The late New York Times managing editor, Gerald Boyd, has posthumously published a book, My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at the New York Times. You can read excerpts of the book at Amazon. Boyd talks about his childhood in St. Louis and the effect a certain Cooper family–grocery owners, Reform Jewish–had on him. He recounts listening to them talk about the Holocaust and about the glorious victory of the IDF in the Six-Day War which leads him to state that as a young boy, "I could not locate Israel on a map, but I cheered for it about as much as I did for the Cardinals." (pg. 48).
Per Russell Baker’s review in the New York Review of Books,
Boyd was recruited for a management position in the 1980s by Max Frankel, then executive editor. By that time, Boyd had already established himself as a top-of-the-line reporter during an exemplary career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Times ‘s Washington bureau.
Oh, Frankel. He was a Holocaust survivor. And in The Times of My Life, his autobiography, he wrote:
I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert. I had yearned for a Jewish homeland ever since learning as a child in Germany that in Palestine even the policemen were Jews! Like most American Jews, however I settled on a remote brand of Zionism… American Jews poured energy and money into… vigorous political lobbying of presidents and Congress…Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognize, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.
(It is so easy to frame American narratives in racial and class terms. Yes, and what about ethnic/ideological ones? Hat tip to Irek.)
