Chief Executive Officer/Publisher, The Jewish Light
A Jewish perspective on media literacy
By Larry Levin
First, the flames of anti-Semitic prejudice, persecution, violence and genocide have been fanned so often by those in positions of major influence with access to widespread dissemination tools. As a result, there’s a relentless need to set the record straight, whether about old saws like Jews controlling the media itself (as heard during private discussions between such heavyweights as President Richard Nixon and evangelist Billy Graham) or persent-day, misinformed diatribes against Israel on college campuses and elsewhere, fueled and funded by stated enemies of the Jewish State. Websites like CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (www.camera.org), hardly perfect in and of themselves, at least help separate the actual wheat from the chaff that so often blurs the line between fact and fiction.
Second, the Jewish tradition, arising out of Torah and talmudic study, places a substantial focus on learning and education, sometimes to arrive at the emet (Hebrew for truth) of a situation, and other times to understand that there are multiple truths emanation from multiple dissections of the facts. But without the ability to distinguish facts from opinions, and to understand when agendas are being propagated in the guise of reporting, our ability to learn and grow intellectually quickly becomes stifled, and by definition, we become less “Jewish.”
So we make it our business at the St. Louis Jewish Light to cultivate understanding and critical thinking and reading skills in any number of ways. The following examples illustrate our commitment to helping our community members develop and apply these skills.
From our monthly Teen Page, created by teens for teen readers, to our workshops at Jewish day schools, to summer internships, we actively assume the responsibility to imbue the next generation with a fundamental respect for journalism. Our Teen Page editors, in conjunction with our Board volunteers and professional staff, oversee the assignment of stories, copy editing, enforcing deadlines, graphic design, layout and production of these pages within our print edition and on the Light’s and their own website area. Our professional staff gave journalism workshops at three different Jewish schools in the past year. And we provide annual opportunities for summer internships for both college and high school aged students who have both passion and experience in journalism or related endeavors.
Our quarterly Can We Talk? series is an innovative structure geared at providing a holistic, anti-soundbite focus for an entire month on a topic of significance to the Jewish community. To date in 2011, we have focused on how Jewish issues are addressed through arts and culture, and how the Jewish community talks about Israel. We provide news and opinion pieces in the print edition and online, Facebook prompts to engage discussion, and an editorial on the topic at month’s end. During the month, we partner with the Jewish Community Center and the Jewish Community Relations Council on an evening of discussion with panelists who bring knowledge and varying perspectives about the issues involved, and we provide video excerpts of the discussion on our website.
Our Israel Alive! series, slated to begin in 2012, is another attempt to provide thoughtful perspective on an area of substantial interest to our readership. The media world is inundated by stories about politics and violence surrounding Israel and the Middle East. But few publications do an effective job of providing a three-dimensional view of Israel as a nation. Our goal is to provide our readers with stories, primarily crafted by Israeli journalists, about the aspects of life and culture in Israel not often treated in depth in the mass media. The breadth of this series will encompass such areas as medicine, business, technology, arts, culture, lifestyle, youth and sports. In this way, our ongoing (and requisite) coverage of hostilities and the like will be presented against a backdrop of how lives are actually lived on a daily basis in Israel.
We constantly seek opportunities to focus in depth on topics of interest to our readers, so they can reflect upon important issues in a more comprehensive and reflective way. In 2010, we published a major series on Hate Crimes, utilizing recent federal law as a springboard to study current trends, both locally and more broadly, in anti-Semitism and hate directed against other groups on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. This special two-part series won a national award from the American Jewish Press Association. We intend in the months to come to perform similar work on the topic of Jews and mental health, and will continue to seek subjects where we can shed a breadth of perspective not commonly found elsewhere.
From teens to unique collaborations, from Israel to special reports, we strive to give our readers something that they rarely have time or ability to obtain in the 24/7, instant and online news cycle – a fuller, richer and deeper understanding of subjects of critical interest to the local and broader Jewish communities. In this way, we constantly strive to set an example for how a full-bodied journalistic experience should work, thereby carrying the banner of media literacy to our audience.
The St. Louis Jewish Light gratefully thanks the Kranzberg Family Foundation, Mildred, Herbert & Julian Simon Foundation, Staenberg Family Foundation, Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis, Harvey Kornblum Foundation, and Pam and Ron Rubin, for their support of the above-described programs.
Larry Levin is Publisher/CEO, St. Louis Jewish Light, llevin@thejewishlight.com
Winner, 2010 American Jewish Press Ass’n awards
Winner, Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis President’s “Outstanding Journalism” award
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