If you haven’t read Roi Ben-Yehuda before, you’re sorely missing out.
One of the best writers I’ve ever worked with, Roi’s articles epitomize the sensibilities of someone who has grown up in both Israel and the US, and remains rightfully suspicious of one-dimensional appeals to all forms of nationalism and xenophobia.
His latest piece, on the ideological limitations of Israel’s flag, was published yesterday in Haaretz.
On July 1st, I stepped down from my editorial position at Allvoices. With two months to pack up our home and move to the United Kingdom, I couldn’t have had a better reason to punch out. I’ll be spending the next eight weeks at home writing and editing a couple of terrific books while we get everything ready. To make the transition back to book editing, after being immersed in the world of blogs and online periodicals is interesting to note, (as a format exercise), given the direction that this kind of work now moves.
Leaving my office in San Francisco’s financial district (pictured above) for the very last time, I couldn’t resist capturing the signage of the cylinder shaped newsstand that sits at the building’s front entrance. Housing not only my ex-employer, but also a Reuters office, and the headquarters of the local Jewish weekly, The J, my former firm’s new abode hosts an above average number of news publishers for such a small, albeit significant, American city.
Just before I left, however, I received a call from the very first periodical I ever worked for, in between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, in 1982. Serving as a summer intern for the legendary Mother Jones (whose building, pictured above, is three blocks west of my former office) has earned me a semi-annual email or phone call from what sounds like another MoJo intern, keeping tabs on alumni. “You’re a writer, right?” asked the young man who called me. “Yes,” I told him. “And an editor, too.”
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.”
This is our local grocery store. We try not to shop there too often because it’s expensive, and offers a fairly unimaginative selection of coffees. But, being four blocks away, it still has it’s value. Such as when, fact-checking an article about the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade cell in Nablus last summer for a magazine, I ran into a friend who had just spent a month working with an NGO in the West Bank city.
"The author identifies the head of the local ‘Brigade crew," I told Rebecca when I saw her, dropping the name given to the commander. "You must have run into those people with some frequency when you were there. Does it ring a bell?" I asked. Laughing, she gently replied, "No, of course not. That’s definitely not the guy’s name, and besides, I couldn’t pin a pseudonym on him if I tried."
France24 has launched The Observers, a new, bilingual citizen journalism initiative. At the behest of staff writer Roi Ben-Yehuda, I became an Observer last week, and gave my thoughts on a new Israeli government drive to encourage teens to do their obligatory military duty.
As someone who, when they came of age in 1985, did not do their service, I explain why, as well as criticize a new state-produced video designed to prevent kids from doing the same. Check it out. The following response, by the anonymous Yael, is worth the price of admission alone.
Later on this week, Roi will be running a piece on the first Tel Aviv Sex Festival, which was held a little over a week ago. I’ll be reprising my Observer role as part of the proceedings.
The killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 was of particular importance in reinforcing this understanding of Pakistan. A Jewish-American reporter engaged in a multiethnic marriage, Pearl’s murder by Islamic militants was promoted as an iconographic instance of the clash of civilizations thesis, transposed to America’s relationship with Pakistan. The ideological tensions inherent in emphasizing Pearl as though he were the US – multicultural, liberal, interfaith – to Pakistan as uncivilized, violent, politically corrupt and religiously intolerant – ought to be clear.
Pearl represented America, and its actualization of the ideals it was promoting on the War on Terror, which Pakistan, with its tribes, its madrassas, and its fundamentalists was in conflict with. This made Pearl a martyr-equivalent to domestic neoconservatives. If Americans wanted more nuance in news coverage of the country than Pearl’s remembrance allowed, they had to seek it out from foreign news sources such as the BBC and The Guardian.
- From a report I recently wrote about south Asian news coverage in the US
It was a hard decision to make, but I had to do so. For the last twelve months, I desisted from doing any freelance work in order to reserve all of my energies for Israel vs Utopia.
Now that the book is in my editors’ hands, today, my first article since last March was published by Zeek. And, on Tuesday, I conducted my first formal interview since I spoke to Jimmy Carter in December 2006.
Look forward to reading a conversation about Middle Eastern news media with Link TV‘s Jamal Dajani in Zeek next month. To call it informative would be an understatement.
It’s finally out, and boy does it look good. Strolling through the Haight yesterday, Jennifer and I stumbled upon the brand new edition of the Punk Planet interview collection, We Owe You Nothing, at the appropriately DiY, volunteer-staffed Bound Together Books.
Featuring several new interviews conducted between 2001 and 2007, We Owe You contains six pieces I acquired for PP back in the day, including interviews with Steve Albini, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Negativland, Team Dresch’s Jody Bleyle, Outpunk’s Matt Wobensmith and Black Flag.
Toronto’s Eye Weekly reviewed the collection on the 9th, together with former Punk Planet Associate Publisher Anne Elizabeth Moore‘s excellent Unmarketable. Putting Anne’s book in the mix not only was smart. It also explains why PP remains essential to understanding the zeitgeist.
Ron Nachmann is an Israeli-American journalist based in San Francisco. A close friend and colleague, we’ve worked together at a number of different periodicals, including Tikkun, where Ron served as music editor. Now a contributor to Zeek, his latest article, a review of Tom Segev’s 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, was published in the December issue. It’s not only a marvelous piece of writing on an incredibly complex and politically loaded book. Ron’s essay is an excellent introduction to the politics of writing about Israeli history.
The appropriately-titled Continuity has finally arrived. A CD/DVD by the Tokyo-based, Polish sound artist Zbigniew Karkowski (in collaboration with Japanese videographer Atsuko Nojiri), this unorthodox career retrospective is the last project we signed when I was Asphodel‘s label manager. Already receiving excellent reviews in Europe from publications such as Vital Weekly, given press like this, I have the sneaking suspicion that Continuity will cement Karkowski’s reputation as one of the world’s most forward-thinking electronic musicians.
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