, interpersonal relations, and homework. “Character is the way the president orients himself toward life not for the moment, but enduringly,” wrote Barber.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman added in Emotional Intelligence that “The bedrock of character is self-discipline; the virtuous life, as philosophers since Aristotle have observed, is based on self-control” to be able to set aside self-centeredness, to do real listening and to allow yourself to be empathetic. For Barber, character is what emerges when who we are comes up against what we must deal with in daily life. Personality and temperament matter because citizens look to the president for reassurance in times of crisis. The president ought to be able to personify the better angels of our nature.

Barber categorized presidents roughly speaking from Theodore Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter (in a revised edition). His classifications were anchored in two criteria: whether these individuals were active performers and whether they took pleasure from their job.

As presidential types went, Barber judged Thomas Jefferson as active-positive, John Adams as active-negative, James Madison as passive positive, and George Washington passive-negative.

Trump, who denigrates opponents as “low energy,” spends chunks of his days in frenzied TV watching and tweet storming clearly derives little pleasure from the presidency. Given his apparent low self-esteem and grandiose schemes, most observers identify him as active-negative.

Barber had found that active-negative presidents do not try to sway those who disagree with them. Their rigidity impels them to double-down on failing policies. They sometimes work themselves to exhaustion, become isolated and paranoid. Anger is a constant. “As the process of rigidification moves along, the President finds among his enemies an individual who, to him, personifies the threat. That person becomes the focus for the President’s aggression,” according to Barber. 

Active-negatives do little or no presidential homework. They have no use for anyone who offers an adverse opinion; total loyalty is demanded. The glass always looks half-empty. So as not to hurt them emotionally – since they are fragile and desperate for adoration – bullied advisers tell them only what they want to hear. Tormented, they cannot relish victory. They find it hard to show compassion. These individuals assume complex problems can be solved by backslapping, flattery, and personal appeals.

Barber published before Donald Trump entered politics, but he analyzed him uncannily: “His natural medium was the world of the deal, the world where a man at the right place and time could patch together a bundle of power, doing some good for himself and some for others at the same time.”

What active-negatives have in common is “strong deprivations of self-esteem” in childhood as a result of “parents who denigrated or abandoned them.” Elect an active-negative character, and you run the risk turning one person’s tragedy into a massive national and social catastrophe, warned Barber.

He might also have added that you could be unleashing a pedagogical catastrophe. Besides the immense power Donald Trump has as president, he also sets an example for children. Remember Vladimir Lenin’s mantra: “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” 

Think about what Trump could do with four more years.

 

'Graving'

When does religion crossover into superstition? And when does pilgrimage verge on idolatry?

I have been thinking about these questions because of the controversy surrounding the annual Haredi-dominated pilgrimage to Uman.

Each year before Rosh Hashana during the Hebrew month of Elul, thousands of (mostly but not exclusively) Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox pilgrims board flights at Ben-Gurion Airport to pay homage at the grave of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav in Uman, Ukraine. A few men spend the entire High Holy Days near the shrine, leaving their wives and little ones behind.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has struck Israel hard and its ultra-Orthodox community, incredibly hard, Ronni Gamzu, the government’s chief Corona coordinator, has been lobbying vehemently to thwart the 2020 pilgrimage. 

Shas and United Torah Judaism, the ultra-Orthodox parties upon which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s political survival hinges, charge that Gamzu exceeded his mandate when he directly contacted Ukrainian authorities urging them to prevent Israeli pilgrims from visiting the shrine. Haredi lawmakers demanded Gamzu be sacked.

Ultra-Orthodox pundits argued that God, not Prof. Gamzu, was best positioned to heal the sick. And anyway, they said, why should the secular have all the fun? They get to work out in gyms and protest Netanyahu policies and alleged corruption in nightly rallies with no social distancing while Haredi life has been comparatively restricted. 

The Haredim feel they are being asked to take Covid-19 more seriously than other Israelis, and it is just not fair. Israelis famously loathe being made suckers – individually or tribally.

