Happily for them, most of the old-time Los Angeles anti-Semites who used to hang out at the downtown California Club are either dead or too old to care that a Jew is on the verge of owning the L.A. Times.
One day at lunch with a group of reporters and editors, Dave Laventhol, then the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, was musing that journalists had become elitist,
separated from their communities, maybe even too educated.
Cities are “humankind’s greatest creation,” asserts Joel Kotkin in his new book, “The City: A Global History” (Modern Library). A contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Sunday Opinion section and contributing writer for this paper, Kotkin traces the rise of urban centers from Mesopotamia to Byzantium and the cities of the Middle East; from the rise of Venice and other commercial centers to the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles.
The Republicans are praying that President Bush\’s embrace of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon\’s Gaza withdrawal plan will sway the Jewish vote.
The Los Angeles Times recently ran a story, \”A Clouded View of U.S. Jews\” (Oct. 9, 2002), which related the results of conflicting polls taken to determine Jewish population numbers in America. One study claimed numbers dipped slightly to 5.2 million, while a second poll claimed the Jewish population increased to 6.7 million.
Reactions to the Times\’ numbers were as diverse as the respondents. Some called for an increase in Jewish education and outreach, while others proposed we should increase our numbers by abandoning the traditional reticence to proselytizing and put more resources into embracing potential Jews. I couldn\’t disagree more.
Steve Wasserman is the literary editor of the Los Angeles Times. A former Berkeley political activist, Wasserman became deputy editor of the Times\’ Op-Ed page in 1978, at the age of 26. He went on to become editorial director of Times Books, a Random House imprint in New York. In 1996, Wasserman returned to California to take over the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The Journal spoke with Wasserman before his speech this week at the Jewish Community Library of Los Angeles on the topic \”People of the Book: Jewish Citizenship in the Republic of Letters.\”
Pack up your Passover dishes for good. The Exodus, according to some modern university scholars and liberal rabbis, never really happened. That\’s what the Los Angeles Times told us in great detail last week in a long article published at the end of the holiday. But the piece, while raising some important questions, skirts some of the most fundamental issues.
Kim Murphy doesn\’t present the stakes in the Irving vs. Lipstadt libel case and she falls into the traps set by the deniers, hook, line and sinker.
To survivors and experts on the Holocaust, there is little doubt that the Los Angeles Times and reporter Kim Murphy gave credence to the lies of the deniers in the name of journalistic impartiality.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.