Ruby Jewsday

OK, so here’s the deal. I’m a 56 year old grizzled veteran of 30 years of the Jewish journalism wars. I had understood for quite a while that I ought to start a blog, yet changing with the times is tough for geezers. So there I was, stuck in 20th Century journalistic mode, when a young colleague Dima Zabarko came along and offered to get a Walter Ruby blog up and running. So how could a shameless self-promoter like me say ‘’no’ to that offer? Clearly, I couldn’t. True, I go into this more than a trifle concerned that an honest exposition of my opinions might freak some of the people who value my reporting. I’ve always believed that a reporter must be scrupulously objective when reporting a story and, I will continue doing that. But I also have opinions to share and ideas I believe ought to be out in the public square. So I will use this space for both reportage and expressing my opinions; always clearly differentiating between the two.

I began my reporting career in Israel during the late 1970’s, covered New York and the United Nations for the Jerusalem Post and several American Jewish papers during the 1980’s and then spent three years in Moscow covering the collapse of the Soviet Union for the Post, Ma’ariv and the Forward. During those years I learned Russian, and more or less went “native” in terms of an embrace of things Russian in both my professional and personal life. These days I am back in New York covering the Russian Jewish community for the Jewish Week and the New York Daily News.

I feel very much at home among Russian Jews, enjoy vodka shots and good times in Russian restaurants. I believe the American Jewish establishment has consistently failed to engage the Russians in a way that would bring the communities together. Indeed organized American Jewry has patronized and spoken down to Russian Jews going back to the days of the Soviet Jewry movement in the 1980’s when big shot American Jewish leaders used to fly to Moscow and head straight for the Kremlin to negotiate with the Soviet leaders on behalf of the refuseniks, without bothering to check first with the heroes whose fate was on the line what they wanted to see accomplished in those meetings. Flash forward 20 years, the Soviet Union is gone, there are a million Russian Jews in Israel, and Russian Jews have become close to 25 percent of New York Jewry. Their sheer demographic clout here has forced American Jewish organizations to sort of half admit them into the tent, with a few representatives on the boards of a few of the big organizations, like UJA-Fed, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the American Jewish Committee. Yet they still play a minimal role in decision making and they still often feel patronized and dictated to by the American Jewish establishment.

Meanwhile, Russian Jews are asserting their unique dual identity as both Russians and Jews. Among the multiple manifestations of this ongoing struggle over self-definition is the continuing, so far unsuccessful effort to elect a Russian-speaker to the NY City Council or NY State Assembly; the ongoing debate in the community as to where it fits in between America, Russia and Israel in an era when Cold War II may be looming; and the phenomenon of 20 and 30-somethings who mainly grew up in America and who speak better English than Russian returning to the fold and re-embracing their Russian identities.

At the same time, I find highly problematic much of the Russian community’s embrace of all things capitalistic and conservative; whether it is the Bush Administration or the hardest of the hard line stance on Israeli issues. I personally am a liberal Democrat and a decided dove on Israel-Palestine issues. Yet because I take the Russian Jewish community seriously, understand its gestalt and feel personally connected to it, I am in a position to have respectful political discussions with Russian Jews—even when we have both had a stakan (shot glass) or two--while remaining friends.

In short, I see my role as a bridge between American-born Jews and Russian-born ones; someone who can facilitate ‘straight from the kishkes’ communication between two communities on a host of controversial issues; Israel, of course, but also domestic concerns like church and state, the death penalty, civil liberties, social services and more; not to mention the 64 thousand dollar question of how the two communities can learn to communicate more effectively. Speaking of 64 thousand dollars, if anyone knows of a source that might fund a Walter Ruby-type to build bridges between Russian and American Jews, please let me know. Poorly maintained bridges eventually wear out, if you get my drift.

So this blog will contain both reporting and opinion. There will be a compendium of significant articles I have written on Russian Jewish issues and an ongoing series of trenchant observations as I go forward. But there will be a lot more on this site than Russian Jews. I will share my vision, developed together with a Palestinian-American named Aref Dajani, of a resplendent future in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side in two states, while sharing with each other a love for the common land that inspires them both. Yes, it’s wildly utopian but it may also be the only way out of the hatred and violence in which we have been immersed for 100 years. I will write about my thoughts about America and the world, about my lifelong struggle with the meaning of Jewishness, about my travels; in short, whatever is pre-occupying me at a certain moment. And of course, there will be space for people to post their comments, to tell me what a shmuck I am and to debate each other.

True, all of this sounds a self-indulgent, but such exercises in vanity are apparently what cyber-space was invented for. So davai, ya’alah, lets get this blog up and see where it goes.

Whimsically,

Walter