A collective autobiography

ROBERT A. DAUM

In the spring of my senior year of high school in Connecticut, a race riot closed the school for a few days. As the dismissed students exited the building, a phalanx of 150 state police officers with helmets and plastic shields stood watch in front of the long line of school buses. As editor of the school newspaper, I worked quickly with my team to prepare a special edition for the return of the student body. The principal initially refused permission for us to publish, for fear that we might inflame a highly combustible situation. We felt that this was precisely the wrong approach. Rumors had fueled the riot, and a judicious mix of news, editorial content, features and sports coverage seemed a constructive response. With the support of the city’s superintendent of schools, we prevailed.

We knew that much was riding on this issue. In the post-riot “back to school” edition, we ran an editorial calling for civility and dialogue. We ran an ironic story about a group of white students running after a group of black students, all of whom nearly collided with a schoolmate wearing a green dragon costume in the courtyard. The drama club had just returned from a performance at a local kindergarten. One of the rumors aggravating tensions was that a student had jumped from a window. Our investigation revealed that, in fact, the student had clambered out of a ground floor window to slip away to the local McDonald’s. We reported on the riot, but we tried to do so in a way that enabled the community to catch its breath, reflect, and see a way forward.

In retrospect, I believe that city officials made the right call in 1975. In a complex, sometimes fraught, social context, media have a valuable role to play. As high school students reeling from a race riot, we sought to strike a balance between solemnity and gentle humor. We sought to inform, provoke, question and entertain. We neither over-estimated nor under-estimated our role in our community.

I recall this story from more than three decades ago on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Jewish Independent because I have a sense of the many challenges that face a Jewish community newspaper. Getting the paper out every week is only part of the challenge. We are a diverse Jewish community. No doubt among the faithful readers of the Independent there are hundreds of armchair publishers and editors. We can be opinionated, and we are not always easy to please. Surely I was not the only bar mitzvah student who learned that as a Jew I have both the right and the responsibility to correct the ba’al kriyah, the Torah reader, if I hear an error. If this is good enough for the Torah reader, why should “our” newspaper be treated any differently?

Sometimes our quibbles might seem relatively trivial. After all, our community is growing, but it is not very large. This puts financial pressure on all community institutions, including the Jewish community newspaper. No doubt they try to report on all that we and Jews around the world are doing, but our community institutions, professionals and volunteers provide an astonishing array of services and programs both within and well beyond the Jewish community. No doubt more ads would increase the size of the issue and broaden the coverage.

At other times our concerns are far more serious. We all live in the shadow of the Shoah, first and foremost (and incommensurably) those who survived it personally and those raised by survivors. It properly commands our attention. Others among us have experienced multiple wars in Israel or elsewhere. Traumatic pain is a trans-generational phenomenon, and we are a traumatized generation. Every Jewish community newspaper cannot fail to be cognizant of this painful dimension of its readership. This is not the only fraught issue that complicates the work of a Jewish community newspaper. Events in and around Israel, and events in the Middle East, are often on our minds. As individuals and as a community we also are deeply engaged in and concerned about many other issues and conflicts, locally and abroad. How can we not be? But, surely we don’t all see things the same way. Balancing different perspectives responsibly, comprehensively and accessibly for our multi-faceted community is a nearly impossible task. Doing all this in a carefully edited weekly issue for 80 years is no small feat.

The Jewish historian (and one of my teachers) David Biale concludes his edited work Cultures of the Jews (2002), “Perhaps all these disparate voices from three millennia, assembled together under this literary roof, constitute the collective biography of Israel.” In its own way, our weekly Jewish Independent constitutes both an ongoing biography and an ongoing collective autobiography of our local Jewish community. Please join me in expressing gratitude to the founders and sustainers of this publication, its publisher and editor, and its regular and occasional contributors, for informing us, provoking us and amusing us – for telling our stories – for 80 years.

Rabbi Dr. Robert A. Daum is director of Iona Pacific Inter-Religious Centre and associate professor of rabbinic literature and Jewish thought at the Vancouver School of Theology.

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