Netanyahu, who has shown a capacity for duplicity, messaged that he was siding with the ultra-Orthodox against Gamzu. Offstage, he pleaded with Ukraine to forbid the entry of Israeli pilgrims. This officials in Kyiv did on August 26, as Israel’s Covid-19 death toll was nearing 1,000.

Some pilgrims took no chances, left early, and are already ensconced in Uman. Others carrying non-Israeli passports will try to sneak in via indirect connections.

Is it not folly to adamantly insist on making an international pilgrimage during a pandemic that has claimed over 800,000 lives worldwide? As it is many ultra-Orthodox sages in Israel, the US, and the UK have died of Corona. So why would any father, son, brother, or husband consider putting their families at risk? Why do Haredi politicians notably Agudat’s Yaakov Litzman (Ashkenazi Hassidic) and Shas’s Aryeh Deri (Sephardic) push for pilgrimages even after the community’s bitter experience at the beginning of the plague?

Part of the answer is that Litzman and Deri cannot ignore the wishes for “normalcy now” coming from clerical powerbrokers and rank and file constituents. The grand rabbis and their coteries are no more ignorant about Covid-19 than the US president, but like him, they find the pandemic a drag.

And like for everyone else, the public health danger must be balanced with other needs, including for Haredim, the imperative of maintaining tribal discipline and cohesion. The Haredi lifestyle depends not only on insularity from society-at-large but on maintaining internal solidarity, which requires devotees to gather in numbers in synagogues, wedding halls, yeshivot, and on pilgrimages. 

If, as Aristotle said, man is a social animal Haredi Man is utterly dependent on his communal personages, structures, and institutions to sustain, legitimate, and perpetuate a way of life.

Naturally, matters of a pecuniary nature play a role. The ultra-Orthodox world’s sub-economy is not immune to the financial blows wrought by Covid-19. There is legitimate as well as illicit money to be made for Haredim and locals in organizing pilgrimages (and pleasures) in Uman.

In Judaism, “graving” is not in and of itself idolatry. Paying homage at graves has long been a fixture of diasporic Judaism, often involving arduous journeys to the Holy Land. That said, fixating on a faraway crypt during a global pandemic seems reckless. 

I am not disparaging cemetery visits. Visiting the graves of loved ones provides succor. Personally, I am less keen on pilgrimages to the graves of saintly rabbis or purported shrines of biblical figures. Yet for many, such journeys deliver a connection to forebearers, solidify our shared heritage, and offer emotional-spiritual comfort.

Perhaps the most revered burial shrine in Judaism is Hebron’s Machpelah, where tradition says Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are buried along with the Matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. The Machpelah anyway has profound significance in Jewish civilization because it is situated in Hebron ancient Israel’s first capital.

When Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav went on his Holy Land pilgrimage, it might have been to Hebron and to the Mount of Olives overlooking the Temple Mount. He may have also visited the tomb of Shimon ha-Tzadik, a Second Temple-era high priest mentioned in Pirkei Avot (1:2) as “among the last of the Great Assembly.” Shimon is believed to be buried in what is nowadays the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah on the way to Mount Scopus.

The 2nd-century’s Simeon bar Yohai cited many times in the Mishnah, and regarded in traditionalist circles as the author of the mystical Zohar attracts masses of pilgrims to his grave in Meron, especially on Lab B’Omer. This year too, notwithstanding Corona (and with an amber light from the Haredi-deferential Netanyahu government), thousands of the faithful trekked to his Galilee resting place.

Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem draws a steady flow of pilgrims. Bratslav devotees have been known to spend the night at Joseph’s Tomb in PLO-controlled Nablus.

Outside Israel, significant gravesites dot the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and North America. But no shrine consistently draws more devotees than Rebbe Nachman in Uman, Ukraine, a city drenched in Jewish blood. Terrible pogroms took place there in the 1600 and 1700s. During the Holocaust, some 17,000 Jews were murdered in and around Uman.

