The Late Blooming
Of A.M. Rosenthal
Snippets Of Rosenthal
In the six years AM. Rosenthal has been writing his column,
his 750 allotted words have become more feisty and idiosyncratic.
Some recent examples:
On My Mind
A.
NI. ROSENTIIAL
The
Clinton
Couple
—Jan. 28, 1992
(written after the mainstream press
was reporting a supermarket tabloid's
allegations about Bill Clinton's
extramarital affairs)
The Clinton couple of Arkansas
presented to the Asnerican pub-
lic 5. gift and a testing opportunity.
ted us
The gift is that they trey
adu-lts. The opportunity is for us to act
.
but two
it
that whey
way spoke as individuals
grew from
t
st ef-
couple hey
was
as the that they were most
pdSonalities
fective — united without losing sepa-
rateness and supportive without
ma wkishne ss.
"Maybe we should not be too hard on. . . [President Bush]
— as long as he promises not to make any more public
jokes about vomit."
—Jan. 31 (written three days after the State of the Uth011
address)
"Enough editors, publishers, and writers are willing
-eager to make whores of themselves to produce
salable nastiness. Their reward is to be noticed —
worth more to them than the cash fee for their
services"
— Jan. 28, 1992 (written after the mainstream press
was reporting a supermarket tabloid's allegations
about Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs)
`The great distortion of the Mideast, which inspired a half-century of war against Israel, remains alive to
fuel more decades of disaster. That is the myth that the entire problem was created by Israeli occupation
of the West Bank, and cannot be solved without creating a separate Palestinian state."
Oct. 29, 1991
in the United States..., cartoons appear in the mainstream press that could have run in German Nazi pa-
pers. One showed an ugly Yitzhak Shamir beating a prostrate, tied Palestinian with a mace from which
swung a menacing Star of David. The Star of David is a routine symbol of oppression now for some Amer-
ican cartoonists. Publishers do nothing; readers, nothing."
— Oct. 22, 1991
"A Saudi is elected president of the U.N. General Assembly. Before the Foreign Minister of Israel speaks,
the Saudi prostitutes himself by absenting himself from the rostrum. If an Israeli had by some chance been
elected president of any UN body, and withdrawn not to spoil his eyes and ears from an Arab speaker,
the critics of Israel, from the most vulgar to the toniest, would have howled. I didn't hear any howls from
the absent Saudi."
Oct. 22, 1991
28
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1992
"Abraham Michael," with the initials, "A.M." in
his byline; for years, "A.M." hewed faithfully to the
time-honored objectivity of his trade, not allowing
his vested interests to intrude upon his profession-
al interests. Then, finally he is unleashed, given
space for 750 words three times a week and — voila!
— from , the cocoon emerges a full-blown, card-car-
rying, Israel-cheering, anti-Semite-bashing Jew.
By now, Mr. Rosenthal's column is so identified
with things Jewish that some readers have tagged
him the Times' "Jewish ombudsman." And an in-
ternationally known journalist said that if a cure
was discovered for AIDS, Mr. Rosenthal would write
about whether it was good for the Jews.
"I had no idea I would write so much" about these
topics, admitted Mr. Rosenthal in a recent inter-
view in his 10th-floor office in the not particularly
handsome Times building on 43rd Street in New
York. "I was never involved with Zionist groups. I
had never served [as a correspondent] in Israel. I
had wanted to report from the Middle East, but the
Arabs were not waiting for a Jew to come along
and give him a visa. I was pro-Israel in the same
sense that most American Jews were: friendly and
deeply sensitive to it."
During his 17 years as the nmes' top editorial ex-
ecutive, Mr. Rosenthal occasionally disagreed with
the paper's editorials regarding the Middle East.
He strenuously disagreed, for instance, with the pa-
per's 1981 condemnation of Israel's attack on the
Iraqi nuclear reactor. But because of the Times'
"church/state" policy that distinguished between
editors who established its editorial policies and
those, such as Abe Rosenthal, responsible for its
news columns, Mr. Rosenthal did not complain to
editorial writers.
"I didn't say their editorials stank," he said, "any
more than I welcomed their commenting on the
news pages."
When he started writing his column, Mr. Rosen-
thal "wanted people to say, 'Gee, he writes like Rus-
sell Baker, only better.' And I wanted to write about
a different topic in each column. Once I gave up my
`Russell Baker/different topic' phase and the back-
ground noise of being an editor subsided, the things
that interested me really surfaced. And to my as-
tonishment, Israel was one of them."
"Don't misunderstand me," he cautioned. "Not
that I wasn't interested in this before. But I never
thought that after the first two years I would have
written 'X' number of pieces about Israel — all pro-
Israel. I would have anticipated the pro-Israel part
of it, but the passion and the abiding interest in it
surprised me."
This fascination, he said, "came from my back-
ground, from a sense of the volatility of the Mid-
dle East, from my awareness that of all the
countries, Israel is still the only one whose existence
is still questioned throughout the world."
Yet, Ari Goldman, the paper's religion corre-
spondent, is "not convinced that there's this 'new'
Abe Rosenthal. Abe had other things in his heart