Everyone has an opinion, but few get paid to express it. Jeff Jacoby, the Orthodox Jewish, conservative-minded columnist at the overwhelmingly liberal Boston Globe, is one of the select few. And whether readers love his column or hate it, when it comes to Jacoby, everybody's got an opinion.
It's Sunday afternoon and the editorial offices of the Boston Globe are nearly deserted, a perfect opportunity to lean in and ask Jeff Jacoby the question I've always wanted to pose to an opinion columnist for a major newspaper: "Why the hashkamah minyan?"
The reason, of course, that I'd never gotten to ask that question is that Jeff Jacoby is a rarity, if not a singularity, among op-ed writers on the editorial pages of a big-city daily: He's a frum Jew. And not just at any newspaper, but a famously liberal one, the largest in famously liberal Boston, and owned by the equally left-leaning New York Times. Jeff is virtually the Globe's lone conservative voice, or as one wag put it, he's its "conservative in captivity."
So why is he a stalwart member (and, along with teenage son Caleb, a sometimes baal korei) of the Young Israel of Brookline's early Shabbos morning minyan? His answer is trademark Jeff Jacoby, straightforward and Midwest commonsensical: "I've been a confirmed hashkamah guy for a long time. I just hate to waste the time. But my wife has a different explanation: She says I'm antisocial."
The title "op-ed columnist" often conjures an image of a hyper-intellectual pontificator. But this Cleveland, Ohio native is as down-to-earth as they come. He's what one might call the "un-columnist."
To be sure, Jacoby, whose columns are regularly cited and discussed in right-wing circles — and lambasted in left-wing ones — pulls his intellectual weight as a serious conservative thinker whose work has garnered awards like the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. His mode of persuasion, though, is not through displays of cerebral fireworks, but by means of reasoned and reasonable thinking, well supported by a full array of sources in law, history, and science. The experience of reading his columns is a bit like inviting an amiable, learned, and world-wise uncle — button-down sweater and all — into one's living room for a fireside chat.
Nor is there even a trace of a writer's occupational hazard of arrogance. When I ask Jacoby whether he has mentored students interested in journalism, he says, "When students say to me 'I want to have a career like yours, so what can you advise me?' I basically respond, 'Wait for the phone to ring, because for me that's how it began. I got a phone call.' I was never a reporter, so I didn't come up the ladder like a lot of reporters who toil in the journalistic vineyards for many years." And of teaching others the writing craft, he says, "a bunch of my colleagues teach writing seminars and journalism classes and I always marvel at how they do it. I'm not very good at distilling things into techniques or rules of thumb." As for why he's not quite a regular on the scholar-in-residence circuit, he humbly comments, "As you know, in every case, the 'residence' part isn't really true, and in my case, neither is the 'scholar' part."
Jacoby doesn't even write books or blogs or host talk shows, as many other writers in his league do. "Part of it," he says, "is that I'm a very slow writer — excruciatingly so. I read slowly and I write slowly. Years ago there was a sportswriter for the New York Times named Red Smith, and when he was asked what it was like to write his column, he said, 'I sit down at the typewriter, I open up a vein, and I squeeze it out one drop at a time.' Writing has always been like that for me.
"Now, [prolific British historian] Paul Johnson is an example of somebody I wish I could write like; he just sits down and two hours later, out comes a column. Or take [the late conservative icon] William F. Buckley. Here's a guy who, at his peak, was writing three syndicated columns a week, editing the biweekly National Review magazine, hosting a television show, giving something like 75 speeches a year, producing a book every year and a half or so, and on top of all that he was being Bill Buckley — you know, yachting across the Atlantic, skiing at Gstaad, etc. — and there I sit for an hour and a half trying to come up with my first paragraph. You get the blessings you get.... Your challenge isn't to be Rav Moshe Feinstein, but to be what Eytan Kobre can be, what Jeff Jacoby can be. I sometimes feel like I'm good enough to know how good the greats are, but at the same time, I know I don't have a prayer to be as good as them."
Although he may complain about his slowness in writing, Jacoby is by no means ready to trim his column back; if anything, he's unhappy about his allotted word count, which has shrunk considerably over the years. "Nowadays, a typical column runs a maximum of 700–725 words, whereas when I first started, 850 words was fine, and if I wanted to go longer on a given day, the copy editors would be happy to jiggle and juggle to make it fit. But the paper has shrunk physically and the desire for visuals has become more pronounced, so they need more room on the page for art. Unfortunately, I find it makes a difference. When you're trying to make an argument and you only have 700 words to work with, you can't do it as well."