Nachman (of Bratslav in Poland) lived in Uman for about a year before his death of tuberculosis at age 38 during Sukkot 1810. A great-grandson of the founder of Hassidism, the Ba’al Shem-Tov, Nachman pulls more visitors than his revered great-grandfather buried in Medzhybizh about 250 km. to the west.

Nachman encouraged his followers toward asceticism and fasting as attested by his fundamentalist followers in today’s Mea Shearim quarter in Jerusalem. A probable manic depressive, he also encouraged clapping, singing, dance, and ecstasy during prayer.

One of his contributions to Hassidism was to accentuate the Rebbe’s role as a conduit between his disciples and God. And he advocated hitbodedut or meditative self-isolation to draw closer to God. He taught: “It is very good to pour out your heart to God as you would to a true, good friend.” 

Such innovations led to disputes with competing clerics who charged him with messianic pretensions. It was these differences that forced him to relocate to Uman.

The branding of Nachman was accelerated by his leading disciple Nathan (Reb Noson) ben Naphtali Herz of Nemirow. He built the synagogue in Uman to perpetuate his teacher’s memory and instituted the annual pilgrimage around Rosh Hashanah. According to Noson, Rebbe Nachman promised to intercede in heaven on behalf of every person who prayed at his grave.

Nachman’s less-ascetic followers latched on to the happy-clappy side of his message. Some can be seen driving around randomly in dilapidated vans with souped-up loudspeakers. Between traffic lights, they pour out and dance to thump-thump-thump Bratslav trance music. 

Today, there is no one Bratslav Rebbe which has allowed some shady characters to emerge. Perhaps the most esteemed Bratslav court is headed by Jerusalem Grand Rabbi Yaakov Meir Shechter (a fierce anti-Zionist). 

The catchphrase “Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman” popularized by one of the Rebbe’s followers – and later by ubiquitous graffiti – is considered to have wonderous Kabbalistic powers when recited.

In pondering the demands of Nachman’s followers and fellow travelers to do their Uman pilgrimage pandemic notwithstanding, I ask myself what distinguishes their Judaism from mine, their “superstition” from my “tradition.”

To the extent that I have an answer it is that Jews are tribal people, and Judaism is a Big Tent civilization that encompasses contending mores and worldviews. The spectrum allows for rationality and fantasy. For me to call them superstitious and for them to call me God knows what.

Jewish law does not obligate graving, not even to visit the burial site of a loved one. However, the notion that the spirits of deceased relatives can intervene on our behalf is discussed in the Talmud (Taanit 16a) which was redacted around 350 CE. Rabbinic Judaism sought to balance the requirement that prayer be directed exclusively to God with our emotional need to hold on to the memories of loved ones. Rational traditionalism tends to discourage obsessive visits to gravesites, according to Maurice Lamm’s seminal The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning.

In contrast, fundamentalists tend to play up graving. The Lubavitcher Rebbe would spend several afternoons a week in meditation at the tomb of his father-in-law.

Personally, I find occasional visits to the graveyard cathartic. I keep deceased loved ones in my thoughts and prayers year-round. But I endeavor not to be obsessive about it.

So, maybe superstition is what happens when you catapult graving beyond what the sages of old intended. And idolatry is what happens when you make a fetish out of what should be symbolic. 

Faith ought to provide a spiritual, ethical, and social framework for living. This is not enough for fanatics who feel compelled to ostentatiously signal their piety. Religion becomes an excuse for obsessive-compulsive behavior.

Non-fundamentalist Judaism allows reverence for God to be expressed in nuanced modest ways. It strives for the golden mean. 

Faith is what you struggle with when you do not have the crutch of easy graving.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kamala Harris is Biden's 'third way' selection

The choice by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden of Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate is relatively good news – in that his list of potential VP candidates was reportedly restricted to only women of color.

That the choice of Harris vexes the party's hard-left is also mildly reassuring.

And in the natural course of events – all things being equal – Harris is now best positioned to be the first female president. Based on what we know about her at this stage -- America could do a lot worse.

Within the parameters of Democratic Party attitudes, her positions on Israel are mainstream, according to the liberal-leaning JTA. That said, Biden's Big Tent campaign will include visceral anti-Israel personalities.

