

Alison Weir

A couple years ago I did a post lamenting the fact that so many of the folks covering Israel and Palestine for American papers were Jewish, and some critics accused me of anti-Semitism. Well the issue doesn’t go away. Below are two responses to the hiring of Jodi Rudoren as the next New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem that fasten on to her Jewishness from different points of view.

First there’s Ron Kampeas at Foreign Policy issuing guidelines for Rudoren that reflect a smug ethnocentrism. As Ilene Cohen said in passing this along, “You’d think the New York Times was a Jewish house organ rather than the paper of record.”

Two of Kampeas‘s “rough rules for Times bureau chiefs (and other journalists) for navigating the world’s most delicate reporting assignment.”

Polish that Sunday school Hebrew…. There has persisted among foreign correspondents, at least until recent years, a stigma associated with the notion that once in your pre-journalist existence you might have become conversant with the language of the Torah.

And below are excerpts of Alison Weir at Counterpunch questioning the fact that every Times correspondent in the conflict in recent years has been Jewish– “a member of the family,” something that is perfectly OK to talk about in Israel but not here. I think Weir is right to land on the “diversity” issue, and the consequent Israeliness of the Times outlook– the manifest investment of Times reporters (who live atop a West Jerusalem house seized from Palestinians during the Nakba) in the Israeli perspective.

(That said, I’m open-minded; I sense that Rudoren is not a Zionist, that she’s tough and smart, and that we’re about to see a sea-change in Times coverage.)

Note Weir’s critique of the Khader Adnan coverage. Shocking.