Joel Schalit

Making News

Nearly a year to the day I left Tikkun to complete my book, I went back to work as an editor again. Not so coincidentally, the gig was online, with Allvoices, an international news and community portal. Tasked with recruiting a team of bloggers to help launch the site’s publishing platform, and responsibility for editing and managing the largest collection of international news feeds I’ve ever seen, I’ve spent the last five months adjusting to a job that’s both new and extremely familiar at the exact same time.

I’m very grateful for the opportunity. Given what a crisis publishing is in, I continue to find myself exceedingly lucky I found any work at all, let alone work in news media. The degree of relief I feel, as you might imagine, remains profound. My biggest concern in quitting my former job in such dreadful economic circumstances was that my book might be my final hurrah to fourteen years in publishing. I’m glad to say its not, though I would have continued to do this irrespective of whether I’m paid or not.

One aspect of my present gig that makes it so fulfilling is familiarizing myself with English language news resources in places I would not have otherwise gotten to know, such as central Africa and the Caribbean, discovering first class, UN-funded news organizations, or independent European agencies that are every bit as good as AP or Reuters. It’s all been enormously inspirational to discover, especially at a time when it seems as though the business is going to absolute pot.

The other aspect of my present gig that I’ve really enjoyed has been working with a crew of twenty-two regular bloggers, such as my longtime colleague and pal Mitchell Plitnick, the Belgrade-based  journalist Amy Miller, Cairo’s aBendinTheNile, and Ilana Sichel in Jerusalem, to name a few. Their writing can be every bit as good as anything I read at past gigs, if not more so. I still do a serious amount of traditional editorial work at Zeek to balance it all out, and the perspective it helps provides is something else.

The best anecdote I can impart about all of this is that my co-workers, who hail from India, Europe, and Pakistan, like to jokingly refer to me as the ‘Mossad agent.’ Though it’s not meant to be pejorative, in context, it’s still a hoot to hear. Relating this to a relative who queried me about the Arab media I’ve been having to review, giggling, he responded, " Nu, you know, this stuff could come in useful some day."

Rootless Occidentalism

C’mon Fairuz, where was this album really recorded? The fine print on the upper right says Lebanon, but the LP’s title indicates that it might also have been made in the US. The ambiguity of the record’s ideal location, as somewhere in between America and the Middle East, suits this 1971 release extremely well. How contemporary, especially considering the fact that the record is nearly fourty years old.

The H in Globalization

H, that is, for Hebrew. Go get ‘em, tiger.  Orakiva  Mall, 2006.

American Studies

American defense concerns have always given weapons names that fit their function. For example, fighters such as the F-15, F-16 and F-18 were appropriately given names such as ‘Eagle’, ‘Fighting Falcon,’ and ‘Hornet,’ while the black-painted, radar-evading F-117 stealth bomber was dubbed the ‘Nighthawk‘.

As silly as these names can get, (Why not a Dayhawk? When is the Chickenhawk coming? etc..) you can see the cultural logic behind their specificity. They’re meant to convey that such war machines embody the fierce, agile, even predatory qualities that define the brave birds that the aircraft were named after.

Hence the curious naming of the new ‘Masada‘ assault rifle by it’s manufacturer, Magpul Industries. Named after one of the first recorded incidents of mass suicide (in which 960 Jews besieged by Roman troops took their lives) the complexity of the rifle’s title represents a fairly serious break with convention.

As though anticipating criticisms over having chosen such a potentially controversial name, in a PDF brochure for the weapon posted to Wikipedia, Magpul maintains that the company is  neither “Jewish or Israeli backed,” but that it has always found the story of Masada to be “a bold example of defiance.”

If you want to get a sense of what informs so many American estimations of Israeli military prowess, you won’t find a more revealing signifier. One people’s loss is another’s defiance. Or, one could conjecture that such takes on Israelis say more about American desires than what they think about Jewry.

In January, the Masada was licensed to the larger American arms manufacturer Bushmaster, who have since retitled it the Adaptive Combat Rifle.

Street Academy

Right across the street from the San Francisco supermarket where I confirmed the non-identity of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader stands a liquor store. Until recently, it’s owner was a Palestinian, and the clerks who worked there were either from southern Lebanon or the West Bank.

The last time I had talked to the Lebanese clerk was in July 2006, at the beginning of the war. He had told me that he was very concerned about his family, who still lived in the south, and had just had their electricity and water cut off during the first days of the fighting.

Two weeks ago, I found him standing in front of the store. He recognized me, and we shook hands. "Did your family make it through?" I asked. "Yes," he replied. "Barely. Your people bombed the hell out of their village," he added, as a young couple walked by us speaking to each other in Hebrew.

I told him about the turn I took last summer in Ghajar, and asked if he could help me identify the puzzling green flag of the militiamen I’d run into there." Oh, they were Amal," he said, referring to the Lebanese Shi’ite guerrilla organization that preceded Hezbollah.