The blessing and burden of bearing first witness to Jewish history

The long version: 37 years in journalism.

On Dec. 31 of 2024, I worked my last day as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Washington bureau chief. Five days earlier, JTA published my farewell. I had written 3,600 words; my editors, understandably, trimmed it to 900 or so. But the long version packs in a lot. So here it is, for the patient. My portrait is by sketch artist Emily Goff. (©Emily N Goff, 2023, all rights reserved.)

WASHINGTON -- I watched Yitzhak Rabin die on a dot matrix printer on a Saturday night in London.

I was working for The Associated Press, which in London in 1995 on a Saturday night was a dead zone. I would scan the Press Association wire for leads on eccentric stories Americans would eat up, like when I called the lady whose dogs called the police after they trashed her house (“Do you think they felt guilty?” I asked her.).

This was pre-smartphones, pre-alerts, pre-texting apps, at the dawn of email, so we got our breaking news staring at dot matrix printers spitting out copy, and I saw Gwen Ackerman, my colleague in Jerusalem, filing a sequence of urgents about shots fired at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.

Before Rabin was declared dead, I had booked the next available flight to Tel Aviv.

I went straight to the AP bureau in Jerusalem and settled down at a computer monitor. The office was alive with chatter -- the assassin went to Bar Ilan University, King Hussein of Jordan would attend the funeral, Leah Rabin met outside her home with a crowd of people pleading with her for forgiveness for not seeing the signs.

I wrote plenty the week or so I was in Israel. But what stays with me is a story about not writing the story.

Beneath the noise of news being made, in between the calls to turn up the radio, the cursing of the editors in New York, there were snippets of bemused gossip about a reporter, or was he a news aggregator, or a stringer? He was someone in Jerusalem’s claustrophobic community of people working for international news outlets.

Someone who refused to write about the night a Jew killed a Jew. He had filed a report devoid of any mention of the assassination.

One of the AP staffers said she had been told by someone else that someone had called the guy -- it was a guy -- and he told that person he would not be reporting on the assassination, as if it was a choice, and he hung up.

Or maybe it was a choice. I have in recent weeks tried to track him down, I got a name and Jerusalem address. No dice.

“Do you really think he would talk to you about that?” Gwen said a few weeks ago when I asked her if she remembered who I was talking about.

“What made you think of him?” Lisa Talesnick, another friend, asked me.

I thought of him because his story about not writing the story haunted me. I thought of him because on the night of Nov. 4, 1995, I was shattered when a hero of Israel’s founding, a man who had once shown me kindness, was felled by a coward's bullet.

And yet my reflex was to report about what would happen next, like Israel's broken heart was a weather report.

I have seen reporters flame out, I’ve seen them this close to a deadly reality and then beating a retreat. There are fabulists like Jayson Blair who made up stuff to enhance the reality. There are fabulists who make up new realities.

This was the only time I had in real time heard of a reporter denying reality.

I thought of him because I’m retiring and I want to reconcile my reflex to report with my sympathy for his retreat. When does the privilege of bearing first witness become a burden too awful to bear?

Fifteen years ago, I worked through my thoughts in a play. A wire service reporter who is at Kikar Malchei Yisrael and sees Rabin shot files the reality -- or thinks she has. She returns to the Jerusalem bureau at dawn and finds out that the rewrite man jettisoned the notes she phoned in and instead filed to the wire a sequence of fictions about intimate betrayals: a father betrays his daughter, a husband betrays his wife, a brother betrays his brother. He filed these fictions under her byline, which, too, is a betrayal. The rewrite man fades away, and 15 years later the now former reporter grieves for her career, for Israel, and wonders what’s more real, what she saw or what appeared under her byline.

It’s a good play, it may be the best thing I’ve written. It’s never been performed. Writing it was enough, I thought, I got it out of my system.

I didn’t get it out of my system.

A year or so ago, on another autumn Saturday, I woke up in a cabin in Shenandoah National Park at 6:30 a.m. and glanced at the phone at my bedside. The screen bubbled over with WhatsApp notices, anguished texts from my family in Israel, warnings from the Israeli army to not move south, and a declaration by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- who is famously averse to war -- that Israel was at war.

I was the only Hebrew-speaking non-Shabbat-observant reporter JTA had available on Oct. 7. I had a single bar on my phone, enough to get WhatsApp messages, not enough to file. So I told my wife, Doina, “Israel’s at war,” packed my laptop and walked through a misty drizzle to the main lodge.