A Byline in Beantown
Jacoby's account of getting a call out of the blue that landed him in his perch at the Globe doesn't quite tell the whole story. He'd originally come to Boston to attend Boston University's law school, one of the country's finest, then headed back home to Cleveland to take an associate attorney's position at a major law firm. But just ten months there cured him forever of any yen for the law; when he took what he calls "a leave of absence from which I've yet to return," Boston beckoned once more. He notes wryly that at age six "I announced that I was going to be a judge, and I ended up handing down opinions, after all. The only difference is mine aren't legally enforceable."
In Beantown, Jacoby helped launch a free-market-oriented think tank and served for 16 months as assistant to Boston University's brilliant but irascible president, John Silber. Also in the early '80s, he served as research director on the two hard-fought but unsuccessful senatorial campaigns that businessman and Reaganite conservative Ray Shamie ran against Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. In a touching tribute to Shamie as he lay dying from cancer, Jacoby wrote: "Americans unhappy with politics-as-usual often lament: 'Why don't more decent people go into politics?' It will soon be time to bid farewell to one decent man who did."
It was during this period, too, that Jacoby began submitting opinion pieces he'd written to various newspapers around the country, and — surprise — some got published. Eventually, an offer came from the Boston Herald, the right-leaning rival to the Globe, to become its chief editorial writer. He accepted. Six-and-a-half years later the call came from the Globe, whose editorial page editor, David Greenway, was looking to diversify its monolithically liberal op-ed pages. This past February 24th Jacoby marked 19 years at the paper.
"What I particularly remember from the first few years here is that my presence was regarded by some as so outlandish, almost scandalous, the attitude being 'How can he have a byline here?' I've often expressed my gratitude to the Globe for bringing me in and giving me a shtender — my 'bully shtender,' if you will — to give my drashah twice a week. They don't have to do so, and in all sincerity I do try to have some hakaras hatov for that."
There has always been a certain type of liberal who doesn't believe that there is such a thing as a legitimate conservative perspective. Over the years, however, Jacoby has established himself not only as a master wordsmith, but as a commentator whose thoughtful opinions liberals might dispute, but would do well not to ignore. The Boston Phoenix, which is even further left politically than the Globe, has called his columns a "must-read." Professor James Lang, a self-described "garden-variety academic liberal," wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education of reading Jacoby regularly in preparation for a course he teaches on persuasive writing. He notes that while Jacoby's "columns generally fill me with irritation, bordering on rage, I have come to believe that he is one of the best argumentative writers I have ever encountered. He has a masterful command of his ethos, he thoroughly establishes the credentials of every source he cites, and uses his evidence from those sources judiciously. His prose reads smoothly and elegantly." Apparently, Jeff Jacoby's long sojourn in the blue-state wilderness has succeeded in opening some minds and hearts to another perspective.
Part of his broader acceptance these days may have to do with his having realized over time that "on some issues, if you want to be able to reach someone, you have to speak in a way that they'll hear you." He recalls an incident that occurred at the beginning of his time at the Globe that involved a flap over an "alternative lifestyle" group, which wanted to march in a privately sponsored parade in South Boston. When the parade's organizers refused, the group sued, and the case eventually went up to the Supreme Court. "I wrote a column asking why this group was so eager to trumpet itself, and I got an outraged e-mail from an arts critic at the Globe saying 'you can't use language like that,' as if I were some primitive just arrived from Borneo who needed instruction on how we moderns did things in the 20th century. When I wrote back to him standing my ground, he shot back a horrified e-mail saying that 'in all my years here, I've never heard anyone express that view.' And for the rest of his career, he never again said a word to me; he'd look the other way when passing me in the hall. Fortunately there hasn't been too much of that, but I have had to learn how to talk to people about a topic on which we vehemently disagree."
He adds, though, that he hasn't seen the same mellowing from the other side. "I used to write an annual column about hate speech from the left, a roundup of that year's worst examples of disgusting things liberals had said about the right, of a kind that if uttered by someone on the right about a liberal, would be a career-ender. I argued that just as the right polices its offenders if they say something outrageous, the left should too. But eventually I stopped writing that column because public discourse doesn't seem to be getting kinder and gentler, and if anything the rhetoric just seems to be getting nastier and more polarized."
Too Jewish?
Early on in his tenure at the Globe, Jacoby was asked by a local reporter why he wrote "so many Jewish columns." He hadn't, really, but the remark was revealing about public perceptions. Jacoby has never wanted to be pigeonholed as the Globe's "Jewish columnist." Nevertheless, his writing is deeply informed not only by his Judaism, but also by being the son of a European-born Jew and Holocaust survivor.
