One More Golden Oldie,Jason Maoz, <i>Senior Editor</i>

As noted in this week's front-page essay, it is nearly impossible to convey the flavor of Monitor columns from years gone by without featuring lengthy extracts from said columns. A column from 2001 on two women the Monitor found especially offensive, the former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Deborah Sontag and the feminist scold and "peace activist" Letty Cottin Pogrebin, offers a robust example of the Monitor's approach, and appears below in full.

(Ironically, the Monitor found Pogrebin's daughter Abigail a delight to interview several years later on the occasion of the publication of her fascinating book Stars of David. Does that mean your meek and mild interlocutor experienced any guilt pangs for having written so harshly about Mother Letty? Not even for a second.)

Notes On A Pair Of Pinheads [May 25, 2001]

Would it be a tad tasteless for the Monitor to break into a hearty chorus of "Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead" at the welcome news that Deborah Sontag is soon to vacate her post as New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief? (Not that anyone wishes for Sontag's literal demise, of course; she should live long and prosper -- as far away from Israel as possible.)

But it's true, it's true: According to The New York Observer, Sontag, arguably the most insidiously biased American reporter currently based in Jerusalem, will be returning to New York to write for The New York Times Magazine. Her replacement in Israel will be veteran Times reporter James Bennet.

No word on the status of Mr. Deborah Sontag, otherwise known as William A. Orme Jr., a Times reporter in Jerusalem, though one assumes he won't be staying behind in Israel, or of correspondent Joel Greenberg, whose work so much resembles Sontag's in tone and style he could well be her clone.

The execrable Letty Cottin Pogrebin is at it again. Pogrebin, a left-wing feminist who helped found Ms. magazine in the early 70's and whose hectoring of Israel becomes shriller by the year, is complaining about those who urge Israelis to unify behind the new Sharon government.

Writing in Moment, the magazine that tries to be all things to all Jews with predictable results, Pogrebin notes approvingly that fringe left groups like Gush Shalom, the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace and Rabbis for Human Rights have no intention of falling into line for what Gush Shalom spokesman Adam Keller calls "a bad government."

Even better, Pogrebin breathlessly announces, "Peace Now is stepping up its dialogues between Jews and Arabs and continues to monitor settlement activity." (The myth that settlements are the main obstacle to peace is, of course, a central article of faith for Pogrebin and her ilk.)

Consider: Eight months into a bloody Palestinian intifada -- which came on the heels of Yasir Arafat's rejection of then-prime minister Ehud Barak's unprecedented concessions -- and Pogrebin still swoons over the concept of "dialogue"; eight years into the Oslo process, with no indication that Palestinians are anywhere near ready to accept the existence of Israel, and all Pogrebin worries about is "settlement activity."

Frankly, Pogrebin has never been one to let inconvenient facts intrude on her Utopian fantasies. Remember the controversy back in late 1992 and early 1993 over a documentary called "Liberators"? The film purported to tell the story of how black soldiers liberated Jews from the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps in 1945, and its release was celebrated by liberal Jews as a landmark event in black-Jewish relations.

But as investigative journalist Jeffrey Goldberg reported in The New Republic, black soldiers never liberated those two camps, and the American Jewish Committee issued its own report which concluded that the film was riddled with "serious factual flaws." The credibility of the film and its producers vanished almost instantly.

None of that seemed to matter to Pogrebin, who came up with a truly asinine piece for the radical leftist magazine Tikkun in which she essentially downplayed the importance of truth when measured against political expediency.

While sheepishly acknowledging that the documentary "presents us with a problem of ethical slippage and well-intentioned embellishment," Pogrebin nevertheless insisted that it's "not a hoax."

And then she got right to the heart of her intellectual dishonesty: "Truth must be defended, yes," she allowed, "but so must the liberal vision of black advancement and the struggle for black-Jewish harmony."

Something to bear in mind the next time you read or hear Pogrebin's brainless bleating about the struggle for Palestinian-Jewish dialogue or similar pabulum.

Jason Maoz can be reached at jmaoz@jewishpress.com

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One More Golden Oldie , Jason Maoz, <i>Senior Editor</i>