It’s been nearly a month since Hamas militants broke through the Gaza border and carried out a brutal attack that has resulted in 1,400 lives lost in Israel, triggering a military response with thousands of Palestinians killed and more than a million displaced. Among the latest developments, a UNICEF spokesperson this week described Gaza as a “graveyard for children,” as calls for a cease-fire mounted and the Biden administration urged a humanitarian “pause” in the conflict.
Through it all, the world has been grappling not only with the fog of war, but also misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, antisemitism, Islamophobia, heated debates over language, and a widening chasm between those whose foremost sympathies lie with the Israelis in one corner, or with the Palestinians in the other. With images of mass civilian casualties seared into our minds and talk of World War III lingering in the air, these are scary, depressing, fraught days, in which all it takes is one wrong word, gesture, or social media post to instantly and profoundly inflame the tensions.
In Gaza, there’s an escalating military campaign that threatens to spiral into a wider conflict, with a very limited number of journalists for major global news outlets able to bear witness on the ground. (I wrote about them last month.) Here in the US, Muslims are facing incendiary rhetoric from powerful conservatives in Congress and the media, while American Jews are facing a rise in antisemitism that has infiltrated daily life in a way many may have thought unfathomable just weeks ago.
Jodi Rudoren has been especially attuned to the latter story. She’s the editor in chief of the Forward, the age-old Jewish news organization that has been an essential source for many American Jews as they process the latest headlines. It’s a tricky job—the Forward is “independent” and “nonideological,” as Rudoren puts it, which means the publication’s largely but not exclusively Jewish readership runs the gamut from pro-Israel hard-liners to left-leaning Palestinian activists. Rudoren is also a former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief who has lived in Israel and reported from Gaza, including coverage of past wars there. I was interested in her perspective on all of this, so we hopped on a Zoom. The following is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation.
Vanity Fair: Give our readers a sense of your background covering Israel and Gaza.
Jodi Rudoren: I worked at The New York Times for 21 years and the LA Times for six years before that. In 2012 I became the Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times. I was in that job through the end of 2015, which means I covered two wars in Gaza. There was an eight-day war in 2012. I was on the ground in Gaza for that entire thing and a little bit after. And then in 2014 there was the summer war. I spent most of that war in Jerusalem and around Israel, but I was in Gaza some during that conflict. I’ve probably been to Gaza eight or 10 times over those almost four years, many of them peacetime. I left The New York Times in 2019 to become editor in chief of the Forward, which is a 126-year-old Jewish news organization. We’re a nonideological, independent, nonprofit newsroom. It’s news through a Jewish lens, for a largely Jewish audience, but not entirely.
Safe to say this is the biggest story in your time editing the Forward?
Of course. First of all, there’s the magnitude of the attack and the response. There’s the length [of the conflict], and that it seems likely to continue. And in the last week or so, I think we’ve come to understand, in a deeper way, the repercussions here in the American Jewish world.