Memories from a Heeb Who Just Turned 100

The year: 1949.

Fresh out of the Rutgers University School of Journalism, my hopes for what looked like a great job opportunity in Manhattan were dashed.

The employment agency interviewer was painfully blunt. “Your name is Liberman. That’s your problem. You’re well qualified but no use wasting your time and mine. That company will never hire you.”

Antisemitism, it seemed, like racism was still alive and well in the USA.,

In alphabetical order starting with the A’s, I began sending my resume to New Jersey’s 28 daily newspapers (17 remain today). “Bound Brook High School correspondent for the Plainfield Courier News, ’42-’43. . . Army Air Corps, ’43-’45. . . Rutgers campus correspondent for the Newark Star-Ledger, ’47-’49. . . Writer who initiated and promoted idea of Intercollegiate Football Hall of Fame.”

An interview at the first paper responding to my missile clicked, and I was hired as a news writer for WJLK-FM, the radio station privately-owned then by the Asbury Park Press. There were two other Jews that year among The Press’ 143 white newspaper and radio station’s employees – neither in a supervisory position, though.

Soon to be married to the brainy coed I had met at a Hillel dance, later to become a Monmouth University supervisor of student teachers, $40 a week, with a promise of $10 more if retained after a month on the job, was a deal not to be dismissed.

After stints as reporter, copy editor, night editor and city editor, I was appointed editor of the Sunday edition in 1956. Its circulation, about 27,000, was a few thousand less than the daily edition.

The job involved assigning news and feature stories, deciding where and how they’d be displayed in the paper, designing page one, editing sensitive articles, writing editorials and serving on the Press Operations Committee.

As the years flew by, Sunday circulation surpassed the daily’s by 70,000, reaching 223,000, ultimately accounting for nearly two-thirds of the paper’s gross revenues of more than $114 million, winning the New Jersey Press Association’s most coveted General Excellence Award and establishing the Asbury Park Press as New Jersey’s second most widely circulated newspaper.

To the chief compositor charged with following page design instructions, I was “Caesar.” But to one of his aides who rarely smiled, I was “the Heeb editor addicted to playing up stories about Israel.”

And, yes, there were times when expletives and ethnic slurs filled the air under pressure of a rapidly approaching deadline. Early on, it was shocking, maybe even hurtful. After a while, you shrug it off, justifying the occasional outbursts as tension breakers.

What I’ll never forget, though, is the night of July 4, 1976. A late-breaking Associated Press report prompted me to order the page one lead story about America’s bicentennial celebration to be replaced by a developing story out of Africa.

In a lightning night attack, the AP bulletin reported, Israeli Defense Forces had secretly landed three cargo planes carrying 200 crack Army troops who shot their way into the Entebbe Airport terminal in Uganda, and rescued more than 100 Jewish hostages.

The four terrorists who had hijacked the Air France Airbus carrying the hostages and were threatening to kill them unless 53 of their convicted colleagues were released were themselves killed. So was the leader of the rescue team, Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who’d become the longest-running Israeli prime minister.

Seeing the updated page, the compositor who rarely smiled approached “the Heeb editor.” Gone was the usual smirk.  

“Let me shake your hand,” he said, smiling. “I never knew Jews could fight.”

“Let me shake your hand,” he said, smiling. “I never knew Jews could fight.”

To this day 48 years later, I still can feel the warmth of that measured smile and handshake.

Si Liberman, a 100-year-old retired editor of the Asbury Park Sunday Press, lives in Palm Beach, Fla.