ZGram - 4/25/2002 - NYT's Frankel spills the beans"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

April 25, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

A few quotes from a noteworthy book.  Max Frankel was with the New York
Times from the early 1950s to 1994, eventually becoming its Executive Editor.

From: The Times of My Life. And my Life with The Times. Random House, New
York, 1999

p. 397, "The best reporters and editors normally have no race, sex, or
religion. They may charm or muscle their way into strange places, but they
try not to THINK male or female, black or Jewish. Still, there always comes
a time for exceptions. I remember reliving the shudders of refugee life at
the sight of Hungarians trudging across a frozen frontier swamp. I never
totally banished that twinge of smug American security when interviewing
high-ranking Germans. And there's no denying the conspiratorial bond that
suddenly appeared when an old man on a park bench in Kiev whispered, BIST
AH YID?

Are you a Jew? was a question often put to me, and with decidedly different
inflections. In Communist countries, it came from Jews who meant thereby to
ask whether they could trust me with seditious conversation. In Israel, it
was asked to discover whether I would ever put my feelings for the Jewish
state ahead of my journalistic mission. Now that I had charge of editorials
at the Times, the question was usually hurled with contempt; I was
obviously a Jew, but in the eyes of many Jews, an unworthy one for daring
to criticize the Israeli government. So whenever I turned to the subject of
Israel, there was no escaping my skin."

p. 398, "Except for my place of birth, I was a Galicianer, dammit, an
EASTERN Jew just one generation out of the shtetl. The Nazis obliterated
that Yiddish world, a constellation of townlets that stretched from
Lithuania to Romania, but the shtetl culture kept on fiddling in the hearts
of millions of us, in Israel and America. No matter how aggressive our
assimilation to new worlds, we Galicianers always juggled a kind of dual
citizenship. Unlike many German Jews, we wanted to retain our Jewishness,
our YIDDISHKAYT. And after the Holocaust, not even the starchiest Americans
dared any longer to demand that we shed it, as they had demanded of
striving Jews in the 1920s and '30s."

p. 399, "Although Times bylines gradually came to include names like
Weiler, Raskin, and Rosenthal, these writers were somehow all persuaded to
render their first names as A. instead of Abraham."

p. 400, "By the time Punch Sulzberger [inheritor of the New York Times]
occupied his father's chair in 1963, American society had shed many of its
anti-Semitic prejudices and permitted the rapid advancement of Jews in
professional life and corporate suites. The general revulsion against
fascism turned into a revulsion against bigotry itself, as demonstrated by
the election of the first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. Exploiting
this atmosphere, and Gentile guilt about the Holocaust, American Jews of my
generation were emboldened to make them themselves culturally conspicuous,
to flaunt their ethnicity, to find literary inspiration in their roots, and
to bask in the resurrection of Israel."

p. 400-401, "Instead of idols and passions, I worshiped words and argument,
becoming part of an unashamedly Jewish verbal invasion of American culture.
It was especially satisfying to realize the wildest fantasy of the world's
anti-Semites: Inspired by our heritage as keepers of the book, creators of
law, and storytellers supreme, Jews in America did finally achieve a
disproportionate influence in universities and in all media of
communication.

Punch Sulzberger [owner of the New York Times] unconsciously abetted this
movement. He felt born to the publisher's chair and had none of his
father's hang-ups about being Jewish. Israel's ambassadors to the United
Nations lived just a few floors below his Fifth Avenue apartment and always
enjoyed easy access to him and to his table at The Times. Within a few
years of Punch's ascendancy, there came a time when not only the executive
editor -- A. M. Rosenthal -- and I but ALL the top editors listed on the
paper's masthead were Jews. Over vodka in the publisher's back room, this
was occasionally mentioned an any impolitic condition, but it was altered
only gradually, without any affirmative action on behalf of Christians."

p. 401, "Because my name was Max and because I produced editorials that
disapproved of some of the hawkish policies of Israel's prime minister,
Menachem Begin, ... even modest criticism of Israeli actions inevitably
provoked angry articles in Jewish weeklies, demands that I meet for
remedial instruction with the heads of Jewish organizations, and a flood of
angry letters, many condemning me as a 'self-hating Jew' who had abandoned
his people to curry favor with the goyim. I was denounced as being ignorant
of the Holocaust and indifferent to the damage done by disharmony among
Jews. To the most sober of these assaults, I sometimes responded with a
hurt biographical note, stressing my roots in the shtetl, our family's
taste of both Nazi and Soviet anti-Semitism, the disappearance of my
grandparents, my sojourn among relatives who had survived the death camps
to settle gratefully in Israel, and my intimate familiarity with every
liturgical variant of Jewish ritual. Mostly, however, I would simply retort
that my only remaining Jewish friends were Israelis, to make the point
that many Israelis also found fault with their government and also favored
accommodation with the Palestinians, as they eventually proved in the
Peace Now movement.

I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert. I had
yearned for a Jewish homeland ever since learning as child in Germany that
in Palestine even the policemen were Jews! Like most American Jews,
however, I settled on a remote brand of Zionism, which rejected all
importuning to move to Israel to share its hardships and dangers."

p. 402, "I did indeed have many close Israeli friends, not only relatives
and journalists but high officials, ranging from Yitzhak Rabin to Lova
Eliav. That is why I well understood the full range of Israeli opinion on
all of the country's vital security concerns."

p. 403, "Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I
myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish
readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective. And I wrote
in confidence that The Times no longer suffered from any secret desire to
deny or overcome its ethnic roots."

[END]

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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

"They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can 
see nothing but sea."

(Francis Bacon)