Ira Rifkin

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Does the Godbeat sometimes fill you with despair? Well, you're far from alone

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Does the Godbeat sometimes fill you with despair? Well, you're far from alone

My colleague Bobby Ross Jr. posted a piece last week keyed to a comment made by Laurie Goodstein, the veteran, award-winning New York Times religion reporter, who recently pulled down another big Religion Newswriters Association prize.

Here's what she said, as reported by Religion News Service, which was the source of Bobby's lede:

"There are days when I feel despair about the news and the place of religion in it,” said Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times, named first-place winner for excellence in religion reporting at the Religion Newswriters Association’s 66th annual awards ceremony over the [Aug. 27-30] weekend in Philadelphia.
“This work is getting harder,” added Goodstein, in what she said were unprepared remarks. She won in the large newspapers and wire services category for stories published in 2014.

Neither the RNS story or Bobby' post explained further what Goodstein meant. But Bobby did ask others to react to the question of on-the-beat despair. So here's my response.

On-the-job despair? Sure. Perhaps not of the order experienced by William Lobdell (younger readers should click here to understand this older-demographic God-beat reference), but despair nonetheless.

Frankly, I don't see how anyone -- religion journalist or not, person of faith or no faith -- cannot feel despair from time to time if they are at all aware of the vast world that exists outside themselves and they do not seriously numb their sensitivities via escapist self-indulgence (which, I hope it is clear, I am not endorsing).

It's a bloody mess out there, with much of the absurdity, depravity and pain brought to us in the name of religion.


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There's plenty of global religious freedom news beyond the Kim Davis case

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There's plenty of global religious freedom news beyond the Kim Davis case

If you read GetReligion even sporadically, you must know that mainstream news coverage of religious freedom issues receives a great deal of attention on this blog, for many reasons.

Perhaps the prime reason is that they play a leading role in the societal and political conflicts marking this era of rapid social change. That keeps them constantly in the news, and that can't be ignored when you're a blog devoted to media coverage of religion issues. Plus, issues of freedom of conscience are often linked -- globally -- to freedom of the press.

For Americans, the case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who cites religious belief for refusing to issue marriage licenses -- containing the endorsement of her name and/or signature -- to same-sex couples, has been the latest U.S. religious freedom headline hog.

What is her church? Here's a link to an interesting Reuters piece about her Apostolic Christian faith, via Yahoo.

 What comes next? Will the Muslim flight attendant for an American airline who says she was suspended from her job for refusing to serve alcoholic drinks be the next religious freedom cause célèbre? It will be interesting to see what sort of religious community support she, a Muslim, receives.

Look, I'm fully aware that Americans are most interested in issues that impact them as Americans.

But the rest of the world has its own melange of religious freedom issues  -- some a matter of life and death, literally.


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About that quick trip to Iran by an American Jewish journalist. Great job, but ...

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About that quick trip to Iran by an American Jewish journalist. Great job, but ...

This Is a delicate one. How do I praise an esteemed colleague for scoring a breakthrough, attention-grabbing, complicated, and perhaps even dangerous story while also cautioning readers to be suspicious of his story's content?

My hope is to make a point about the tough task facing journalists who swoop into a place run by a dictatorship known for its masterful media manipulation, and are expected to produce definitive reports based on their limited time in-country?

I'm speaking about the recent stories published in The Forward  by Larry Cohler-Esses, who recently visited Iran at Teheran's invitation, making him the first journalist from an American Jewish, pro-Zionist publication to do so since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The mere fact of his trip was mainstream news, and understandably so. The New York Times, NPR, CNN, The Guardian, Haaretz, and other big names in American, European and, of course, Israeli journalism rushed to interview him about his experience. 

A personal note: I have known Larry for a quarter century -- yup, I'm dispensing with AP style here; it seems too formal for a colleague. We met when he worked for a Jewish weekly in Washington, D.C., and I toiled for the competition in Baltimore, but we are not close. I know him to be a stickler for accuracy and a reporter with superb journalistic instincts who excels in tackling difficult subjects. I'm sure he accurately reported what he saw and was told.

Currently The Forward's assistant managing editor, it took Larry two years to get his visa for Iran, a sign of his tenacity. But perhaps also a sign of Iran's ability to time its moves to squeeze the most it can out of a situation.


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The Independent takes on journalistic contradictions, faux morality and double standards

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The Independent takes on journalistic contradictions, faux morality and double standards

Owned by a Russian oligarch and center-left in its orientation, the British daily The Independent runs a media column that recently addressed the very concerns that prompt me to contribute to GetReligion.

There's no beating around the bush for columnist Ian Burrell.

Here's his opening two graphs:

The need to understand the intersections of religion and civil freedom has never been greater. Hard-won human rights victories of the past century, for women, gays and free thinkers, are still opposed by zealots across the world, while people of faith are under persecution in many lands.
These are complex issues which the news industry has a duty to explain. Instead, however, we have a media rife with contradiction, faux morality and double standards.

I would only make one change to that. I would broaden his lede to include the intersection of religion and the entirety of human culture -- politics, commerce, popular entertainment -- you name it. 

Here's a link to his column; its worth reading in its entirety. I'll return to it below.

Burrell finds fault (as do I) on both sides of the misleading, artificial and media-driven divide that purportedly separates those on the right and left; if only people were that simple to understand and deal with.


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One spacey assignment: What's the story on alien life and scriptural literalism?

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One spacey assignment: What's the story on alien life and scriptural literalism?

My GetReligion posts run under the rubric "Global Wire," so I may be stepping outside my designated orbit with this one. But since our Hubble site -- excuse me, that should be humble website -- provides us near infinite space (Anyone know just how big the internet actually is?) in which to indulge ourselves, I figure, "Why not indulge?"

