With Jewish year 5772 now officially here, I would like to clarify The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle’s well-established policies about letters to the editor and opinion articles.
First, The Chronicle welcomes letters and opinions from readers and community members. Indeed, we wish more people would participate and share their thoughts about what they read in The Chronicle.
Second, we strive to represent the full spectrum of legitimate Jewish community viewpoints over time. There are challenges in trying to achieve that goal. Chief of them is that the majority of community members, locally and nationally, tend to be liberal politically and non-Orthodox religiously. Hence, articles and letters expressing viewpoints from those perspectives tend to arrive more often. The remedy for that, however, is for more people with a greater variety of perspectives to write.
Our preference, of course, is to publish viewpoints by local writers. Given that such articles arrive seldom, I often publish items provided by JTA, the national and international Jewish wire service to which we subscribe.
JTA sometimes provides pairs of articles debating particular issues. I like to use these whenever I can, although the writing can be uneven, and many issues are too complex to be adequately addressed by a simple “pro” and “con” pair of opinions.
Above all, JTA doesn’t provide debating articles as often as I would like. In last month’s issue, for example, JTA offered an essay by Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, criticizing efforts to outlaw application of Muslim religious law (Sharia) in U.S. life.
Foxman is a significant figure in the national Jewish community, and when he provides such an article for national syndication, it is almost always newsworthy. However, JTA didn’t provide a counterpoint article defending anti-Sharia efforts, contending that they seek to avert a real threat to U.S. culture.
Local responses to Foxman’s article would be welcome, and that leads to a third matter. The Chronicle has a long-standing policy about how often it prints letters and opinion articles on any specific issue.
Usually, it works this way: We publish an opinion article (or in the instance I will cite, a pair of debating articles) on a topic — say, the Obama administration’s relationship with Israel (see the July issue). We next publish a letter or letters reacting to the article — in this case, four letters critiquing Stuart E. Eizenstat’s article on the topic (see the August issue). If we next receive one or more replies to the reactions — either from the article’s writer or, in this case, from a community member (see the September issue), we will publish that. And that is the end of the exchange on that topic, until the topic comes up again in future Chronicle issues.
Most journals and magazines (Commentary, for example) follow such a policy. Moreover, before The Chronicle established this policy, the letters to the editor feature was in danger of becoming monopolized by an endless competition for the last word that other readers do not appreciate.
Fourth, The Chronicle has a policy that letters and opinion articles should be about facts and ideas, never about personal attacks on public figures or on other writers. For example, one may disagree with Foxman’s assessment of the threat posed by the U.S. Muslim community’s effort to have U.S. society make room for Sharia. But I have read a reaction to Foxman’s article that calls him a “hypocritical ignoramus” and a “malign buffoon.” Such name-calling has no place in reasoned debate or discussion, and it will not be published in The Chronicle.
Finally, when you write letters or opinion articles, and you refer to data of various types or quote somebody, please cite your sources. I don’t mean full academic-style footnotes; just brief references. (For example, “As David Pryce-Jones wrote in his book “The Closed Circle…” or “The Jerusalem Post reported on Sept. 19 that…”). This not only makes your letter or article more credible, but it helps me make sure that The Chronicle is not publishing any outright falsehoods or mistakes.
Newspapers have opinion pages for several reasons. They help keep the reporting honest by calling attention to mistakes or contrary interpretations. They deepen readers’ understanding of events and issues. (As British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in his great essay “On Liberty,” “Very few facts are able to tell their own story without comments to bring out their meaning.”) Above all, they should help stimulate, rather than stifle, community discussion.
These are what I hope The Chronicle’s opinion page does and will continue to do in this and every Jewish year.
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