Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 36, No. 20, Ed. 1 Thursday, May 20, 1982 Page: 4 of 24
twenty four pages : ill. ; page 20 x 16 in. Scanned from physical pages.View a full description of this newspaper.
Extracted Text
The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
TEXAS JEWISH POST THURSDAY, MAY 20, 1982 POSTORIAL PAGE 4
oostoriol:
Prayers In Classrooms
“No one will ever convince me that a moment of
voluntary prayer will harm a child or threaten a school
or state.” With this resounding declaration, President
Reagan announced at a recent White House Garden
ceremony his support for a constitutional amendment to
permit voluntary prayer in public schools. Such an
amendment would override the 1962 Supreme Court
decision that declared classroom prayer unconstitu-
tional.
The announcement is a discouraging development for
those who support the constitutional separation of
church and state and for those who believe in freedom
of religious pluralism in this country, both of which such
an amendment could directly infringe upon.
By fullfilling an earlier campaign pledge, Reagan's
announcement was immediately met with a fusilade of
opposition from Jewish and Christian organizations, as
well as the American Civil Liberties Union. These
groups maintain, among other points, that prayers
cannot be voluntary when mandated by a school system
since a child who did not want to participate would be
subjected to ridicule from classmates or forced by peer
pressure to take part in whatever ceremony was being
held.
One critic from the American Jewish Congress said:
“The Jewish Community, in particular, is acutely aware
of government imposed religion ... It is for this reason
that many of our ancestors fled Europe.” An official
from a Baptist organization termed the President’s
announcement as “the politicizing” of prayer and said
that “involving government in prayer would trivialize
and secularize prayer.”
From a political standpoint, Reagan’s announcement
was idealy timed to grasp back his disenchanted moral
right conservative constituency who can use this as
ammunition in the 1982 elections. As in the past, the
moral right groups will be able to “target” a candidate
and make his support or opposition to this amendment
an issue come election time.
For whatever his reasoning, the President is a
difficult man to convince otherwise once he has put his
stamp on an issue. It is interesting however, to question
whether a man of the President’s stature and
knowledge sincerely believes that the imposition of
voluntary school prayers would not pose a type of
emotional threat to eight and nine-year old students and
whether he truly believes that such an amendment
^would not affect the religious diversity of this country..
TEXAS JEWISH POST
Dedicated to Truth, Liberty and Justice
Editor and Publisher.....................J.A. Wisch
Managing Editor and Associate Publisher......Rene Wisch
Contributing Editor............. Steve Wisch
Editorial..........................Linda Davidsohn
Dallas Manager......................Chester Wisch
Typography.........................Wylma Hooker
Food - Home.........................Susan Wisch
Circulation.........................Rosa Lee Jones
ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVES
Eli Davidsohn Kevin Jones
Robert Brimm Judy Levine
Wylma Hooker Betty F. Wisch’
MEDIA SPOTLIGHT
MONITOR
Washington Post's Foul Plays
Judy Wisch
P0ST0GRAPHERS
Sharon Wisch
SUBSCRIPTION RATES
51400 Texas Residents J1600 Out-of-State
J2500 Outside U.S.
OFFICES
FORT WORTH DALLAS
P.0. Box 742 11333 N. Central Expwy.
Fort Worth, Texas 76101-0742 Dallas, Texas 75243-6767
(817) 927-2831 (214) 692-7283
Metro 429-0840
The Texas Jewish Post (ISSN0040-439X) is published weekly.
Office of Publication, 3120 S. Expressway. Fort Worth, Texas 76110
Second Class Postage Paid at Fort Worth, Texas
Permit No. 540940
"POSTMASTER: Send address changes to the TEXAS JEWISH POST
P.0. Box 742, Fort Worth, Texas 76101-0742."
BY MOSHE DECTER
For some years, the
Washington Post has had on
its staff an “Ombudsman” —
a seasoned journalist who is
free to examine, and report
on, what the paper might be
doing wrong. It is a valuable
institution, to be commend-
ed to other papers and other
news media.
In his weeklv column on
May 4, the Post’s Ombuds-
man, Robert J. McCloskey,
ran a remarkable column in
which he tired to cope with
the charge that the paper’s
Middle East coverage is
anti-Israel, and is character-
ized by what some of its
accusers have called a
“psychotic bias” and “anti-
Semitism”. In denying the
charge, he reports that
other papers — the New
York Times, Boston Globe,
Baltimore Sun, Chicago Sun-
Times, Los Angeles Times
— hear similar charges.
Without imputing any
such bias to the Post or the
other papers, an observer of
the press must be struck by
the fact that this is clearly a
nationwide phenomenon, not
restricted to one paper or
one city. It’s important to
bear this fact in mind as we
peruse the Ombudsman’s
revelations, which are based
on his review of the last few
months of the Post’s cover-
age.
* “Frequently, news in-
volving Israel is given
exaggerated play.”
* “At times, plain mis-
takes occur and are not
always corrected.”
He cites several examp-
les:
Twice in one week last
December, “Post stories
misstated the substance of
U.N. Resolution 242.” And
though he says his column
made a correction, it can
never catch up with the
original “mistake”.
An earlier report, he adds,
“delcared that Israel had
rejected withdrawal from
occupied territories”. Mc-
Closkey cites a long list of
such errors. Front-page
headlines and story place-
ment are frequently skewed
and sensationalize the news.
Prior Arab rioting, he notes,
did not reach the front pages
until Israeli security forces
fired on demonstrators.