"My father is from Leginya, a tiny village in eastern Czechoslovakia, right on the border of Hungary. When he was five years old, his parents sent him to live with relatives in a town called Snina so he could get a Jewish education — there was a cheder in Snina. Today, one can drive from Leginya to Snina in a few hours, but back then, in the 1930s, the distance made it virtually impossible for my grandparents to see my father. My father's mother went just one time to Snina for a wedding and was thus able to see her son — I have a picture of them together on that occasion. And my father's father? He didn't see his son for eight years — not until he came back to the village after his bar mitzvah."
He sometimes mentions, when he speaks to Jewish audiences, that price his grandparents willingly paid to give their son — Jacoby's father — a Torah education. "It gives me a certain humility," he adds, "when I realize that the things I have to complain about are so much more trivial than the things that Jews in other places and times, not so long ago, have been entitled to complain about."
Jeff's American-born mother grew up non-observant and at age 18 decided to become observant through the influence of Rav Chaim Zvi Katz, a Telzer talmid who taught at the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland. Lou Feig, who was president of the Academy, later introduced his parents to each other. His parents, who now live in Beit Shemesh for most of the year, were and remain an enormous influence in his life. "Just yesterday I was thinking: My father's last image of his father was in Auschwitz, watching him being sent off to the right, to the gas chambers, carrying his tallis and tefillin. I don't hold myself out as a role model for anybody, but I must say there are days when it's that image that gets me out of bed in the morning when I'd rather sleep late and not go to shul."
Another early influence was Rav Nachum Zev Dessler, the longtime dean of the Academy, which Jacoby attended through high school. "As Rav Eliyahu Dessler's son, he came from Jewish aristocracy, although I didn't realize it at the time.
"Once, I had done something bad and I got caught. I think I was suspended for three days or something, but it was bad enough that I was told I had to go see Rabbi Dessler. What I remember most vividly, after all these years, is walking into Rabbi Dessler's office, sort of quaking in my boots, not knowing what he was going to do. His first words to me, in this gentle voice, were 'How are your parents?' That almost made me feel worse — that I wasn't being yelled at, that I wasn't being told 'bend over, you're going to get whipped now.' It was almost as if to remind me 'Are you behaving the way your parents would expect you to behave?'"
Who's Upset Now?
Whether he's critiquing the views of liberals or fellow Jews, or even some conservative positions, one thing's certain: These critiques generate a response. For many years the Globe got more letters to the editor about Jeff Jacoby's column than about any other. The amount of feedback depends very much on the topic. Asked to name his single most commented-on column, Jacoby recalls the one he wrote after Yasser Arafat died, which triggered thousands of e-mails, the overwhelming majority of them positive. But he gives much of the credit for that to his copy editor, who took a reference in the piece to Arafat being a monster and attached the title "Arafat the Monster." At a time when much of the talk in the media was revisionist nonsense about Arafat as a frustrated peacemaker who'd be missed, many readers clearly appreciated this blunt op-ed at a major daily calling him what in truth he was.
There are, of course, certain hot-button issues guaranteed to generate lots of heated responses: anything related to same-gender marriage, to Islam, or to Israel. "The haters are out there, and I've heard from them many times over the years. But at the same time there are also ardent philo-Semites and Christian Zionists out there, and I hear from them, too. Whenever I get an opportunity to speak to evangelicals, I love doing it. When you talk to a typical American Jewish audience, which will be largely secular, and you quote from Tanach, it'll seem a little off-beat, esoteric. But then you go talk to a group of black, pro-Zionist ministers and you quote to them that 'G-d keeps His Eye on the land of Israel from one end of the year to the other,' and they're likely to cite you what perek and pasuk that's in."
Jacoby's positive take on evangelicals isn't universally shared by the Boston area's Jews. When he moderated an event at a Conservative temple in Framingham, Massachusetts, that included a speech by prominent evangelist Pat Robertson, Jacoby comments that outside the building there was a huge protest against Robertson "and from what I could tell they were all Jews." Jacoby asked Robertson to respond to skeptics who claim the only reason evangelicals support Israel is that they think it's the only way to bring about the Apocalypse and to eventually convert the Jews. Robertson replied, "There are some Christians who believe that, but I've never been one of them. I'm such a strong supporter of Israel because from earliest childhood, I was told by my mother that as a Christian you are obliged to support Israel." As he recounts the story, Jacoby adds: "I can't tell you how many times I've heard that from other Christians, too. Over and over again, they cite the pasuk in Bereishis (12:3) where Hashem says He will bless those who bless the Jews and curse those who curse them."