Given the COVID-19/public health crisis, and the economic and political upheaval confronting America, I can only hope the next administration will cultivate its own garden rather than exhaust itself trying to solve the intractable zero-sum Palestinian Arab conflict with Israel.

From my Jerusalem vantage point it looks as if Americans are too often presented with false political choices -- either Marjorie Taylor Greene, a reactionary QAnon enthusiast or Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar who exemplifies the smug, woke, anti-Israelism of the so-called progressive camp. 

In the prescient words of Woody Allen: 

“More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

In a sense, Biden’s choice of Harris could turn out to be a third way -- circumventing hopelessness and extinction.

That said if Biden-Harris win -- as I hope they do -- their administration will likely operate in a toxic political environment which could be exponentially exacerbated if Donald Trump were to unleash a birther-like campaign to deny the legitimacy of the 2020 elections.

Huge swaths of Americans are mobilized in opposing extremist camps. 

The battle-ready masses (on both sides) are comprised to no small degree of many individuals who in the era before social media might have been kept entertained by more harmless pursuits (beer-guzzling or skateboarding) but are now fully empowered to run amok in angry crowds.  

America’s future does not look bright 85 days or so before its presidential elections. Neither open-minded liberalism nor common sense conservatism seems to hold much sway.

I hope Americans can somehow repair their shredded political culture; that they can breathe new life into the Madisonian model of representative democracy – separation of powers, checks and balances, tolerance, civil liberties, respect for minority views, and opposition to the tyranny of the majority.

Whether Biden-Harris are up to the task is dubious. But it is left to them to make an effort.

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT MATTERS? CORONAVIRUS & THE RABBIS

THEOLOGIANS SHOULD NOT LET THE GLOBAL HEALTH CRISIS GO TO WASTE

Like all civilizations, Judaism reacts – albeit cautiously – to seismic events.

Take for example the development of Hasidism which was partly a response to Cossack brutality in Poland. Or Hassidism’s Mitnagdim opponents who were reacting to Shabbetai Tzvi’s false messianism. Reform developed because modernizers worried Orthodoxy was ill-suited to take advantage of emancipation. Zionism was a reaction to the failure of that same emancipation. Likewise, Conservative Judaism was a reaction to Reform’s radical reformations.

And so on.

Combined with the unravelling of the American polity, the Coronavirus pandemic will transform Jewish civilization in ways we cannot yet envision. 

We are already seeing the sociological and psychological impact of Coronavirus on religious life. Worshippers miss gathering as a congregation. Even where services take place in person face masks, and physical distancing creates a stilted experience. That does not mean when all this is over, everyone will be content to resume their usual places in the pews.

A new coronavirus Responsa is developing in the classical Orthodox world. (Do you need to fast during times of plague? Are you allowed to drive home after taking someone to the hospital on Shabbes to avoid further exposure to the virus?) Meanwhile, some in the open Orthodox minority have joined with liberal streams in allowing Kaddish to be recited at weekday Zoom minyans.   

Much has also been written about the uptick in antisemitism. Unlike the Black Death which unleashed a wave of pogroms, the 21^st-century Coronavirus is accompanied mostly by increased dissemination of Jew-hating messages. These come from white and black supremacists as well as from PLO and other anti-Zionists. 

My interest here is less sociological, psychological, Halachic, or even political and more theological. An observant and erudite friend of mine thinks I am engaging in a fool’s errand. He says Random events happen, and not to make the pandemic a God issue. This sounds like a variation on Richard Elliott Friedman’s hypothesis that God has withdrawn from intervening in human affairs.

My sensible self finds the view that God is not a micromanager utilitarian. Yet I think this is a discussion worth having. Israel’s job is to struggle with God.

Perhaps the Coronavirus will change how people think about the Creator. Will the need for religious certainty increase? Or will God become irrelevant to more Jewish young people?

The competition is not necessarily better situated. The Humanist camp can offer uncertain science, meager pastoral support, and impermanent community. In a COVID-19 foxhole this may be insufficient. 

