On March 25 five years ago, I published the first entry on this site, which was then a blog at the New York Observer, and had no idea of the political site it would become. I’m proud of what we’ve done here and offer a giant Thank you to our readers; and I want to take a moment to reflect on social media and the road ahead.
I started this site to push my opposition to the Iraq war and to stay alive as a writer at 50 on the new internet landscape. My then-editor, Peter Kaplan, who gave the site its name, told me to write about what was on my mind, and though that turned out to mean a lot of self-indulgent posts, the thing I wanted to write about most was Jewish identity and the Iraq war; and the unrelenting demands of blogging gave me permission to become a broken record. A few months into blogging I was posting so much about “my Jewish problem” with Israel that I couldn’t justify never having been there, and I went during the Lebanon invasion of ‘06. So this site made me open my eyes. My favorite post that first year was about sitting in Hebron when a South African activist told me that what we were seeing was worse than apartheid.
After a year the Observer and I parted ways over my criticism of Israel and I went out on my own, and for the next year and a half there wasn’t a day I didn’t think of quitting. I’m thankful to a few friends for encouraging me, James North, Jack Ross, Scott McConnell and Peter Drubetskoy. Without them this site would not be here today.
In 2008 everything changed because of two things, one good, one bad. I met Adam Horowitz at events he was coordinating on the Right of Return in New York and I so trusted his calm assurance that when he said a few months later that he was leaving the American Friends Service Committee and was looking around for opportunities, I said, Anything you think you can do with this site, let’s do it.
And then soon after Adam started working here, the Gaza onslaught happened, and what we were running suddenly meant a lot more.
Adam changed Mondo from a blog to a website. He is an expert in creating political space, and he began to do that here, surveying the territory and putting the stakes in. He is also more of a modern journalist than I am. He understood the web’s potential to create a community, and he began throwing open the windows and building a brand. In a word, he professionalized the site, and started bringing in diverse voices.
Adam and I have both been stunned by the effect of social media. This site doesn’t belong to us completely, it belongs to a community—and the more we’ve gotten out of the way, the more successful we’ve been. The internet is more permeable than any other journalistic medium, more democratic and responsive and intelligent. Names turn up on pending posts (back in the kitchen, I mean) that I’ve never seen before. I know I’ve paid a price, of a loss of writerly individualism, but it was a good price to pay.
We thank all of you for showing up.
I used to write ten times a day for this site, now I write three or four times. That’s a good change. After four years I was at last able to give myself something of an income; and my ambition is to give other writers money before long.
If the next five years are anything like the last five, we have no idea where we’re going. But Adam and I are making plans. We see this site growing more professional all the time. We want to be involved with more young talents from a worldly diverse community and help them to develop as we have been able to develop. We want to see the incredible voices that we have been so lucky to publish, Ahmed Moor, annie, Ali Gharib, Alex Kane, Anees of Jerusalem, Bruce Wolman, Susie Kneedler, Joseph Glatzer, Max Blumenthal, Eleanor K, Rehmat Qadir, Pamela Olson, Matthew Taylor, Parvez Sharma, Ira Glunts, Matthew Phillips, David Samel, Shmuel, James North and of course Seham grow more prominent and more influential, and get paid for their labors. And Wondering Jew, too. (I know I’m forgetting some names, I apologize ahead of time!)
And let me mention our young Gaza contributors who we hope to watch into a freer future: Jehan Al-Farra, Sameeha Elwan, Fidaa Abu Assi, Rawan Yaghi, Mohammed Rabah Suliman, Lina Al-Sharif, Mohammed Said AlNadi, and Sarah Ali.
Speaking personally, this site has made me grow up as a person and writer. The conditions of elite journalism allowed me to sit above the audience; I was able to mentally shut out the people in the seats, and as a result my writing was often cute, trivial, ironic, mean, sexist. On the internet, I had to join the people in the seats. I wrote about stuff that other smart people could comment on and correct and weigh in against. Many of them knew the subject far better than I did. I’d always been a luftmensch, now I was forced to engage the world. My style became more straightforward, my storytelling more urgent and serious. Also, I became a member of a community and a manager of this site.
If five years ago someone had shown me what this site is today, 10,793 posts later, I simply wouldn’t have believed it. I wouldn’t have believed myself capable of the editorial and personal responsibility of dealing with so many ideas and people from cultures so different to mine. I hope to continue to develop so that I can take a larger and maybe quieter role in the global community I’m engaged with. I want to become less wise-ass, more accurate, and more thoughtful—in a word, more journalistic.
