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Jack Ma is probably one of the brightest most entrepreneurial executives in China and being a free spirit type Xi has to shut him down:
Israel beware: Here comes a new Sulzberger
A family dynasty that has guided “The New York Times” since the 1930s has made it a standard not to portray the Jews too favorably.
In a change that is unlikely to change anything at The New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.—its publisher between 1992 and 2017, and chairman thereafter—announced his retirement in his newspaper on New Year’s Day. Predictably, he will be succeeded by his son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, extending the family dynasty five generations back to 1935 when Arthur Hays Sulzberger succeeded his father-in-law, Adolph Ochs, who had purchased the newspaper in 1896 and proclaimed its enduring pledge: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
In his farewell statement, Sulzberger Jr. proudly identified his job: “to provide whatever support the world’s best journalists needed to do their important work.” And that they did, covering “things that no one thought possible” with “nuance, empathy and ambition.” The Times, he concluded immodestly, “is larger, more open, more creative, more nimble and more ambitious than ever.” With pardonable exaggeration, he identified it as exemplifying “independent journalism,” providing “the greatest service for a changing country that is struggling to understand itself.”
But it was not always thus, nor is it now likely to be. The Times was molded by Adolph S. Ochs, who purchased the newspaper in 1896—ironically, the same year that Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State was published. A proud Reform Jew who insisted that Judaism was a religion and not a national identity, Ochs and his credo were embraced by his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who launched the family dynasty that has guided the Times ever since.
Sulzberger, sharing Ochs’s aversion to any perception of the Times as a “Jewish” newspaper, feared that Zionism would raise doubts about the loyalty of American Jews to the United States. Editors were instructed not to refer to “the Jewish people,” but to “people of the Jewish faith.” Adolph Hitler might identify Jews as a despised race, but Sulzberger insisted that the Times not identify them as a distinctive group. Jews fleeing Nazi terror or slaughtered in death camps were identified as “human beings” or “persons,” not Jews. Their horrific plight was rarely reported in the Times. Sulzberger linked Zionism to “the Nazi connotation that we are a racial group apart.”
The birth of a Jewish state in 1948 sparked the newspaper’s concern, lest American Jews (the Sulzbergers included) be accused of divided loyalty. Over time, it (slowly) relinquished its resolute anti-Zionism, though signs of discomfort with Israel periodically surfaced. Its capture and trial of Adolph Eichmann was a source of palpable Times discomfort because it enabled Israel to speak on behalf of world Jewry. Sulzberger conceded: “I don’t feel any affinity for the State of Israel.” Nor did he favor Jews in editorial positions, lest the Times be devalued “in Gentile circles.”
Sulzberger’s family successors—Arthur Hays Sulzberger Jr., Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (the first non-Jewish family member to become publisher) and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.—largely receded from public view, and Christian identities removed any disparaging claim that the Times was a “Jewish” newspaper. But deeply embedded discomfort with Israel persisted, especially following the 1967 Six-Day War, when Jewish settlements began to appear in biblical Judea and Samaria (previously Jordan’s West Bank). Columnist Anthony Lewis, who was fond of equating Israeli treatment of Palestinians with South African apartheid, and Jerusalem bureau chief Thomas Friedman, who had found fault with Israel ever since his undergraduate years at Brandeis, emerged as hectoring critics of the Jewish state.
Several of Friedman’s Jewish successors followed in his ideological footsteps. Joel Greenberg, who had received a jail sentence for his refusal to serve with his Israel Defense Forces unit in the Lebanon War, perceived a “tribal trend” among religious Jews who wore a “yarmulke at all times.” In a 5,000-word article, Deborah Sontag blamed Israel—not PLO chief Yasser Arafat—for the collapse of peace negotiations. Clyde Haberman bracketed Israelis and Palestinians within the “imperative of faith, advanced by force.” Jodi Rudoren was fond of citing “extremists on both sides,” Israelis and Palestinians, for Palestinian terrorist attacks. After all, “colonized Palestinians” were left to suffer from Israeli “oppression and humiliation.” Peter Beinart recently launched his new position as a columnist with an opinion piece titled “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.”
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. proudly cites “independent journalism,” exemplified by The New York Times, as “a cure for this polarized era.” But history suggests that when it comes to critical coverage of Israel, the more that Sulzbergers come and go, the more the Times remains the same.
Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel and “Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016,” which was recently selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a “Best Book” for 2019.
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There were never more truer words:
When the rule of law breaks down, no one is safe
The assault on the Capitol was shocking and disgraceful. It’s also a reminder that everyone’s rights, including minority groups, depends on the preservation of order and respect for democracy.