The WiFi in the lodge was good, but then I may have been the only person with a laptop flipped open. I plugged in my earphones and tuned into Kan Reshet Bet and listened to a man saying his wife and children were in Khan Yunis, he tracked them with an app. I listened to a woman whispering, terrified, from a safe room and hanging up when voices encroached. I listened to a young man who described in flat tones men gunning down dancers at a rave.

Around me in the lodge, dads in puffy vests ordered hot chocolates and moms in thick sweaters dumped jigsaw pieces out of cardboard boxes onto coffee tables and they waited for the rain to subside so they could hike.

I watched the other guests and translated quotes and toggled back to WhatsApp for updates and slotted them into the story I would file and I watched the other guests and envied them and for a second recalled the guy who believed he could ignore the imperative to bear witness.

I know Jewish reporters are not the only ones who have grappled with reporting on news in which their very lives are invested. It must be true of Ukrainian media. A friend from Gaza who now lives elsewhere sends me dispatches describing how he stares at the TV and identifies in the rubble the markers of outings with his dad and his falling in love and becoming a father.

For Jewish reporters, chronicling events and portents of unimaginable horror has a history beyond the memory of time.

“Why did the skies not darken and the stars not dim?” wrote Shelomoh bar Shimshon, who chronicled the Rhineland massacres in 1096.

Bar Shimshon names the mass suicides of Jews facing the depredations of the crusaders as akedahs, sacrifices akin to Abraham’s binding of Isaac.

The akedah permeates Israeli culture: Israelis lavish their children with attention and then they are expected to turn away when they are 18. Yehuda Amichai captured how unmoored from emotional sanity this is in “From Man You Are, to Man You Shall Return": A parent listens to the predawn padding of a child on his way back to the war front and all he can do is watch from the window as the boy walks away.

My late friend, the cartoonist Dudu Geva, drew a duck about to eat a hard-boiled egg: “When you grow up, you’ll understand,” the duck says.

David Grossman, who lost a son, continues to write. Nahum Barnea, who lost a son, continues to write.

On Jan. 1, an alert from the Israeli Army WhatsApp channel popped onto my phone: “Attached is an IDF announcement regarding the names of a fallen soldier.” Seated in the cold morning light flooding my Virginia kitchen I clicked -- I reflexively click -- and I saw Amichai Oster, the son of my colleague Marcy, who had stayed with us over the summer.

“Amichai has been killed,” I told Doina, and she pleaded with me to say I was mistaken, but I was looking at his unmistakable portrait.

Marcy continues to write. She described for Y-Net, on the eve of Yom Kippur, why praying Hallel, the prayer of thanks, has become impossible. “Right now, the words of the prayer stick in my throat,” she wrote.

Marcy continues to bear witness.

How can I not?

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And yet I get the impulse to turn away from reporting on the perils Jews face, partly because you wonder if anyone is paying attention. It’s what perhaps the best-known JTA alumnus did as the reality of the Shoah set in.

“It took about seven years for Daniel Schorr to tire of being a journalist for Jewish media,” I wrote in 2010 when the legendary reporter and commentator died.

I think I was making a private joke at my own expense: I had been, as Schorr had been at the outset of his career, a reporter for JTA for seven years, but loved it.

“The distaste of digesting for JTA’s readers the news of the emerging Holocaust, combined with what he saw as the blinkered parochialism of Jewish news, led him to quit JTA in 1941 and search for work elsewhere,” I wrote.

I dug up Schorr’s 2001 autobiography, “Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism,” this week to get a fuller sense of why he left. The parochialism, sure enough, is there: “Each year I did an article asking, ‘Was Columbus a Jew?’ (No, but his navigator may have been Jewish.)”

But Schorr is also conflicted about covering the war. He is furious with the big outlets for ignoring what JTA reporters in Europe were taking grave risks to make public. (After the Nazis expelled JTA from Germany in 1937, the JTA ran a news agency staffed with non-Jewish correspondents under the generic name Overseas News Agency.)

“These reports occasioned screaming headlines in the Yiddish press, but were largely ignored by the general newspapers,” he wrote. “Editors were being counseled by the State Department to be wary of Jewish propaganda. Years later, declassified records would show how far the American and British governments went to keep Americans in ignorance of the extermination of the Jews in Europe. For fear of distracting the Allies from pursuit of the war, it was said.”

Yet Schorr also recalls arguing at the time with Jacob Landau, JTA’s founder, about whether the agency was fear-mongering. “Like many of the media before and since, the Bulletin regarded fear as a circulation builder,” he said, referring to the daily paper the JTA published for a short period. “After seven years of this I began to bridle about this contorted view of a world in crisis. I made my discomfort evident enough so that Landau finally suggested it might be time for me to move on.”

