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This Jewish radio reporter was ‘the dean of the press corps’

(New York Jewish Week) — Room 9, the compact space designed for journalists inside New York City Hall, has held its share of personalities over the years. But none has spent as much time there as Stan Brooks, a Jewish radioman who reported on the city for five decades, covering six of its mayors and some of its most pivotal moments.

“He was like the dean of the press corps,” longtime colleague and friend Glenn Schuck told the New York Jewish Week about Brooks, who worked at 1010 WINS for almost his entire career. 

“Every mayor kind of revered Stan,” Schuck said. “All the mayors liked him, would call on him, and made sure that Stan was an important part of whatever question and answer session they were having.” 

A few weeks before Brooks’ death from lung cancer at age 86 in December 2013, the city’s outgoing mayor showed up at his bedside in Hell’s Kitchen with cookies. “Mike Bloomberg showed up, went up into his room — Stan was not well, he was very, very sick at that point — he sat with him, held his hand,” Schuck recalled. “That’s how respected Stan was. I mean, he had the ear and attention of a lot of people.” 

And then, just days before Brooks’ passing, Bloomberg renamed the radio room at City Hall the “Stan Brooks Radio Room,” citing Brooks as the “longest-serving member of Room 9.”

That would not be Brooks’ only lasting mark on the city he loved. In 2014, his local city councilman — Corey Johnson, who would go on to become the council’s speaker — spearheaded an effort to rename the corner of West 43rd Street and 10th Avenue, where Brooks and his wife Lynn lived at Manhattan Plaza, Stan Brooks Way.

“He loved that neighborhood,” Shuck said. “His life was that building and that neighborhood that he lived in.”

Schuck recalled how people would always ask Stan, “You’re 80-something years old, don’t you want a house in Florida?” and his response was always no. “He wanted to be in Hell’s Kitchen, in his apartment, on a Saturday, walking through the neighborhood. That was his life,” he said. 

Stanley Bertram Brooks was born Jan. 24, 1927 in the Bronx to Herman and Mildred Brooks. His father was a paper salesman and the president of the Young Friends Association, a Jewish burial organization, and his mother was one of 11 children, coming from a very close family. 

Stan, who grew up in a kosher home and attended a Conservative synagogue, lived on the same block — Walton Avenue — as practically his entire extended family, according to George Brooks, one of his three sons. Stan and Lynn raised raised their family on Long Island where they belonged to Temple Sinai, a Reform synagogue. 

“He was kind of spiritual in nature. I think he felt his connection to Judaism very much through his parents and his family — I would call it a family-based religion,” George said, recalling how his father said Kaddish every morning for the first year after his parents died. 

Brooks went to City College before serving in the army and graduating from Syracuse University. 

Brooks once spoke about being on “Kitchen Patrol” duty while in basic training and seeing stacks of pork chops being fried in lard and going outside and throwing up because he had never encountered pig meat before and was overwhelmed, George said. 

That was the beginning of “opening his mind to the wider world. He really was taken from kind of a sheltered, shtetl-y Bronx upbringing to seeing all kinds of people that he would never have met,” George said of his father’s time in the army. 

Before joining WINS as news director in 1962, Brooks worked for newspapers in Westchester County and was a reporter and editor for Newsday on Long Island for 10 years.

Shortly after he joined 1010 WINS, it became an all-news operation — the first of its kind in New York City and one of the first in the country. He helped lay the groundwork for the station and for all 24-hour news stations to come. 

“Being the first news director of the first all-news station, everyone looked up to Stan, admired Stan. He was, you know, he really was a trailblazer,” Schuck said. “I mean, he set a lot of the things in motion that are now 24-hour news channels, whether it’s TV or radio, are in place today,” Schuck said. 

One reason for hesitancy with 24 hour news channels was the concern that there couldn’t possibly be enough news to fill all that time. But Brooks “knew New York had enough stories to tell and he was just a really, really good storyteller,” Schuck said.

And Brooks certainly found enough to report on. He became a local reporter for 1010 WINS in 1970 and had a full reporting repertoire of 30- to 60-second dispatches. Even at 80, “he would always be the first one to get his stories done,” Schuck said.

“He would bring the story to life. He could go to an endless news conference and somehow he would know what the center of the story was immediately and he’d have the lead written before he got back to the desk,” Rich Lamb, a reporter from WCBS and one of Brooks’ colleagues said after his death. 

Brooks was a man of routine. For almost 50 years, every morning he drove from Hell’s Kitchen down to City Hall where he parked in the same spot each day. He ate the same cheese sandwich made by his wife at his desk for lunch every day because he wanted to be able to work without pause.

He brought that steadiness to moments of high intensity in the news.

During the 1971 Attica prison revolt — when inmates at the high-security Attica Correctional Facility took control of the prison and kept guards hostage resulting in 39 prisoners and guards killed by law enforcement gunfire — “he was famously on a payphone in the middle of this prison riot and was so calm,” Schuck said. ”Stan made his name for things like that.” 

Then, in 2003, City Councilman James David was killed in City Hall right in front of Schuck and Brooks just seconds after they had just shaken his hand. Brooks delivered a live report on the scene. 

“Because Stan was with me that day, it allowed me to get through something like that, because I felt like, ‘I’m with Stan so I’m good,’” Schuck said. “He was more than a colleague to me, he was a mentor and a friend. Almost like a second father. I just always felt better when he was around and he led by example.”

When Schuck joined 1010 WINS in 2000, Brooks sat down with him to answer all of his questions and would do that for anyone. “He was very welcoming, willing to sit with anybody, even if you had met them for the first time just to kind of, you know, set you on your path,” Schuck said. 

Throughout his career, Brooks frequently shared his wisdom and experience with younger journalists. “He was firm, but never rude. He would teach that to younger journalists, you don’t have to be rude to get your answers. He asked tough questions, but he was always nice about the way he did it. And that’s how he got his answers,” Schuck said. “He always got the answers he wanted, because he had the right tact and the way he handled himself. And if people wanted to tell a story, they wanted to tell it to Stan, I think that was important and he taught journalists by the hundreds how to do that.”

“He never really even saw it as a job,” Schuck added. “He just loved what he did. He wanted everyone to learn how to do the job like he did.”

Not only did he love what he did, but he understood the importance of his work — and did it until just a few weeks before his death, even when he could barely make it up the City Hall steps. 

“I think that he felt very strongly about uplifting the downtrodden, which I think of as tikkun olam, giving people who don’t have a fair shake a fair shake,” George Brooks said. “That’s part of why he was a journalist, to tell the stories of the people who needed to be heard who might not otherwise have a voice.” 

When he wasn’t working, all of Brooks’ time was devoted to his family — his wife Lynn, to whom he was married for 60 years before she died just months before him, and his three sons, George, Rick and Bennet.

—
The post This Jewish radio reporter was ‘the dean of the press corps’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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