(Corny lede, you say? Well, excuse me.)

To get to the point, we're talking universalism. Not the sort of doctrinal universalism you might expect on a site devoted to religion journalism. I'm referring to the spacial universalism of, you know, the universe.

Why? Because of this piece spotted earlier this month on the Website of the Washington Post. How could I pass up a story headlined, "Why the Vatican doesn’t think we’ll ever meet an alien Jesus"?

The story followed July's NASA announcement that it's Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft had discovered one of the closest analogues to our own planet found to date, a planet little more than one and a half times as big in radius as Earth and called Kepler 452b. The plant, said The New York Times, "circles a sunlike star in an orbit that takes 385 days, just slightly longer than our own year, putting it firmly in the 'Goldilocks' habitable zone where the temperatures are lukewarm and suitable for liquid water on the surface -- if it has a surface."

So we're talking the possibility of organic life, no matter how primitive, of a sort recognizable to humans. 

Which brings us back to the Post, the Vatican and Jesus.


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Another week, another Israel story -- Iran nuclear deal. What's an overworked journalist to do?

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Another week, another Israel story -- Iran nuclear deal. What's an overworked journalist to do?

That hue and cry emanating from the Jewish community of late sounds, to me, a lot like, "See! See! I told you so!"

Told you what? 

That President Barack Obama is happy to throw Israel under a bus if that's what it takes to cement ties with his newly minted Iranian friends and burnish his foreign policy legacy in a Neville Chamberlain-ish manner.

Or...

That Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a warmonger oblivious to American concerns and ungrateful for all the UN cover and financial aid Washington's given Israel under Obama and for decades?

Well, which is it?

Take your pick. Your choice is likely to depend upon where you get your news and opinions. Or perhaps I should say your opinion-infused news, which is closer to the reality of what the information industry churns out. But that's just my opinion.

I wrote last week about the media's focus on the soul-searching in Israel following back-to-back Jew-on-Jew and Jew-on-Palestinian attacks. I planned to write more about that this week, given the continuing developments, covered here by The New York Times and here, from another angle, by The Jerusalem Post.

But as is too often the case with Middle East crisis news coverage, events quickly pushed the story forward, leaving journalists little opportunity to circle back and report more in-depth on the first round coverage's more compelling angles.


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Adding to the Middle East mix; this time we're talking about Jewish terrorism

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Adding to the Middle East mix; this time we're talking about Jewish terrorism

Despicable Jew-on-Jew and suspected Jew-on-Palestinian acts of violence were committed in Israel last week, producing much agonized soul-searching among Israeli and Diaspora Jews over how this could happen. Not surprisingly, the international media has been all over the story, supplying enough answers to the question of "how" to satisfy every taste.

Here's a quick summation of events: 

Within the span of just a few days, right wing religious settlers clashed with government forces seeking to remove illegally built West Bank settler homes, an ultra-Orthodox man attacked a Jerusalem gay pride parade, knifing six and killing a teenaged Jewish girl, and suspected extremist religious settlers set fire to a Palestinian home, killing a toddler. (I say suspected because, as of this writing, no one's actually been charged with the crime, though all signs point to the involvement of radical Jews.) 

Want more detail, including how the Israeli government has reacted to these events? Read this solid Washington Post piece published earlier this week.

Israeli Jewish civilian violence rooted in religious or political extremism -- or an unfortunate mix of the two -- is not quite the man-bites-dog story it's generally portrayed to be. Sadly, it happens too often for that to be the case. Jews, Israeli or otherwise, are no less immune to the darker human impulses than anyone else. 

Still, the anguished "How could Jews do this?" trope carried the day.

My reading of the media landscape tells me that this is the case for several reasons.


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Is China's economic imperialism a religious issue and, thus, a story for religion scribes?

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Is China's economic imperialism a religious issue and, thus, a story for religion scribes?

Four years ago while vacationing in the Central American nation of Belize I noticed that the preponderance of grocery stores in the coastal and interior towns I visited were operated by Chinese immigrants. How come?

Few of the adults appeared to speak any Spanish or English, Belize's two most important languages, indicating to me that they were recent immigrants. Their children, it seemed, handled all their business translation needs, a not uncommon occurrence among first-generation immigrants everywhere.

I concluded that Belize, a small, seemingly unimportant geopolitical player with a polyglot population and limited infrastructure, had become another object of Chinese government economic imperialism meant to gain influence and create financially dependent allies across the developing world.

China, as one New York Times writer put it, engages big time in "buying loyalty." It does so by showering needy governments with loans and investments and sending its people to establish economically Important footholds.

I may be reaching here, but my gut tells me that, given China's miserable human rights record -- and in particular its treatment of religious movements -- that Beijing's ever-spreading tentacles is an issue to which American religious groups should be paying more attention.

Yes, that means that this is also a topic to which religion-beat journalists should be paying more attention.


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Abe Foxman and dependence on 'quote machines' in the journalistic process

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Abe Foxman and dependence on 'quote machines' in the journalistic process

Is there a working religion journalist in America who's ever done a story concerning anti-Semitism who did not seek a quick quote from Abraham H. Foxman, the newly retired national director of the Anti-Defamation League?

If so, please contact me. You're unique.

After almost three decades as the ADL's main man and a half-century with the organization itself, Foxman -- a veritable quote machine who, for many journalists, functioned as the unofficial voice of mainstream, organized American Jewry -- has finally, at 75, handed in his badge. Characteristically, he did not go quietly.

"Today is the last day of my long tenure as national director of the Anti-Defamation League," he began an oped distributed July 20 by JTA, the international Jewish wire service. 

"So why am I choosing to write an article on my last day? It is the same imperative that has motivated me all these years: If I see something troubling to the Jewish people, I cannot be still.


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