I am a former prosecutor and graduate of the
Columbia School of Journalism. I have been published in The Jerusalem
Post, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Observer, New York Times, Miami
Herald and The Chicago Tribune. I have interviewed tank commanders
surrounding Arafat’s Ramallah Compound, witnessed a suspected collaborator
being shot in Jenin, and interviewed a Hamas leader in Gaza.
My political awakening took place during the Iranian
hostage crisis of 1979, when I was a nine year old in San Diego. I felt
trampled, abused, and impotent. Then, riding across the political chaparral,
came a man with a jaunty pompadour and John Wayne worldview. I worked
on the Reagan campaign and began a subscription to The National
Review. My reading of William F. Buckley Jr. was syncopated with
head nodding and cursed mutterings.
This went on until the eighth grade. It was then,
after exhorting my fellow students to support the mining of Nicaraguan
harbors, that a teacher forever changed my life. She walked into class
and plopped a copy of Mother Jones onto my desk. Inside there
was an article on Salvadoran death squads beheading villagers. There
were families with heads cut off. It was a moment of intense clarity
that instantly shattered my ideological force field. I began to read
Mother Jones along with The National Review and
then took up The Economist and The Nation.
Most of my political positions today would be characterized
as liberal, but I never hew to a party line, never swallow a party platform
whole. Ideological rigidity is not a virtue; nor is the inability to
disagree civilly. Opening yourself to other viewpoints is not a weakness.
Failure to do so ossifies the political animal until, over time, he
becomes maladapted, still hunting for jungle prey long after the jungle
has been clear-cut.
My boyhood home was modest. I think of it as
pre-Vietnam War. The green, shag carpet was worn. The largest holes
were covered with mismatched throw rugs. The deck had a foot-size hole
in it from the jumping jacks of a weekend guest. The coffee table was
the color of coffee, a selling point for clumsy, coffee drinking people.
It permitted no boast, no sweep of the hand. It mocked pride.
My summers were spent with my grandparents in Israel.
I would bring a suitcase of clothes and a suitcase of books. In sneakers
and surfer shorts, I proclaimed my nationality among the sandals and
Speedos.
Women with hairy moles pushed me out of bus lines.
Chicken came from the butcher, bread from the baker, and medicine from
the government. My grandparents helped me catch the comet tail of Yiddish.
My contemporaries spoke Hebrew, so I conversed with the wizened and
imported. Evenings were spent filtering English language news broadcasts
from Tel Aviv and Beirut. News was balkanized and parochial. The pretense
of objectivity was refreshingly absent.
During my college years I studied Third World
economic development in Malaysian tin mines; Islamic Fundamentalism
in Kashmir; poverty in the slums of Caracas. In Beijing, I took photographs
that caught the unwanted attention of a Chinese intelligence officer.
He forced me to mount the handlebars of his bicycle for a ride to a
guard shack. I sat on the floor while Mandarin was shouted above me.
It was there on the floor that I decided that, some day, I would be
a foreign correspondent. Then I escaped.
After college, law school, and a federal judicial
clerkship, I became a Deputy District Attorney for Monterey County.
Essentially, my job was to read and evaluate police reports. If interminable
negotiations failed, the file became a loose script for jury trial (i.e.
several days of improvisational performance art).
In a prologue of frenzied activity, addresses became
three dimensional, victims gained smell and patois, police no longer
served as interlocutors. My experience was unmediated. Unfortunately,
this represented a sliver of my time. Otherwise, I sat behind my desk
and read police reports or mechanically attended to the banal.
This is why I left for Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism, where I spent two years learning journalistic ethics that
ill-served me in the world of commercial journalism where editorial
timidity often prevailed. Public relation firms controlled the news
cycle, and I did not.
So I brought my wife Lys, and son Max to Bolinas in
order to pursue a career as a freelance foreign correspondent. Once
here I discovered The Point Reyes Light and met Dave Mitchell,
its valiant editor. I found this mighty-mite of a paper, with Pulitzer
pedigree and low coffers. After a great deal of my plaintive wooing,
Mitchell agreed to sell me The Light. He has deemed me worthy
to carry on his extraordinary work, which – second to my wife agreeing
to marrying me – is the highest compliment I have ever received.