and felt they were get-
ting a fair shake from
him.
`Then Tom wrote his
book [From Beirut to
Jerusalem]. In it, he
said some things that
surprised a few people,
including me. He had
deeper reservations
and opinions about
what the Israeli gov-
ernment had been do-
ing than I thought.
That makes me ad-
mire him even more
for the fact that I didn't
know that. And for the
fact he did not travel
these through the
news columns of the
New York Times."
In November, 1986,
a few months short of
the Tines' mandatory
retirement age of 65,
Mr. Rosenthal stepped
down as executive ed-
itor. He was replaced
by Max Frankel, a
German-born Jew who had been expelled from his
native country by the Gestapo in 1938.
For a few weeks, Abe Rosenthal, the man who
had made reporters tremble and helped topple at
least one president (and probably contributed to the
insecurity of several others), "felt sorry for myself.
It took some adjustment to [writing his column
and] being alone. It's not total solitude. I do see
people, but I rely entirely on myself. Then, I re-
membered that as a foreign correspondent, I didn't
have a newsroom. So I went out and made my own."
At first, "On My Mind" got scathing reviews. Wags
dubbed it "Out of My Head" or "Thoughts While
Taking a Shower"; Newsweek carped that Mr.
Rosenthal "delivered a pastiche of benign and often
carelessly worded impressions"; and the New
Republic cracked that the column "will certainly
accomplish a long-overdue revival . . . of the literary
style of Dwight D. Eisenhower"
`I'm Not Jewish
For Nothing'
A
fter 23 years of editing and managing,
Mr Rosenthal was a rusty writer whose
attempts at humor and irony often fell
flat. For all the Jewishness that comes
out in his column, Mr. Rosenthal is not
especially religious. He does not belong
to a synagogue and rarely
attends one. The last time
he went was last Yom
Kippur. Yet, he seems to
devote almost every
fourth column or so to is-
sues that particularly af-
fect Jews, although
probably no story or col-
umn ever hit him as
strongly — as a Jew — than
that of Daniel Burros. It
made him ponder what it
meant to be a Jew, and
what it meant to be a Jew
who refused to be a Jew
In the winter of 1965,
Mr. Rosenthal, then the
Times' executive editor, re-
ceived a letter from a
friend who worked in a
Jewish organization. The
letter stated that Daniel
Burros, whom the Times
had named two days be-
fore as the head of the Ku
Klux Klan in New York,
was Jewish. If true, it
would be the ultimate ex-
ample of Jewish self-ha-
tred.
The story was assigned
to McClandish Phillips,
an evangelical Christian
reporter who, when not
working on a story, some-
times sat praying or read-
ing his Bible. Mr. Phillips
discovered that shortly af-
ter Burros' bar mitzvah,
he had become highly es-
tranged from Judaism. In
high school, with his blue
eyes and blond hair, he passed himself as a Ger-
man-American and yelled "Jew bastard!" in fights
with Jewish students. When he was 23, he joined
the American Nazi Party. A few months later, he
became the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in
New York state.
Mr. Phillips met Burros in a small luncheonette
in Queens and told him that he knew about his Jew-
ish origins. The KKK leader pleaded that the story
be killed. He later threatened to blow up the Times'
building.
Nine days later, on a Sunday, the Times ran a
front-page story about Burros. That evening, Bur-
ros killed himself.
"The Daniel Burros story was very important to
me," said Mr. Rosenthal recently, "because it made
me aware of Jewish anti-Semitism. It was written
by a magnificent reporter, and I was worried that
he would be upset that Burros killed himself. He
was calm. He said Burros' death was a decision of
God, and that I, being a Jew, was, in effect, the arm
of God. Which gave me a hell of a turn. I dropped
that discussion.
"I felt sorry for Burros, but I didn't feel guilty. I
know what guilt is. I'm not Jewish for nothing."
Indeed, Mr. Rosenthal's column is proof of not his
guilt, but of his Jewishness, an identity that he
may have suppressed to some extent while running
the Times. But at least one close friend worries that
he may be giving too much space to "Jewish issues"
in his column.
"At this stage," said the colleague, "some of Abe's
credibility may be fraying. He gets all these awards
from Jewish groups and he is toasted and everyone
says, Mazel Toy.' And like everyone else, I'm over-
joyed to salute him. But I think he may be a little
too close to the line of being a shill for Israel. Or,
maybe, he's gone over it."
❑
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
31