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Three-time war veteran and longtime JTA correspondent Tom Tugend dies at 97
(JTA) — It was the kind of story that Tom Tugend loved to tell, except he lived it.
He left Berlin, aged 13, on Adolf Hitler’s birthday, in 1939, driven out by the ideology reflected in the swastikas on the banners fluttering in the streets. Six years later, he was back in Germany as an American soldier interrogating the Nazis who had driven his family out.
“I had been a refugee a few years before,” Tugend told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2021. “They kicked me out, they were the masters. And suddenly they couldn’t be nice enough, and couldn’t do enough for us. And of course, each one, some of his best friends were Jews.”
Tom Tugend, who fought in three wars — two for the United States and one for Israel — spent decades as Jewish media’s gentleman correspondent, covering, among other beats, Hollywood.
He died at his home in Sherman Oaks, California, on Wednesday at 97, his daughter Alina said.
“His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” Alina Tugend told JTA Thursday. “He was a hero to many people.”
Tugend was unfailingly kind and soft-spoken, including in an interview last year with the JTA, in which he shared story after story, from firing swastika-emblazoned anti-tank guns in Egypt to his experience facing antisemitism as a young German immigrant in the United States.
Born in 1925, Tugend was raised in a well-to-do German Jewish family. His father, Gustav Tugendreich, a respected pediatrician, understood the danger of Hitler’s rise and left for the United States in the mid-1930s after securing a lectureship at Bryn Mawr College.
When he was able to bring them over, he urged his family to follow him, but life remained good enough in Germany that they resisted until it was almost too late — they left four months before World War II started.
It was Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, and the city’s trees and poles were draped with massive swastika banners. “Gee, I mean, they may not like the Jews, but it’s very nice of them to give us such a nice sendoff,” Tugend recalled last year with a laugh.
The transition to life in the United States was not easy. The family encountered antisemitism in their new home.
In eighth grade, for example, Tugend’s class read Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” which famously includes Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, as a main character. One of Tugend’s classmates, whom he had considered a friend, raised his hand and asked the teacher, “Wouldn’t you rather buy from an American than a Jew?”
“I don’t generally talk about it because it goes so counter, it sounds almost disloyal that you say I had a more difficult time initially in the United States than I had in Germany,” Tugend recalled.
He was restless, and joined the army when he was 18 — where he found more antisemitism. He was deployed in March 1944 and spent time in Marseille helping the French army fight SS units. When his commanders learned he spoke fluent German, they sent him to that country to interview Nazis.
He returned to the United States in March 1946 but remained unsettled. Two years later he saw an opportunity.
“Since a Jewish state is established only every 2,000 years, I was afraid I might not be around the next time,” he said, so he enlisted in the nascent and notoriously strapped Israeli army, which got its material where it could.
Tugend served as a squad leader in an English-speaking anti-tank unit, where he wound up using German guns that featured large swastikas on the barrel.
When that war ended, Tugend returned to California to complete his journalism degree. That stay was short-lived, too — he was drafted again in 1950 but was spared combat. Instead, he went to San Francisco to edit an Army newspaper.
After Korea, Tugend said, he ran out of wars. He shifted his focus to writing. He spent 30 years working at the University of California, Los Angeles and also had a parallel career in Jewish journalism, starting in 1964. He would go on to write for the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, and he spent decades as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s West Coast correspondent.
Lisa Hostein, the longtime former JTA editor-in-chief and current executive editor of Hadassah Magazine, remembered meeting Tugend on a Jewish press trip to Argentina in 1986. She told JTA last year that Tugend was “always the consummate professional and gentleman.”
Over the years, Tugend was honored by the Greater Los Angeles Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists. He also received a lifetime achievement award from the American Jewish Press Association.
His last published article was last month in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles; it was an obituary for Edward Robin, a Los Angeles philanthropist and businessman, who was 80, 17 years Tugend’s junior.
Weeks before his own death, Tugend infused the article with his gentle and generous warmth. “A mere listing of his leadership roles in Jewish organizations worldwide would call for a book-length article,” Tugend wrote about Robin.
Honored at last month’s Jewish Journal gala, which he attended, Tugend never lost his love of writing. “You still get a certain kick in seeing your byline,” he told JTA last year.
Tugend is survived by his wife of 66 years, Rachel, and their daughters Alina Tugend, Orlee Raymond and Ronit Austgen.