Perhaps that is why some who seldom pray are telling pollsters they have been appealing for divine intervention. 

Or, maybe, this in-your-face, social-media-saturated, 24/7 cable news covered pandemic will reinforce existing befuddlement.

As social scientists consider how people are thinking about God, theologians will want to focus on what religious convictions the crisis is raising. But also, what clerics are saying that is new.

You may have seen this poignant moment of religious self-criticism from Haredi Rabbi Gershom Edelstein head of the Ponevezh Yeshiva in B’nei Brak. Edelstein is a significant figure in the Lithuanian or non-Hassidic stream of ultra-Orthodoxy. His yeshivashe milieu leans toward a religiosity that is obsessive, insular, and puritanical.

So, when Edelstein engages in public self-criticism it is worth paying attention: “There’s something we have to understand here … the Haredim have died, in comparison to the general population, at a much higher percentage. Abroad as well, Haredim have died at a higher percentage than the rest of the [Jewish] public. What does this mean?”

His conclusion was that God judges the religious more harshly than Jews raised in the ignorance of what I would term the Muggle world.

On first blush, he was challenging Haredim to set a good example for ethical behavior and interpersonal relations or derech eretz. Was he insinuating that his followers should be more courteous behind the wheel or in the public square? To be kinder to each other in the synagogue and gentler to their wives and children at home?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Conceivably he was really calling for added stringencies in the Haredi lifestyle. New restrictions on permissible foods, additional layers on female bodies, and more frum signalling.

Some clerics were playing an altogether different blame game. Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Meir Mazuz, a Sephardi chauvinist of Tunisian ancestry, intuits that God is punishing humanity for its postmodernist social mores, especially regarding homosexuality.

Reform Judaism in contrast is blaming no one (well maybe Donald Trump) but does want its adherents to use the time of Corona to promote racial and social justice.  

The challenge is to promote universal social justice while not shape-shifting Judaism into something it isn't. 

The modern Orthodox theologian Rabbi Irving Greenberg seems to suggest that no one is to blame for the Coronavirus and it is not a punishment. However, perhaps the Lord is calling on humanity to take part in repairing the flaws of His unfinished creation (Tikun Olam).

At the very least we should not make things worse.

It is too much to ask non-Orthodox rabbis to preach that left-leaning political activism ought not to supersede Jewish ritual commitment. That Shabbat needs to be taken seriously, and that peoplehood and covenant is integral to Jewish civilization.

Is it too much to ask Orthodox rabbis to accept that ritual commitment ought not to supersede menschlichkeit? 

 אֵין תּוֹרָה, אֵין דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ. אִם אֵין דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ, אֵין תּוֹרָה

Jettison your religious haughtiness and accept (gasp) that no one, actually, has a Hotline to God.

Is it too much to ask?

Of course, it is too much! We are not on the cusp of the messianic era. 

I'd settle for a polemical ceasefire and for more of our spiritual leaders to set aside tribalism and partisanship -- just for the duration of the pandemic. 

What matters as our world slides into another miserable and suffocating wave of the Coronavirus? 

That is what we need to ask ourselves. 

And that is what our clerics need to ponder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Baby Boomer Curmudgeon to Gen Z: 'Read a Newspaper!'

You feel strongly about Black Lives Matter, climate change, democracy in Hong Kong or Israel’s West Bank policies? What do you really know about the issues that are close to your heart? How confident can you be in an opinion that is based on a chance swipe and scroll that engaged you for, like, 22 seconds? It takes months maybe years of thoughtful, critical, informed, and in-depth reading to formulate an educated opinion. 

No one said adulting would be easy.

Plenty of people older than you make no effort to be informed. Or they read and watch only what they agree with. But look at the shape of the world you inherited from them. Your millennial elders have not set much of an example either with their laptops sharing random Facebook posts. 

You Gen Z people born in the late 1990s and early 2000s seem to have mostly dispensed with Facebook and laptops.

What you know comes from scrolling through your smartphones on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and lately the hyper-vacuous Tik Tok. 