This is the perpetual dilemma of the Jewish media: How alarming should we be in our copy? “We had to face the clear dilemma of what to present to the Jewish public, how to prepare our readers for yet more trying times to come,” Arno Herzberg, JTA’s Berlin editor from 1934 to 1937, wrote in an article reprinted in JTA’s 1997 80th anniversary retrospective. “The question of how a story might affect the morale and mental stability of our readers was a decisive factor in editorial presentations.”

At JTA, we have a version of this conversation three times a week in our staff meetings, although, reader, we may be a little less preoccupied with your “mental stability” than our 1937 antecedents. Does this report on antisemitism statistics stand up? Was this an antisemitic attack — or just an attack? Is this statement antisemitic? Is it causative or correlative to the violence that ensues?

And there’s a factor that JTA in the 1930s did not have to contend with: a collective Jewish entity, Israel, that has agency. A Jewish nation-state that has shucked millennia of passivity and vulnerability now also must contend with accountability.

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The reporter’s thrill of writing history’s first draft is compounded, for a Jewish media reporter, by being part of an ancient continuum of bearing witness to Jewish history.

It can be sweet: Tracking Joe Lieberman’s insinuation of Jewish thought into the American Jewish political discourse is a story of the acceptance Jews have enjoyed here, as are the marks left on the culture by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Steve and Eydie and George Segal and his refusal to alter his name or, for that matter, his nose.

The chutzpah of a small nation gently chiding its most important -- and less LGBTQ-tolerant -- ally at an embassy Pride event. (Guests were encouraged to wear bold colors, and reader, I was there as a reporter, but I must confess to indulging in a Hawaiian pattern shirt.)

But more frequently, we cope with Herzberg’s dilemma: How much alarm does this news merit? In the summer of 2016, I covered a gathering in a hotel conference room of white nationalists with the dismissive distance I thought these misfits merited: “The crewcut, the sunglasses, the tight, thin frown, the pacing: This was the alt-right guy,” I wrote.

A year later, the man who convened the hotel gathering helped organize a march that terrorized Charlottesville, Virginia, and culminated in a killing. The white supremacist message, hollow and stupid in a hotel conference room, became a potent threat -- one I faced down covering the story.

A line shouted out at the hotel with purported irony, “Gas the kikes!” became evidence of violent intent at the civil trial of the Charlottesville organizers.

A year later, a gunman killed 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, and I was left struggling with a different dilemma: a community desperate to be whole and the reality of its shattering. Last year, covering the trial, I found myself toggling between two American Jewish stories: of fear and of the longing for fearless Jewish expression.

A decade earlier, the Bush administration’s fruitless prosecution of two American Israel Public Affairs Committee staffers on Espionage Act charges presented a similar dichotomy for a bulwark of American Jewish support for Israel, between expression and fear of the consequences of expression.

There was for decades no more robust expression of Jewish influence and power than AIPAC. In the 1980s, one of the targeted employees, Steve Rosen, had led what had been a strictly congressional lobbying outfit into lobbying the executive branch.

Some officials in law enforcement and in spy agencies were enraged by the notion of lobbyists soliciting information from midlevel government officials, although it is something that journalists do routinely.

The government’s case was predicated on an entrapment that preyed on the Jewish imperative that the saving of a life outweighs any other consideration. A wired Pentagon official lied to the other targeted staffer, Keith Weissman, that unless he shared certain (fake) classified information, Israelis and Americans would die.

The government’s case was always wobbly, and the Obama administration killed it almost as soon as it assumed power. But the prosecution had done its damage: It drove AIPAC to fire Rosen and Weissman and to roll back executive-branch lobbying. Whatever one thinks of AIPAC’s mission, a perfectly legitimate means of engagement with one’s government was made toxic for Jews.

The prosecution of Rosen and Weissman riveted me: I gave up vacations to make court dates, in part because barely anyone else paid attention to all but the major developments outside the Jewish media. I kept refreshing the docket and in 2006 reported the mistakenly released subpoenas of top Bush officials in the brief period before the court suppressed them just hours later. A court official called and gently wondered if I could take down the story (uh, no).

(I once drove to the court, in a cluster of office blocks in Alexandria, Virginia, with the three other reporters who covered every increment of the case: Shmuel Rosner of Haaretz, Hilary Krieger of The Jerusalem Post and Nathan Guttman of the Forward. I joked while driving that all it would take for the government to get away with its prosecution was a missile carefully aimed at I-395. Nervous laughter ensued.)