(Jan
Supports of U.S. President Donald Trump en masse at the U.S. Capitol, where some smashed windows and entered the building while protesting the results of the November elections, on Jan. 6, 2020. Source: YouTube Screenshot.
What happened at the Capitol on the day both Houses of Congress assembled in a joint session to certify the votes of the Electoral College in the 2020 presidential election was a disgrace. In an unprecedented scene, a violent mob protesting the results broke into the building and sent both the House of Representatives and the Senate scurrying for safety, temporarily halting the quadrennial ritual and providing scenes of the riot that will live in infamy in American history.
The only possible decent response to this appalling episode is the harshest condemnation of those involved and even more sadly, those, including the president of the United States, who encouraged the mob that committed the violence. Like a great many protests against police brutality last summer that may have started peacefully but ended in riots, those who helped incite this event ought to be held accountable for the consequences of their actions.
The excuse for what happened stems from some of President Donald Trump’s supporters believing him when he says the election was stolen from him. Both he and they have a right to express their views. The same can be said of those members of Congress who were also prepared to make a symbolic protest against the ritual acceptance of an outcome that had been certified by the states and confirmed by the courts. But the fact that this particular protest, which began with a mass rally near the Capitol at a rally on the Ellipse when the president made an incendiary speech, ended in violence is not a point for partisans to debate.
There can be no rationalizing or excusing what happened. Both sides in America’s tribal culture war that has defined the nation’s politics in recent years have much to apologize for, as the events of the last four years have proved. Still, this is not the moment for “whataboutism” or an exchange of accusations in which responsibility for these events can be deflected elsewhere. No matter which candidate you voted for in November—and whether you celebrated or mourned that outcome, or the results of the crucial Georgia Senate runoff races decided the night before the riot—there can be no debate about the unacceptable nature of what happened on the afternoon of Jan. 6.
While it’s hard to see beyond our outrage of the moment or our fear for the future of a republic in which the norms and traditions of democracy are so flagrantly flouted, there’s a broader point to be considered in the aftermath of this sad day. And it is one that should particularly resonate for the Jewish community.
Talk about the need to defend democracy has become commonplace on both sides of the political divide since both Republicans and Democrats now tend to conceive of each other as not being merely wrong, but both evil and lacking good motives. Irrespective of where you stand on the great issues of the day or what you think about the Nov. 3 presidential election, the problem with this sort of thinking is that it is itself a threat to democracy. If we can’t accept the idea that our opponents are decent people and that when they win, we must accept the outcome, then that is not merely a recipe for civil strife but also truly the end of democracy.
The first peaceful transfer of power took place in the year 1801 when the ruling Federalist Party, led by President John Adams, handed over the reins of power to Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic Republicans after losing the election of 1800. In a sense, that event completed the American Revolution. It proved that the republic that those two men—once close friends but who had since become the most bitter of political enemies—had helped found in 1776 would endure, rather than collapse into tyranny or autocracy like every previous attempt at republican government.
That transfer of power was neither amicable nor particularly civil. Rather than attend his rival’s inauguration, Adams left the capital in a huff the morning of his swearing-in—a precedent that may well be copied later this month when Trump must, like it or not, give way to President-elect Joe Biden.
The peaceful transfer of power is not merely a tradition that celebrates civility; it is integral to the preservation of the rule of law. And without the rule of law that restrains the brute passions of the moment, ordinary Americans, especially a religious minority, can never feel safe from potential violence from either hostile majorities or marginal extremists.
One of the scariest things about the riots that spread across the country last summer is that irrespective of concerns about police misconduct, the breakdown of the rule of law in many cities meant that no one could feel secure going about their daily lives, coupled with the added issue of being restricted by the coronavirus pandemic.
If America has been the freest, most secure and accepted Jewish community in the history of the Diaspora, it’s because it is a republic in which the preservation of the rule of law can be counted on.
Thus, the spectacle of an attack on the Capitol and the ritual process of the transfer of power is something no one who one values the tradition of an American public square—where all may gather or speak in safety no matter their race, color or creed—can view with equanimity.
Whether or not they may have a grievance of some kind or even if there were some merit to their complaints, when mobs attack democratic institutions and those who enforce the law, the foundations of the republic are shaken and the safety of the people, including those who are most dependent on these traditions, is called into question. That is why what happened at the Capitol should not only never be repeated—and those responsible for it punished—but that all people of goodwill, no matter their party affiliation, ethnicity or faith, must unambiguously condemn it.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
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Speaks for itself:
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