While screaming head-
lines make a major story of
any killing of an Arab rioter,
news of the murder of scores
of innocent people in daily
internecince warfare in Leb-
anon is buried in brief notes
deep in inside pages. ‘The
contrast,” the Ombuds-
man admits, “evokes cries of
foul play.”
• McCloskey admits that
the fighting in Lebanon
warrants more prominent
coverage, and he sums up
the criticism this way:
“These and other exam-
ples move serious people to
ask why is it when Muslims
kill Muslims it is not as
newsworthy as when Israe-
lis kill Muslims.”
The Ombudsman has no
answer.
But he has other examples
of such mistakes. The Post
published a story the pre-
ceding week, based on a UPI
dispatch — “Israeli soldiers
shot and wounded two
Arabs” — that buried the
news that one victim had
“pulled a knife” on the
soldiers. And the headline
took no note of that either.
“Omissions,” McCloskey
writes, “are seen as confir-
mation of bias. He cites the
instance of an ABC
News/Post poll in early
March which contained
much data favorable to
Israel, but which the
Post failed to pub-
lish, because the Post’s
analyst raised questions
about the poll’s signifi-
cance. The Ombudsman
feels the results should have
been published.
He touches on another
serious problem: “analysis
running as news”. Too often,
he concedes, editors fail
distinguish the two, anc
readers suspect it is “a
not-so-subtle bit of editor-
ializing”. “That occurred,”!
McCloskey admits, “withj
four articles on the Middle
East in five days early in
April.”
That the problem persists
is pointed up by a letter in»
the May 7 Post: The paper*
reported two Washington!
rallies on April 25 — against
nuclear weapons and for
Argentina — each attended
by some 500 people. But a
pro-Israel rally of more than
3,000 people the same day
went unreported. B
between
you and me
BY BORIS SMOLAR
[Editor-in-chief emeritus, J.T.A.]
[Copyright 1982, Jewish Telegraphic
Agency, Inc.]
“THE FORWARD” AT 85: The
celebration this weekend [May 23] of the
85th anniversary of the Jewish Daily
Forward — the only Yiddish daily
newspaper in the United States — marks
a milestone in American Jewish history.
There was a time — about 50 years ago
— when more than a dozen Yiddish daily
newspapers were published in this
country. Seven of them were in New
York, including a tabloid-size evening
paper; three were published simultan-
eously in Chicago, which had at that time
the largest Jewish community in the U.S.
next to New York. Yiddish daily
newspapers were published also in
Philadelphia and in Cleveland. The
Forward survived all of them.
Each of these newspapers had a
circulation of tens of thousands. The
circulation of the Forward was at that
time more than 200,000. Today, when the
great majority of Jews in this country are
American-born and read the English
press, the circulation of the Forward is
about 40,000. This, despite the fact that
more than 1,593,000 Jews have declared
Yiddish as their mother tongue in the U.S.
census of the population in 1970. About
170,000 of them were of American-born
parents of the second and third genera-
tions.
The Forward is still the bible today of
the generation of immigrant Jews whom
the paper helped to find their way in this
country. The paper is highly respected
also by young American Jews of the
second and third generations, even if they
cannot read Yiddish. The role which this
paper — and its editor Abraham Cahan —
played in assisting the generation of
immigrants to fight the ten-exisiting
“sweat shops” in which many of them
worked practically under conditions of
slavery in strengthening their fledgling
but now powerful trade labor unions, in
serving as their adviser in various family
problems, and in adjusting themselves to
American life, is reflected in numerous
English books and social work in this
country.
Way back in the 1930’s, when the New
York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies
established its School for Social Work to
train students for professionals in Jewish
institutions, it produced a mimeographed
volume of letters originally written in
Yiddish by readers of the Forward
asking the paper for advice on the family
and social problems they were facing. The
letters, translated by the school into
English, became a part of the curriculum
of the school, giving the students a
concrete idea of the sorrows, joys, hopes
and frustrations of the immigrant
generation. These bittersweet letters —
and the responses they drew from the
legendary advice column in the paper —
were popular as a daily feature in the
Forward, appearing under the title “A
Bintel Brief’ (“A Bundle of Letters”).
* * *
A RECORD OF GLORY: The interest
in the Forward among the present
generation of young American Jews —
and also among non-Jews — is best seen
from the books and articles in English
about the Forward and the personality of
its editor, written by prominent histor-
ians and authors. Also from the fact that
two volumes of the “Bintel Brief” were
published in English translation by two
leading publishing houses — the Viking
Press and Doubleday Publishing Company
— in the last few years. No book has ever
been written on any of the other Yiddish
newspapers or their editors.
The influence of the Forward on its
readers in general was strongly reflected
at the Forward Balls which were given
annually in the early years of the
existence of the paper which at that time
faced financial difficulties. These balls,
intended as income for the Forward were
crowded by tens of thousands and were
held in the largest halls in the Madison
Square Garden in New York, the Coliseum
in Chicago, and large halls in other cities.
They were mass-demonstrations of
grateful and dedicated readers deeply
interested in the existence of their paper.
Women at the balls took off their golden
earings and their rings and threw them
into the collection pots as contributions for
See Between You and Me-Page 21
Upcoming Pages
Here’s what’s next.
Search Inside
This issue can be searched. Note: Results may vary based on the legibility of text within the document.
Tools / Downloads
Get a copy of this page or view the extracted text.
Citing and Sharing
Basic information for referencing this web page. We also provide extended guidance on usage rights, references, copying or embedding.
Reference the current page of this Newspaper.
Wisch, J. A. & Wisch, Rene. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 36, No. 20, Ed. 1 Thursday, May 20, 1982, newspaper, May 20, 1982; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth755686/m1/4/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .