The Jewish world without Safire
A few months back, I wrote that op-ed columnists have emerged as the new Jewish leaders, and that just as there are Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Jews, there are Safire, Brooks, Friedman, and Rich Jews.
I didn’t know at the time that Safire planned to retire on Jan. 24, and that, in the opinion pages of The New York Times at least, an important segment of the Jewish population would no longer be represented.
I’ll miss Safire for the same reason that I do what I do: I’m a pluralist. I have my opinions, and they’re usually the opposite of Safire’s. But I always felt a good newspaper is like a strong Jewish community: We have our factions, but that shouldn’t keep us from talking with and learning from one another. Even when I disagree with you, you might have something to teach me, even if the lesson only leads me to sharpen my arguments against you.
For a golden moment, ending with Safire’s retirement and beginning last year with the appointment of David Brooks as his heir apparent on the Right, you could say that the range of mainstream Jewish opinion could be found among the Times’ essayists. On the Left you had Thomas Friedman and Frank Rich — Friedman representing the Laborites in the pro-Israel camp, Rich waving the banner of liberalism in his defense of civil liberties and gay rights and his attacks on anti-intellectualism and censorship.
Their biographies even mesh with two familiar Jewish types.
Friedman is a product of five-day-a-week Hebrew school, summers on kibbutz, a degree from Brandeis University, and a semester abroad at the Hebrew University. Many Jewish readers will never forgive Friedman for daring to criticize Israel’s leadership, but Friedman knows the score. As he once said, “A Jew who wants to make a career working in or studying about the Middle East will always be a lonely man: He will never be fully accepted or trusted by the Arabs, and he will never be fully accepted or trusted by the Jews.”
Rich is almost classically assimilated, having been brought up in Washington, DC, in a family that, as he recalls in his autobiography, “spoke no Hebrew, ate pork chops, and, in further defiance of their nominal religion’s practice, named their firstborn sons after their living fathers.” That hasn’t kept him from being one of the fiercest critics of Mel Gibson, or sniffing out anti-Semitism in the ranks of the Culture Warriors.
Brooks is a wild card, but a familiar one to anyone who talked to Jewish voters during the last election. He came up through conservative bastions like the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard, but has been called “a conservative you can bring home to your liberal parents.” While he’s on board with the administration’s economic policies and the Iraq war and is critical of liberal spiritual values, he supports abortion in the first trimester, as well as gay marriage and gays in the military.
Brooks appears to be mildly hawkish on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but foreign affairs are a sideline for Brooks, just as domestic affairs are for Friedman. And while Brooks may replace Safire as a reliable defender of the Bush Mideast agenda, he won’t be calling up his good buddy “Arik “ Sharon, as Safire is wont to do. (Safire has even joked that his views are “a little more hawkish” than the prime minister’s.)
When Safire goes, the Times will be missing a voice that speaks to and for the Jewish Right, certainly on Israel but also on domestic affairs. In general, it’s the voice of the Orthodox, the pro-Israel PACs, the Jewish Republicans, Commentary magazine, and the Mideast “media monitors.” These are Jews who tend to dismiss the Times news pages as “anti-Israel,” and prefer to get their Israel news from Fox or the New York Post. The Orthodox and the Jewish Republicans may be, as Safire once said of himself, “a political minority within an ethnic minority,” but they manage an outsize influence. For the Orthodox, it means they show up — at rallies, in congressional offices, in the war chests of pro-Israel candidates, and in Israel, either as frequent visitors, full- and part-time residents, or the parents of those who make aliya.
The Republicans, meanwhile, make up in influence and access what they lack in numbers.
I never bought the argument that the Times has it in for Israel. But as much as I respect Friedman on Israel and Rich on cultural issues, a significant segment of the Jewish community will not be reflected without Safire’s voice.
That’s too bad, because when groups and individuals receive little or no validation from the mainstream, they become only more radical in their views. Safire might have had a moderating influence on the Right as Israel heads toward a showdown over the withdrawal from Gaza. It’s the same kind of influence Friedman wields whenever he reminds the Jewish Left that it’s not just a right-wing fantasy that the Arab world can be corrupt, fascistic, and indulgent toward terrorists.
Meanwhile, by appearing on the Times’ op-ed pages, Safire drew readers who would normally shun the “liberal” Times, and certainly its liberal columnists. I can’t say for sure that after reading Safire conservative readers would turn to Bob Herbert or Paul Krugman, but it’s comforting to think that they might.
Safire will still be around, writing his language column for the Sunday Times. In his official retirement announcement, he wrote that at the start of his 30-year run, the Times “wanted ‘another point of view,’ which was what it surely got, and its editors did not wince nor cry aloud.”
I never thought I’d say this, but I almost feel like wincing or crying myself.