1 24 JEWISH INFLUENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA, PART III In 1986 Ze'ev Chafets, an American Jew who had moved to Israel, returned for a while to the states to do a book about the American Jewish community; he entitled the resultant volume, Members of the Tribe. Following an AIPAC (the powerful Israel lobbying agency based in Washington DC) organizer who was "hunting Jews" across America, he noted an interesting incident at a Jewish gathering at the Stardust Motel in Moline, Illinois. Chafets writes that a fellow Jew sitting next to him in the audience poked the American-Israeli in the ribs, and then "tapped my copy of the Quad-City Times ("The Midwest's Most Exciting Newspaper") and whispered, 'This is a Jewish newspaper' ... The man was referring to ownership, not content ... Determined to make an impression, the man poked me again. 'See this motel?' he asked. 'It's a Jewish motel.'" [CHAFETS, p. 39] In 1999, the chairman of the Newspaper Association of America was Richard Gottlieb. He is also the chairman of Lee Enterprises, based in Davenport, Iowa, which owns 21 newspapers and 16 TV stations across the United States -- from Billings, Montana, to Madison, Wisconsin, to Lincoln, Nebraska. Lloyd Schermer retired as CEO of the company in 1999. A corporate subsidiary, NAPP Systems, constructs printing plates for about 350 newspapers in 30 countries. In Nebraska too, John Gottschalk is the chairman and president of the Omaha World-Herald company. He is also publisher of the Omaha World-Herald. [BATT, J., 3-24-2000] In northern California, in the heart of the internationally important high-tech area of Silicon Valley, David Cohen controls an area-wide empire as the Publisher/CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Newspapers (SVCN Inc.). Cohen foundedMetro, "Silicon Valley's weekly alternative newspaper." A SVCN subdivision is Metro Newspapers. Metro, in turn , "purchased the Los Gatos Weekly and the more than 100-year old Los Gatos Times-Observer, which were combined as the Los Gatos Weekly Times. In 1991, the company acquired the weekly Saratoga News and the Willow Glen Resident ... In 1993, Metro Newspapers began publishing a newspaper in Cupertino, and acquired its competitor the Cupertino Courier, in 1995. The company founded The Sun in 1993. The most recent addition to the community family was The Campbell Reporter, which began publishing in March, 1999." [CUEPERTINO COURIER, 4- 11-01] In Colorado, Edward Lehman publishes a few small town newspapers, including the Longmont Daily Times-Call, theLoveland Daily Reporter-Herald, and Superior in Lafayette. The executive roster for all these papers includes Edward Lehman at the top, Dean Lehman as president, and Lauren Lehman as vice-president. (Ruth Lehman is the Associate Editor at the Longmont journal). In 1975, in New Hampshire, journalist Kevin Cash wrote an entire volume criticizing the concentrated media and political power of newspaperman William Loeb. Loeb owned New Hampshire's two major newspapers -- the Manchester Union Leader and the New Hampshire Sunday News, as well as the Vermont Sunday News, and a few smaller New England area papers. Loeb was also in the habit of 1 2 writing regular editorials in his newspapers. "The truth is," wrote Cash, a former reporter at the Union Leader, "is that [Loeb's papers] are to a large extent monopolistic in nature within the limits of New Hampshire." [CASH, K., p. 3] Loeb was of Jewish heritage (both parents were Jewish); he once published in one of his papers, however, his father's 1906 Episcopal baptismal document, signed by American President Theodore Roosevelt (his father was Roosevelt's executive secretary). In Pittsburgh, Paul Block (1877-1941) owned the Pittsburgh Evening Sun, the Pittsburgh Morning Post, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as well as the Toledo Times and Toledo Blade. [GREENBERG, M., p. 53] His sons, William and Paul, also later added television and cable stations to their mini-empire. Elsewhere, "in 1978, the Samuel Horvitz Trust [run by three sons and an employee] owned five monopoly newspapers in Ohio and New York, cable systems in Ohio and Virginia, and construction firms in Ohio, and was a major landowner in Florida." [BAGDIKIAN, p. 42] In a review of Jewish book publishing in the United States to 1976, Jewish author Charles Madison noted the following Jewish-founded, or purchased, firms (some still exist, some are now defunct, some are absorbed by others): Simon and Schuster (Richard L. Simon; Max L. Schuster) Knopf (Alfred A. Knopf) Random House (Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer) Pantheon (founded by Kurt and Helen Wolf) Viking (Harold Guinzburg) Dover (founded in 1943) Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux - (The father of Roger Strauss -- president of the publishing company -- was in turn chairman of the Board of the American Smelting and Refining Company. From 1955-65 Roger was also chairman of the board of American Judaism magazine). Grove Press (1947) - which controlled Evergreen Books and the Evergreen Review. Praeger (1950) Basic Books (1952) - Its founder, Arthur Rosenthal, later