Forward Thinking

In his Aug. 29 editorial, J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Forward, warned his readers not to be "startled" by that week’s front-page op-ed. He knew he was playing jump rope with raw nerves. After all, American Jews, the paper’s prime audience, could never have expected such heresy in a mainstream Jewish publication: "Israel, having ceased to care about the children of Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism."

Surely this was an anti-Semite, head wrapped in a kaffiyah, holding a match to the Israeli flag. But he wasn’t. The writer was Avraham Burg, a respected former speaker of the Israeli parliament. Goldberg simply had the gall to translate his words from Hebrew and put them on the Forward’s front page.

Burg’s piece, a rage-filled lament for an Israeli society "already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall," first appeared in a major Israeli daily, Yediot Ahronot, and, although shocking, joined the debate that thunders continuously through the Israeli public arena. In the U.S., however, it’s hard to imagine a Jewish newspaper other than the English-language Forward even touching it. Not only is much of the Jewish press in America lamely local -- asking little more than the hard-hitting question, Who was bar-mitzvahed this week? -- but, for the most part, their editorial line is filtered through one parochial prism: Is it good for the Jews? Bankrolled by local Jewish federations, the community weeklies lack the independence to report critically on the charities and institutions that make up Jewish organizational life. Dissent or even debate over Israeli policy is off limits. Like the American Jewish establishment, these papers swung left-of-center during the Oslo peace process in the 1990s and, for the three years since the start of the current Intifada, have swung right, staunchly defending the policies of Ariel Sharon.

Under two very different editors, as it happens, the Forward, during both periods, has gone counterclockwise.

Of the prominent American Jewish publications, the Forward alone, now in its thirteenth year, is truly independent. As a result, its op-ed page is a rare and influential forum (albeit an elite one, read by no more than 30,000) where the contentious ideological battles of the Jewish world are duked out -- pro-peace vs. anti-negotiation, Orthodox vs. Reform, assimilationist vs. isolationist. And with the war on terror turning any critic of Israel into a suspected traitor, it has not recoiled from running pieces like Burg’s that undermine the image of communal unity peddled by the American Jewish establishment.

On its news pages, meanwhile, the Forward covers the Jewish story as a story, seriously and dispassionately. Recent front-page articles have looked at a study claiming that 22 percent of Israeli households are malnourished, exposed the role of an Orthodox Jewish organization in supporting a conservative U.S. judicial nominee, and examined the unstable and insecure character of Jack Ruby (known to his Yiddish-speaking mother as Jacob Rubenstein). Its mandate is wide, taking on issues as international as the reemergence of opium-growing in Afghanistan and as local as the conflict between Hasidic Jews and blacks in Brooklyn. And the Forward is one of the few publications keeping a close journalistic eye on the American Jewish establishment, ready to pounce when incompetence or corruption is uncovered.

So harshly scrutinizing is it at times that its critics fret that it allows anyone to peer at the community’s often ugly internal disputes. But Steven Bayme, National Director of Contemporary Jewish Life at the American Jewish Committee, says that the Forward "gives you independent journalism, hard-hitting journalism, and it has become important precisely because it is willing to tackle sacred cows. The general sense is that a healthy community is one which can confront its weaknesses as well as its strengths. And the Forward forces us to look at those things."