June 25, 2009
Newspapers may be dying, but you got to love the New York Post for going out with a yellow, punning, salacious bang. “RAB-BYE” is what the front page screamed last Wednesday, taking you to a story about the resignation of a Jewish chaplain in what the press is calling the “behind-bars bar mitzva.”
A hasidic businessman serving time on fraud charges was apparently allowed to throw a lavish bar mitzva for his son at the Manhattan jail known as The Tombs. The chaplain who helped arrange the simha in the slammer, as well as a top Corrections Department official, were forced to resign for violating prison policy, which apparently bans metal cutlery and hasidic rock ’n’ roll.
And that’s not even the craziest front-page b’nei mitzva story of the month. The Stamford Advocate reported on a bat mitzva gone wild in Norwalk, Conn., where police were called to an “out of control” party at a historic mansion museum.
Cops say that kids had torn out ceiling tiles and a light fixture, an uncle of the bat mitzva was charged with disorderly conduct, and one officer saw “several boys and girls” in one of the bathrooms engaged in sexual activity. And I don’t mean Spin the Bottle.
Stories like these usually fill Jewish readers with a combination of embarrassment and umbrage. The umbrage is often directed at the media. Whenever the media report stories that embarrass the Jews, some readers suspect ulterior motives.
So, for example, Stamford’s Rabbi Joshua Hammerman wants to know what made the Connecticut bat mitzva front-page news. “I won’t raise the banner of anti-Semitism,” he writes at his blog, “but why focus on a party that happens to occur after a particular religious event as opposed to any other teen party where similar (or worse) things might happen?”
But the search for ulterior motives sometimes overlooks the very definition of news. What is news? Nine times out of 10, it is that which deviates from the norm, and the wider the gap between the norm and the deviation, the more newsworthy it becomes. A busted frat party wouldn’t make the papers unless it got really out of hand (like, for instance, the Morristown party bus scandal whose ingredients included underage drinking and a dance floor headed down the highway at 50 miles per hour). We expect unruly behavior at a frat house. But, to our credit, the world does not expect Jewish coming-of-age celebrations to borrow a page from Fellini. Or Goodfellas.
(The fact that the bat mitzva also took place at a historic site probably boosted its newsworthiness.)
In essence, religion reporting works on the principle of the soft bigotry of high expectations: The editor’s assumption is that religion stands for a set of ideals, and when a religious figure doesn’t live up to those ideals, it’s a story.
That’s not an anti-religious position — if anything, mainstream media are extremely solicitous of religion.
Consider, first, the fairly narrow range of religion stories that appear in the press:
- religious group struggles with challenge to its traditions (homosexuality, feminism, bio-ethics),
- religious group prepares for holidays (recipes included),
- religious group challenges government on church-state (and vice versa), and
- religious institution or individual gets caught in a scandal.
The first three kinds of stories are invariably respectful of the religion in question. Even at their most controversial, religious viewpoints tend to be treated as legitimate perspectives on a subject (to the chagrin of “New Atheists” like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris).
The scandal story is the one that usually draws accusations of being anti-religious. But again, religious scandals wouldn’t be scandalous if not for the assumption, shared by reporters, that religions are meant to represent probity, moderation, and virtue. Reports on scandals usually contain a disclaimer by a denominational “moderate” who explains that the crazies or crooks do not represent the entire faith. Such stories also presume that whatever bad things happen, the religion as a whole cannot be blamed.
If the media were truly anti-religious, you would see more sentences or sentiments like this: “As might be expected from a faith that derives its values from texts written in the pre-modern era, and whose adherents have been engaged in a series of violent conflicts ever since, members of the religion carried out a despicable act while invoking their deity.”
Instead, the normative narrative is, “Ignoring the messages of peace and love in their holy book, extremists today took part in an act of violence that was denounced by other members of the same faith.”
This doesn’t excuse the media when they lose all sense of proportion, or play gotcha. Some stories belong on the police blotter, others on the front page. The prison story deserves widespread coverage because it involves high-placed city officials, taxpayer money (the guards worked overtime), and more than a whiff of corruption.
As for the Norwalk bat mitzva — I’m sorry I had to read about it, but I hope it launches a thousand sermons and Shabbat table conversations.
Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
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