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Weissman’s choice to heed a Jewish imperative, in his case to save lives, despite the risk to his reputation and career, is one that preoccupies me. Some of the stories I loved writing best were profiles that caught American Jews when they made risky decisions inseparable from their Jewish identity:

-- CNN anchor Jake Tapper in 2021 reminded Donald Trump’s impeachment lawyer of the biblical commandments “You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness.”

--Laura Moser, the progressive congressional candidate, who in her 2018 run for a Houston seat encountered an antisemitism that seemed to pervade the American polity, left, right and center, driving her to relocate her young family to Berlin. ”At least in Europe, you know. You know to look over your shoulder,” she told me.

--Bethany Mandel, the conservative writer and influencer, who would not let the revelation that the rabbi who supervised her conversion had secretly filmed her immersion in the mikvah to keep her away from the faith she loved.

“We stepped back from the organized Orthodox community,” she told me. “We’ve never really stepped back in. We don’t go to shul. We have our, like, nice little like Orthodox life here, but we don’t — we don’t send our kids to school, we don’t go to shul.”

The case of the peeping rabbi is a reminder that there are less salutary stories about Jewish actions, or actions by Jews. that require coverage. My colleagues have in recent years, since the emergence at the end of the last decade of #metoo, stories of Jewish institutional abuse and harassment.

The queasy imperative to expose Jewish wrongdoing especially extends to Israel, a state with a sophisticated military, and the carnage that can ensue, especially this past year in the Gaza Strip.

We sometimes get pleadings to take special consideration as a Jewish agency -- and we have, particularly when a hostage’s abductors might not know their captive is Jewish.

But reporting the Jewish story means holding Jews and Israel accountable, as the Israeli army discovered in 2010 when it pleaded with my publisher, Ami Eden, to withhold my scoop that it was holding in secret detention an Israeli journalist, Anat Kamm. Her subsequent trial was conducted in the light of day.

The impulse to keep our agonies and our civil wars unwrapped and immune to scrutiny is powerful and ancient.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, in his 1982 masterwork on Jewish memory, “Zakhor,” addresses why, for centuries, history appeared to end for Jewish scholars in 70 CE, with the destruction of the Second Temple. Rabbinical writings replaced the Bible’s relentless chronicling with a rubbery mysticism.

The uncertainties and horrors of the Roman empire, of Diaspora, may have been easier to handle from the cozy retreat of mysticism and mythologizing. It can’t have helped that the rabbis saw Jewish actions as responsible for the Temple’s loss: sinat hinam, reckless hatred among the Jews of Judea, helped bring about the end of Jewish sovereignty.

“The biblical past was known, the messianic future assured; the in-between-time was obscure,” Yerushalmi writes. “Then as now, history did not validate itself and reveal its meaning imminently.”

“As now”: The dilemma, again. How alarmed should we be about what might happen next week because of what happened this morning?

On Oct. 13, 2016, I was at a hotel in Miami Beach working on an election scene story when Marcy texted me. “All yours,” said the popup message.

I clicked on the link. It was a tweet by Julia Ioffe, the longform journalist.

“Is it just me or is much of this Trump speech Jew-baiting?” said Ioffe, who had endured antisemitic abuse for her reporting on candidate Donald Trump and his wife, Melania.

Trump was speaking some 70 miles from where I was and there was no way I could get there before his speech ended, and in any case, it appeared I had missed the salient part. So I called up C-Span on my laptop and clicked on “play from beginning.”

I recognized in Trump’s speech the language, beats and tropes of a book I had read when I worked 30 years earlier in anti-defamation for the Jewish community in Sydney, Australia: “The Protocols of the Elder of Zion.” The one thing absent from his speech was the mention of Jews.

Josefin Dolsten, a colleague in New York, started an email chain with Gabe Friedman, Andy Silow-Carroll and Marcy, feeding me material. I wrote a comparison piece: Trump’s speech, with the notorious antisemitic forgery.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League CEO, was unnerved by the speech. The Trump campaign laughed off the comparisons. “Jonathan Greenblatt is merely trying to divert the attention of the voters away from these facts by fabricating connections to antisemitism,” Jason Greenblatt, no relation to Jonathan, told me.

Three weeks later, the Trump campaign ran its final ad: Excerpts of the speech set against video of a rogue’s gallery of villains at the center of conspiracy theories: Janet Yellen, George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein. All Jewish.

A year later a neo-Nazi plowed into a crowd of innocents in Charlottesville and Trump equivocated about who was at fault.

A year after that a Pittsburgh gunman who shared with Trump the conspiracy theory that powerful actors were paying Latin Americans to invade the country changed Jewish life in this country forever.

Reader, farewell, for now.

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