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Israel’s Netanyahu Says Syria Deal Possible, Expects Buffer Zone
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participates in the state memorial ceremony for the fallen of the Iron Swords War on Mount Herzl, in Jerusalem, Oct. 16, 2025. Photo: Alex Kolomoisky/Pool via REUTERS
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday a deal with Syria is possible and he expects Syrian authorities to establish a demilitarized buffer zone from Damascus to Mount Hermon and other areas.
Netanyahu spoke a day after US President Donald Trump, whose administration has been trying to broker a non-aggression pact between the two countries, said it was very important that Israel maintained a “strong and true dialogue” with Damascus.
Syria does not formally recognize Israel, which following the fall of longtime Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in December moved troops into a buffer zone along the Syrian border to secure a military position to prevent terrorists from launching attacks against the Jewish state.
The previously demilitarized zone in the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria and later annexed by Israel, was established under the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement between Damascus and Jerusalem that ended the Yom Kippur War. However, Israel considered the agreement void after the collapse of Assad’s regime.
“What we expect Syria to do is, of course, to establish a demilitarized buffer zone from Damascus to the buffer area, including the approaches to Mount Hermon and the Hermon peak,” Netanyahu said while visiting wounded soldiers in central Israel. “We hold these areas in order to ensure the security of Israel’s citizens, and that is what obligates us.”
He added: “With goodwill and an understanding of these principles, it is possible to reach an agreement with the Syrians, but we will stand by our principles in any case.”
Trump has backed Syria‘s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, while Israel has voiced wariness over Sharaa’s past links to Islamist militancy, but has engaged in efforts to broker a deal.
An Israeli raid in southern Syria on Friday killed 13 Syrians, Syrian state media reported. The Israeli military said it had targeted a Lebanese Islamist militant group there. Netanyahu on Tuesday was visiting soldiers wounded in the clash.
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French Authorities Detain Two Minors Suspected of Plotting Terror Attacks on ‘Israeli Targets’
Illustrative: Police officers work after police shot dead an armed man earlier who set fire to the city’s synagogue in Rouen, France, May 17, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes
French authorities have launched an investigation into a group suspected of planning attacks and two minors have been charged and placed in pre-trial detention as a result of it, France’s national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office said on Monday.
In a statement issued after a report in French media, the office also said that since the start of 2025, a total of 20 minors have faced terrorism-related charges.
Media outlet Franceinfo reported that the two minors had been planning an attack on “Israeli targets,” citing a source close to the investigation. The anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office did not immediately confirm this in its statement.
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Joel F. Brown named next Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Forward Association
Joel F. Brown has been named the next Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Forward Association, the nonprofit entity that publishes the Forward, America’s most influential and widely read nationwide Jewish publication. He has served as a member of the Forward board and of the Forward Association for 10 years.
Brown most recently served with the Chicago-based law firm Goldberg Kohn as a principal in its Commercial Finance Group. He has written and lectured on a wide variety of finance-related legal topics and was named one of the 2021 Best Lawyers in America honorees in Banking and Finance law. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and of New York University School of Law.
Since retiring from the practice of law in 2024, Brown has been pursuing a Masters Degree in Jewish Studies from the Spertus Institute. Brown also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, has served as President of Am Yisrael Conservative Congregation (Northfield, Illinois) and is affiliated with the Shalom Hartman Institute.
Brown said, “I am honored to assume this important role in supporting the Forward’s ongoing storied history of reporting on the Jewish American experience in all its diversity. Over the next few years, I expect the Board will help guide the Forward in its mission to cover the full spectrum of Jewish American politics, culture and religion, with an emphasis on reaching new audiences, and in particular younger audiences.”
About the Forward
The Forward is America’s leading voice in Jewish journalism, delivering incisive coverage of the issues, ideas and institutions that matter to American Jews.
The Forward‘s independent, non-ideological perspective on world and national news, and its unparalleled coverage of Jewish arts, culture and opinion, have made it the most influential and widely read nationwide Jewish publication today, and it has been honored with the most journalism awards of any Jewish media organization.
The Forward reaches more than 100 million viewers annually across its website, social media, email newsletters, events and podcasts. The Forward‘s free e-newsletters include the Forwarding the News morning briefing and others highlighting areas of special interest like Yiddish and antisemitism.
Leading outlets turn to the Forward‘s journalists for analysis and interviews, including The New York Times, CNN, Fox, NPR, Politico, Haaretz and The Washington Post. The Forward has been archived by the U.S. Library of Congress and named one of the top nonprofit news sites by Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab.
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