Left to your own devices, how can you separate the wheat from the chaff? Chatter from substance?

You may think I am being extra. But I maintain you can’t be legitimately woke if you do not read a newspaper regularly – like every day. The routine is important. 

A literate, educated, grownup needs to know what is going on. Your best bet is to habitually turn to the same, single, cohesive, comprehensive platform. 

You need to get beyond the echo chamber that merely reverberates the whims of your social media cohorts. An acceptable platform is one that offers under one roof reliable news, views, literature, and culture.

You’re thinking “Ok boomer, what makes you think any news source is reliable?” Point taken. Nonetheless, the better newspapers and websites maintain standards and don’t hide their biases. Regardless, it is your responsibility to be a discerning information consumer.

Personally, I subscribe to the online editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I peruse both and usually read several articles from beginning to end in each. I also take the daily Hebrew-language Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz newspapers in PDF format. I don’t get through all four periodicals obviously. 

Haaretz and the Times give me little joy, but I read them anyway.

I always had a love-hate relationship with the Times. I began reading it on a regular basis in 1971 when in the eleventh grade at Mesiftha Tiffereth Jerusalem, a Jewish parochial school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I’d plop down 15¢ at the candy store at Canal Street and East Broadway above the F-train subway station. My money bought me a 96-page broadsheet jammed with seven columns of newsprint. (Most surviving newspapers today are tabloids and nobody uses seven columns anymore.)

In the afternoon I would buy Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post (another 15¢) to read the pugilistic writing of columnist Pete Hamill. The Times was an altogether more demanding experience. To read it made me feel grownup, part of a larger world. Like maybe I was going to go to college.

The Times was painstakingly compiled and meticulously edited and really was an early draft of history. I would force myself to deliberately read an article in newsprint from start to finish without any expectation that dopamine would wash over my orbitofrontal cortex. Instead, I could be sure that my fingers would be smudged with newspaper ink.

It took me years to learn how to read the Times and what interested me. 

Today little of what you read on the Internet is anchored in original reporting; much of what you read is aggregated, curated, and ideologically dogmatized. Where possible read original reporting.

Fifty years ago, the Times operated in a looser ideological straitjacket and – like other quality newspapers of the day – maintained bureaus in major US cities and across the globe. Because there were many prestigious newspapers around, it was theoretically possible to get different vantage points. 

When I came of age, telephones were rotary, newspaper pictures were not in color, the US was at war in Viet-Nam, Republican Richard Nixon was president, and Soviet Jews were barred by the socialist authorities in the Kremlin from emigrating. 

Reading newspapers I realized that politics, Jews, and Israel were the subjects that most captured my attention.

Usually, around page 46 toward the back of the first section, the Times published editorials – unsigned articles attributed to the editorial board expressing the official position of the newspaper. These were ordinarily uninspiring and eminently worth skipping. Alongside the editorials were letters to the editor that had arrived at the Times' offices on West 42nd Street via the US Post Office (some had been handwritten) and selected by a team of letters editors. I would skim this section; "letters to the editor" were often signed by professors, heads of organizations and retired diplomats who disagreed with something they’d read in the newspaper. They were comparable to talkbacks except that they adhered to standards for decency and grammar, you had to sign your real name, and it took an effort to submit one.

The page opposite the editorial page was the “op-ed” page. It carried articles by Times and guest columnists. I did not read staff columnist Russell Baker whose wry humor was culturally over my head or Tom Wicker because I did not have prerequisite knowledge of the political scene. Washington bureau chief R.W. Apple’s assessments were similarly beyond my ken. 

The guest columnists either wrote on apolitical subjects or shared the Times’ outlook. Nowadays, the Times is even more myopic, illiberal, and closeminded about giving a platform to those its editors disagree with.  

Then as now, it is worth paying attention to bylines (the writer’s name). 

Before any Times article was published, it was revised by layers of editors. The first paragraph or two of a news article often encapsulated the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How of the story. Currently, because of the Internet, such "just-the-facts" journalism is passé. 

In the old days, reporters showed unique styles and covered beats (subjects) that made some more interesting than others to read.

