\”I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it,\” Richard Ingrams wrote in his July 13 column.
Stanley Hirsh shared a vision of a newspaper that could serve as a kind of hub for an increasingly diverse and far-flung community.
The old joke says, \”For every two Jews, you have three opinions.\” So is it possible that, as members of the Jewish political left complained in an ad on the back page of this newspaper on Nov. 22, \”In the name of unity in a time of crisis, the great Jewish tradition of vibrant and open debate has given way to a single voice\”?
One of the main organizers of that \”One Community, Many Voices\” statement, UCLA professor David N. Myers, said of current Jewish political discourse that \”the default assumption is that you support the present policies of the Israeli government, and hold Israel free of responsibility for the situation, or you\’re against us.\”
You want media bias? I\’ll give you media bias. Here\’s one big city newspaper\’s account of the Israeli incursion into the Jenin refugee camp: \”Jenin camp looks like the scene of a crime. Its concrete rubble and tortured metal evokes another horror half a world away in New York, smaller in scale, but every bit as repellent in its particulars.\”\n\nThat\’s from the London newspaper The Guardian. The Los Angeles Times, in contrast, ran a long, two-page investigation into what happened in Jenin. It reported the evidence of terrorism that led to Israel\’s decision to go in. It documented the precise and risky manner by which the Israeli army chose to carry out its operation. It recounted the fear of the soldiers and refugees, the killing of innocent Palestinians (that\’s part of the story) and it investigated the wildly inflated stories of Palestinian propagandists and found them lacking.\n\n
On April 1, Los Angeles County children\’s social worker Jules Weingart sent the Los Angeles Times a letter protesting its predilection for calling Palestinian suicide-bombers \”militants.\” As a courtesy, Weingart attached a list of normative definitions of the terms \”militant,\” \”terrorism,\” \”terror\” and \”extremist.\”
On April 18, Weingart received a response from Times Readers Representative Jamie Gold. \”The word terrorist is not applied to combatants in Israel,\” Gold informed Weingart on behalf of the newspaper, \”because it is considered a politically loaded word.\”
That this is some perverse form of political correctness, few can doubt. But as Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has asked repeatedly over the last year, \”Political correctness for whom — suicide-bombers?\”
After nearly a half-century run and years of financial difficulties, the Heritage Southwest Jewish Press called it quits with its Sept. 28 issue.
Rebuilding the Temple? Could the Times be coming around? Then I read the editorial and everything fell into place.
Shortly before or perhaps just after World War II, actor Kirk Douglas asked Dorothy Buffum Chandler why the Los Angeles Times seemed to pander so wantonly to the anti-Semitism then still rampant among many of the city\’s more refined elites.
\”Why, darling?\” cooed the doyenne of the Chandler newspaper dynasty. \”We do it because it sells papers.\”
In February 1997, the L.A. Jewish Voice, a weekly published by Selwin Gerber and a group of investors, threw down the gauntlet in the arena of Los Angeles\’ Jewish press.
Joseph Jonah Cummins was a complex man. A prominent Hollywood attorney, the powerful, opinionated Cummins represented Errol Flynn and Bette Davis and lived next door to Milton Berle and Jack Benny.
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