became Director of Harvard University Press. The Free Press (1947) - Its founder, Jeremiah Kaplan, joined Crowell- Collier, which had acquired MacMillan, as a Vice-President. Atheneum (1959) Crown Publishers (1936) (headed in later years by Nat Wartels, "a legend in the business") [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 250] Academic Press International Universities Press Twayne Publishers (1948) World Publishing Company (1905) 2 3 Frederick Ungar (1941) Harry Abrams (1950) - mostly art books. George Braziller (1955) Tudor - mostly music books. [MADISON, CHARLE;, 1976] "One year,' says famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz in her autobiography,, "when I cam back from Paris, I foolishly risked a certain jail sentence by bringing for, buttoned into my blouse, a copy of the utterly pornographic Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller, an erotic masterpiece that Jeremy rented out to his friendds as twenty-five cents a day. I'm not taking all the credit, but eventually he [Jeremy Tarcher] became the first and best publisher of New Age books in the United States." [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 147] [Krantz notes that her novel Mistral "was quickly bought for France by Edition Stock, whose publisher, Jean Rosenthal, as it happened had translated my other novels into French."] [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 313] In a continuing trajectory of percentage of ownership, by 1968 Roger Kahn noted that "Jews own perhaps half the major book publishing houses: Random House, Simon & Schuster, New American Library, Alfred Knopf, and Atheneum are a few that thrive under the leadership of Jews." [KAHN, R., p. 5] "Owners of new [early to mid-20th century publishing] concerns, "notes Jay Gertzman, "most of them young Jewish men (Horace Liveright, Thomas Seltzer, Ben Huebsch, Max Schuster, Alfred Knopf) had begun to specialize in presenting European writers to an American audience curious about their sexual frankness and Marxist ideas. Established houses, such as Doran, Houghton, Appleton, and Doubleday, did not do so, and some of their executives resented their parvenu colleagues. Modernist writers especially owed their exposure to Jewish firms." [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 114] In the 1980s, Crown Books, headed by Robert Haft (who also founded the Trak Auto supply chain), rose to become the third largest bookstore chain with nearly 250 outlets throughout America. At its peak the firm was a national giant with nearly 10,000 employees and valued between $500 million to $1 billion (the company drastically weakened with in-house, intra-family legal feuds between Robert and his father Herbert, a Jewish immigrant from Russia). The Brentano's bookstore chain was also founded by Jewish entrepreneur August Brentano in the late 19th century. Abraham Rosenbach and his brother Philip were used book sellers from 1903 until the 1950s. In 1928, the New Yorker called Abraham "the most famous dealer in rare books." "If Gutenberg [Bible] sales are taken as the measure of a dealer," says Guy Lesser, "Rosenbach would have to be reckoned history's most successful [book dealer], judiging by his transactions over ... four decades." [LESSER, G., JAN 2002, p. 48, 46] "Whiskey, cigars, deep-sea fishing, and women (to put the last politely)," adds Lesser, "in roughtly that order, after books, seem to have been his passions." [LESSER, G., JAN 2002, p. 48] 3 4 Jewish publishers also brought out the inexpensive series for mass appeal, including the Little Leather Library, the Little Blue Books, and the Modern Library (Horace Liveright); Jewish entrepreneurs also initiated the "Book-of-the-Month Club." "As an author and editor, [Mortimer] Adler built a publishing empire on an unlikely foundation: the philosophic system of Artistotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. That system influnenced his work as compiler of the Great Books of the Western World and as editor of Encyclopedia Britannica." [D'Alessio, F., 6-29-01] In 2001, Michael Ross, the publisher of the World Book Dictionary, removed the verb "jew" (traditionally meaning "beat down in price") from the volume. [LEVINE, S., JUNE/JULY 2001] Other Jewish book publishers include Westview, Stein and Day, Holmes and Meier, Price Stern Sloan, Lyle Stuart (the founder, Lyle Stuart, was born Lionel Simon), Ottenheimer (a Baltimore publisher with 200 titles a year), and Schocken. In England, Lord George Weidenfeld not only controls a well- known namesake publishing house, he is also chairman of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain. From England, Andre Deutsch's namesake company published Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul, Arthur Schlessinger, and other prominent authors. In Canada, Avie Bennett is president of McClelland & Stewart (1992). By the late 1990s, Golden Books Family Entertainment, "the nation's largest producer of children's books," was headed by Jewish publisher Richard Snyder (who replaced Richard Bernstein). The next four top executives at the firm were also Jewish: Steven Grossman, James Cohen, Ira Gomberg, and Ian Reich.