The Jewish Chronicle: the end of a great media institution
The weekly paper, the Jewish Chronicle, is going into voluntary liquidation. This is very sad, on several levels. As the world’s oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper, founded in 1841, it has been an institution for the best part of two centuries. It has been an intelligent, culturally broad-minded, understandably pro-Israeli voice for the (sadly decreasing) Jewish population of Britain.
For the past ten years it has been edited by the well-known mainstream journalist Stephen Pollard, always a strong champion for his fellow Jews, both here and abroad. The venerable JC has enjoyed a global reputation. Jews are famously prominent in all the artistic and intellectual fields — as well as in business, of course — so the JC’s coverage was rich with articles on books, plays, concerts, theatrical and operatic productions, and its features were somewhere between middle and highbrow, but always well-written.
For me personally the loss of the JC is a painful blow, as I have had a long association with it. As a freelance I journalist I first began writing pieces for it in 1990, exactly thirty years ago. I filed book reviews, features, and plenty of comment pieces, because I often came up with ideas relating to Jewish matters, sometimes serious, sometimes humorous. I’m not Jewish myself (I’m Catholic, although I did have Jewish grandparents on my father’s side) but you didn’t have to be Jewish to write for the JC. It was (pardon the expression) a broad church.
Like so many outlets in the print media the JC had been suffering financially for a number of years, for all the usual reasons: the competition from online, the fall in advertising revenue, the drop in circulation. But it was only last summer that the paper had found an “angel” in the form of a new foundation, funded by a group of Jewish individuals, families and charities, to safeguard its future. Things were looking rosy.
But no one could have foreseen the current pandemic and the economic devastation it would wreak. When we finally emerge from this scourge, the journalism landscape will look very different. The big media companies will survive but very many small outlets will disappear, probably forever. Some analysts are predicting that up to 30 per cent of the country’s journalists will lose their jobs. All the staff at the JC have now been laid off, including old and dear friends of mine.
What I loved most about the paper was that there were certain kinds of articles which I simply could not imagine writing for anyone else. For example the piece I wrote pleading for sympathy for the plight of the half-Jew (i.e. me), who wasn’t sufficiently Jewish to call upon the traditional support networks that exist within Jewish communities, but Jewish enough to tell Jewish jokes with all the appropriate shrugs and gestures. It reminded me of Groucho Marx’s famous quip: when told at a country club that the swimming pool was off-limits to Jews, he replied: “My daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” That’s it exactly! To be half-Jewish is to be let in “only up to your knees”.
And there was the piece I wrote about being a goy who had soaked up a handy lexicon of Yiddish words from my Mittel-European parents, to be wheeled out in many of life’s situations because, to be honest, sometimes only a Yiddish word will do: “I might say to myself: oy vey, I’ve got to schmooze that editor again! But overcoming my reluctance, I launch into my spiel and pitch a new story idea. If they reject it, I think: what a schmuck. But if they give me the go-ahead, I feel all warm inside: ach, that editor is such a mensch.”
So it’s a mournful day for me, for the JC, and for British Jews who now will not have a paper of their own, which focuses on their interests and concerns — and Lord knows they have needed this in recent times, with the frightening rise in anti-Semitism here and throughout the world.
On the other hand, I keep thinking that the Jewish race has shown itself, throughout its incredibly long history — nearly six thousand years — to be remarkably resilient and resourceful. The JC may well — in one form or another — rise again some day. I do hope so.