Jacoby adds that in his opinion there's no reason for Jews to spurn the support of the evangelicals. "If they're willing to give you support until what they think will be the so-called Second Coming, that's a good deal, since that's never going to happen. When Jews complain about that, I say 'Do you believe that?' And when they respond 'Of course not!' my retort is 'So what are you getting so upset about?'"
For all that Jacoby is a persuasive advocate for conservative positions, he's not a reflexive one. He has parted ways with others on the right on several issues, including the debate over torture and waterboarding, and most passionately, on immigration. "I've been arguing practically from my first day here that there's nothing conservative at all about trying to keep people from coming to this country. When conservatives say, 'You came here illegally, I don't want to talk about anything else,' that's not conservative thinking, that's blind, knee-jerk thinking. A genuine conservative isn't supposed to be someone who says 'the law is the law, period.' He's supposed to be somebody who wants to fix the law, such as when he says that the tax code is a mess and needs reform.
"In my own humble little family, I'm the son of one immigrant and the father of another one, albeit both legal. And when I look at my father, who came here from Czechoslovakia, and when I look at my younger son, Micah, whom my wife, Laura, and I adopted from Guatemala, would anyone doubt that the country is better off for them being here? And then multiply them by countless others. Why wouldn't a conservative who stands for sensible public policy want to adjust the law so that we deem immigrants 'illegal' only when there's a really good reason not to want them, such as jihadists or gangsters?"
Jacoby's willingness to take independent stands — and the fact that he's a genuinely nice person — has enabled him to forge friendships across the ideological spectrum. He's been able to find common ground with some of the Globe op-ed page's staunchest liberals, like Derrick Z. Jackson, whose office is next to his. "One of the things we strongly agree on is the poison that television represents. He used to be a sportswriter, and another issue on which we're totally in sync is opposing government-subsidized sports stadiums and convention centers. Dan Wasserman, the Globe's syndicated editorial cartoonist, leans as staunchly to the left as I do to the right. We disagree on almost every political issue, but not once have we had a conversation that wasn't friendly."
Perhaps it all comes down to the advice Papa Jacoby offered Caleb in the column he wrote when his son turned five: "No lesson will ever be more important than Hillel's. Treat other people the way you would have them treat you; be honest and ethical and kind. Be a good boy. Become a good man."
Sidebar: Jacoby's Judaeo Ethic
While Jacoby may not wear his Jewishness on his sleeve, an astute reader of his columns can't possibly miss the Torah-based teachings he weaves into so many of them out of a deeply-held belief that "one of the blessings of being frum is an awareness of what Torah has to offer not only to us and our families but also to the surrounding society." Two excerpts:
Occupiers, Tea Partiers, and the Tenth Commandment (November 2, 2011)
Economic envy may cloak itself in rhetoric about 'inequality' ... or 'redistribution of wealth,' but its oldest name is covetousness. That is the sin enjoined by the last of the Ten Commandments....
At first blush it may seem odd that G-d would ban a mere desire. After all, the other nine commandments concern behavior: idolatry, theft, perjury, and so on. But as a matter of moral and social hygiene, the Tenth Commandment is indispensable. Covetousness — particularly when it takes the form of class hatred — is the root of innumerable other evils. From the belief that you don't have enough because others have too much, it isn't that great a stretch to the belief that those who have too much should be forced to make do with less. It shouldn't be surprising when a movement obsessed with what rich capitalists earn rather than with what they produce starts treating other people's property and persons with contempt.
People are truly good at heart? Sadly, no (January 2, 2013)
It is fundamental to the Judeo-Christian outlook that human beings are not naturally good. "The intention of man's heart is evil from his youth." ... All of us are tugged by conflicting moral impulses, and whether we do the right thing or the wrong thing is up to each of us.
Peace, justice, and compassion are not the natural human condition. With rare exceptions, criminal violence can't be blamed on external culprits. Murder isn't caused by poverty or gory video games or low self-esteem — or guns. Nor are wars caused by nuclear missiles, or al-Qaeda terrorism by box cutters. We fool ourselves if we imagine that by fixating on missiles and box cutters we can avoid reckoning with the cruel side of human nature. ...
The desire to believe, like Anne Frank, that "people are truly good at heart" is powerful. Sadly, history refutes the idea that human nature alone will make a good world. Controlling bad things may sometimes be prudent. But it is above all by controlling ourselves — by fortifying — that the struggle against evil progresses.