Jeffrey Goldberg’s Socialist Newspaper
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/jeffrey-goldbergs-socialist-newspaper/91252/
History, we see, is up to her old tricks. This time she was summoned by Paul Sperry of the New York Post, who put out on Labor Day a tweet with a note saying: “BACKGROUND: The author of ‘The Atlantic’s’ discredited hit piece on Trump was raised by socialist parents who sent him to socialist camps in the Catskills. Jeffrey Goldberg … later worked for a socialist weekly newspaper in New York.”
This scoop, by one of the Post’s star scribes, was forwarded by a press reporter of the Times, Marc Tracy, to another of the Gray Lady’s scribes, Ben Smith, with the subject line: “you should forward to Lipsky.” Mr. Smith did so, adding his own comment, which, including the salutation, read in full “!!”. We took the slammers to mean that Mr. Smith was enjoying the ironies of the situation.
For Mr. Sperry is right that Mr. Goldberg worked for the Forward in New York. So, for that matter, did Mr. Smith. The paper is the English-language weekly successor to the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward that was founded in 1897 by socialists. We, meaning our editor, were, in 1990, the founding editor of its English paper. We edited it for a decade. Our headstone may yet say we hired both Smith and Goldberg.
It happens, though, that we are several kiloparsecs to the right of the socialists. We had come to the Forward from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, where we were hired because we happily hewed, as we still do, to the principles of free minds and free markets. Then again, too, we’d long admired the Forward, which guided millions of Yiddish-speaking immigrants over the cultural bridge to America.
The Yiddish Forward’s first editor, Abraham Cahan, promptly quit the paper he’d founded in a clash with the Socialist Party. He spent several years in the late 19th and early 20th centuries writing for the Commercial Advertiser and The New York Sun, returning finally to the Forward against a guarantee of independence. From the Forward emerged two Nobel laureates, Isaac Bashevis Singer in literature and Elie Wiesel in peace. Cahan was editor until he died in 1951.
The Forward was never again a party paper in the European sense. Plus, it lurched rightward with every crisis that came upon the Jewish people. It rallied to our side in World War I. After Cahan made a trip to pre-state Israel in 1925, it emerged for Zionism. It also turned fiercely against communism, and helped create the institution that played the leading role in bringing down the Soviet Union.
That was the International Confederation of Free (meaning non-communist) Trade Unions. The ICFTU sent a young organizer, Irving Brown, to Europe after World War II to organize the free trade unions that would help get Marshall Plan materiel past the communist dock workers. The ICFTU eventually became a powerful union umbrella. It had offices in Brussels and agents around the world.
The ICFTU helped save the French Fifth Republic from the communist students in 1968. It was with the ICFTU that was affiliated a little known trade union in Gdansk, Poland, called Solidarity, which rose up and cracked Soviet Rule in the East Bloc. This is why these columns often say that one can trace a straight line from the editorial sanctum of the Forward to the downfall of the Soviet Union.
So Soviet communism was defeated because working men and women drove through its beating heart the stake of Free Labor. The last great anti-communist at the head of Big Labor was Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO. He occasionally stopped by the Forward, where we once said to him, “Lane, people say that our defeat of the Soviet Union was the result of a conspiracy among President Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and you.”
“They had nuttin’ to do with it,” he quipped.
Which brings us back to Ben Smith, Jeff Goldberg, and the socialist paper on which they started, and to Mr. Sperry. We wouldn’t presume to speak for any of them — or Lane Kirkland, who was no conservative. We did perceive Kirkland as treating capitalism as a partner and dedicating himself to making sure that labor partook of its prosperity. Still a fine formula for any politician — or newspaper — of our own time.
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