The starting point for just about every article is influenced by the predispositions, inclinations, and leanings of its editors and writers.  Humans come to writing preloaded with bias. These days latent bias by a writer is not an issue since there is no longer any pretence of objectivity.

As Donald Trump reinvented what it means to be president, the Times (and the Washington Post) countered by unabashedly reinventing themselves from ostensible news and feature outlets to deliberate views-outlets. Content is seldom slugged (or explicitly categorized) to differentiate news and features, analysis, and opinion. It is all one mishmash.

But you at least get edited, vetted, coherent coverage on a wide range of topics by turning to an outlet like the Times.

Back in 1971, with 90-plus pages to digest daily, I soon found out where to focus. There was plenty of stuff to skip: theatre reviews (I had never seen a play), wedding announcements (dull), business/finance/stocks (yawn) and sports (the venerable Yankee baseball players I'd worshipped had been traded or put out to pasture). Shipping news? Nah. A long weather column? Usually, not. Classified job ads -- only when I got to college.

Officially, the Times was not a Jewish newspaper though when I began reading it the Ochs-Sulzberger clan which owned the company could still be charitably described as assimilated Reform Jews of German origin.

Many of the top editors, including Max Frankel, Joseph Lelyveld and A.M. Rosenthal were Jewish. Wolfgang Saxon wrote obituaries worth-reading about the Jewish departed.  (An aside: get into the habit of reading the obituaries; they are like mini-biographies.) The Yiddish-speaking Irving Spiegel covered the city’s Jewish beat with panache.

The Times was never comfortable in its Jewish skin. It had underplayed (though not completely spiked) coverage of what Hitler was doing to the Jews of Europe during WWII. The first mention of the Warsaw Ghetto on January 3, 1941, was a stand-alone photo with a single sentence caption. Earlier, in the 1930s, the Times had whitewashed Stalin’s atrocities in the Soviet Union.

The paper was anti-Zionist – its owners opposed a national homeland for the Jewish people. Once Israel fought its way into existence in 1948 the paper more than tolerated its existence – though it hardly ever sided with Israel editorially. After the 1967 Six-Day War, the paper advocated for Israel to pull back to the 1949 armistice lines – the boundaries from which the Arabs had initiated their attack in the first place. Even though the Arabs insisted they did not want peace with Israel not even in exchange for the land they'd just lost.  

With the election of Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister in 1977, the Times took a more robust adversarial stance – maintained ever since. It toiled to demonize Israel’s control over the former Jordanian West Bank and played up the claim that Judea and Samaria are “occupied Palestinian territories.”  

Only in 1984 did the paper send its first Jewish bureau chief to Israel – Tom Friedman. But only later did I learn that he had been a campaigner for Breira, a radical student group that advocated for the PLO (when Yasir Arafat was explicitly committed to "armed struggle").

Wait. So why do I want you to read the Times? Or the WP Post (now owned by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame)? Because with all their faults and aggravations both newspapers/websites provide a literacy you need – a literacy you just can’t get by scanning random stuff shared on social media by friends.

Regrettably, there is no real alternative to the progressive Times – no genuinely liberal, centrist or enlightened conservative platform with global reach and intellectual depth. The Wall Street Journal is focused on business and is editorially Trumpian. Like Fox News, the Times of London, and today's New York Post, the Journal is controlled by the Murdoch family. (Only lately do the Murdoch’s seem to be distancing themselves from Trump.)

On top of it all,  the Times has gotten more insufferable for Boomers like me with its infantilizing how-to articles, transparent manipulation of semantics for trendy political ends, and supercilious social hectoring.  The paper is experiencing its own sort of cultural revolution (*). The Times riles and infuriates, even as it informs and illuminates. 

I can still handle it. I'm no snowflake.

Further Reading:

The Powers that Be by David Halberstam

The Lady Upstairs by Marilyn Nissenson

Double Vision by Ze'ev Chafets 

The Trust by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones

Personal History by Katharine Graham

A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill

(*) Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikotter