Uncategorized
For ill and for good, this ‘Wicked’ song has become ubiquitous
In the final minutes of the second act of the Broadway musical Wicked, Glinda and Elphaba sing together one last time. They have reached their ultimate, iconic forms: Glinda is the Good Witch, ringletted and resplendent. Elphaba is the Wicked Witch of the West, caped and glittering. They suspect they will never see each other again. And so the two women sing a duet that is part yearbook note, part deathbed confession.
“Because I knew you,” Glinda sings, “I have been changed for good.”
Jenna and her husband watched from their orchestra seats. It was 2005, Wicked was the toast of Broadway, and the tickets were a splurge. When the actress playing Elphaba sang, “It well may be that we will never meet again in this lifetime, so let me say before we part: so much of me is made of what I learned from you. You’ll be with me, like a handprint on my heart,” Jenna’s eyes filled with tears. Her husband reached over and took her hand.
Four months later, they separated. On her birthday that year, Jenna’s ex-husband sent her a card. “Because I knew you,” he wrote, “I have been changed for good.”
“I love the double meaning of that,” said Jenna, now 57 and a volunteer manager at a nonprofit in Maryland. “I have been changed to be a better person, but I have also been changed permanently, for good. There’s no going back.”
The second life of ‘For Good’
Amidst cheers and ballyhoo — to borrow a phrase from Glinda — a second Wicked movie is now hitting theaters. To mark the distinction between this movie and its predecessor, the 2025 edition is called Wicked: For Good.
“For Good,” the song, has attained an unusual second life outside of the musical. In Wicked, Jewish composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz launched a number of forever entries into the musical theater book of standards — “Defying Gravity,” “Popular,” “The Wizard and I” — but “For Good” belongs to an exclusive category: songs that have become staples at graduations, retirement celebrations and funerals. If you see a cap and gown, you are not safe from a heartfelt rendition of “For Good.” If there is a casket on a table, these days you may be as likely to hear “For Good” as you are to hear “Wind Beneath My Wings” or “Candle in the Wind.”
“As a cantor, it’s impossible to hear ‘For Good’ from Wicked without sensing that the song is doing something deeply Jewish, whether or not its creators intended it,” said Neil Michaels of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. “It has become, in many sanctuaries and life-cycle moments, a kind of contemporary niggun, carrying emotional truth where spoken liturgy might fall short.”
“I’ve played it for a funeral,” said Joe Wicht, who has accompanied singers for 18 years at the San Francisco piano bar Martuni’s. “I’ve played it for singers at wedding receptions, too.” But most often, he said, the song is sung “by two best friends.” Duos who request “For Good” are often about to be separated by a move, or redefined by one person getting married, he said. Sometimes, the singers are a parent and a child.
“This isn’t the kind of song where people just willy-nilly decide to sing it in a bar, a la karaoke,” he said. “It’s always sung with intent.”
“It’s always the same scenario — best friends,” he added. “I’ve never heard this song performed between two people in love.”
An anthem of friendship for this generation
Few songs aim to articulate the way that two people can alter each other’s lives and edit each other’s characters, sans romantic love. Schwartz has said in interviews that he wrote the song after sitting down with his daughter and asking her about her best friend. “If you could never see Sarah again and you had one chance to tell her what she’s meant to you,” he asked, “what would you say?”
The song, which lifts some of Schwartz’s daughter’s words directly, literalizes the way two people can blend without losing their own specificity. It begins with a solo for each woman, then they sing in counterpoint, then harmony. “For Good” is sometimes derided as schmaltzy and overearnest. But its impact is indelible: it is a song people rely on to express a kind of love that often goes unsung.
“For those of us who have lost someone,” wrote vocal coach and therapist Petra Borzynski in a recent essay, ‘For Good’ is “the song that speaks the unspeakable: that the person who is gone still lives in every choice we make, every kindness we extend, every moment we choose differently because they existed (for better, for worse).”
Borzynski sang the song for years. Then her mother died, at 59, of ovarian cancer. When Borzynski attempted to sing the song, she recalled, “my voice literally broke.”
When 75-year-old Melbourne resident Des Flannery was in his late 60s, he got into a fight with his best friend, Max. They made up when Des sent Max a written apology, Des’ daughter, Breanna, told me. In his note, Des quoted the opening lyrics from “For Good.” When Max died several years later, Des eulogized him, reciting the lyrics that had helped bring him and his friend back together.
“He wasn’t confident he could get through it without becoming a wailing mess,” his daughter, Breanna Flannery, said. “So reading it seemed the best way to get it out.” (Afterwards, women mourners crowded around Des to praise his bold, emotional writing, unaware that he had been quoting Wicked.)
Drew Wutke, a pianist at Marie’s Crisis, the famed Broadway musical singalong bar in the West Village, is used to looking up from the piano during “For Good” and seeing drinkers crying into their tequila sodas.
“It is the friendship anthem of the last 25 years,” he said.
“I don’t know another way to say it other than: it is a heaven-blessed song,” he said. “The hope that soul-friendship exists, that chosen family exists — those are the wires that get tripped when that introduction starts,” he said, humming the song’s opening notes. “Even though it is lyrically nonsensical at times.” One lyric often maligned even by fans is, “Like a seed dropped by a sky bird, in a distant wood.”
“A skybird! Please!” said Wutke. “We could have workshopped that lyric.”
I’ve heard it said…but what does it mean?
As with the rest of the musical, the universality of “For Good” is both a strength and weakness. Wicked is a musical about a woman who faces cruelty and discrimination because of her skin color. It has been called a parable about fascism, and an allegory for racism and ableism. But no Black actress played Elphaba full-time on Broadway for the musical’s first 22 years. And though one character in Wicked uses a wheelchair, the first time a wheelchair user ever played Nessarose was in last year’s movie.
Though the Wicked movies have been released during a time of rising authoritarianism, the movie’s stars and creators have limited themselves to comments like the joint statement Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande made recently, which spoke of “times like these that feel so divided, as if we’re reading from different pages and different books.”
Though the song is deeply meaningful to listeners, the meaning those listeners derive is not consistent. “At its core, ‘For Good’ is about hineni — ‘here I am’: standing fully present in relationship,” said the cantor, Michaels. “It is the musical embodiment of the Jewish belief that who we become is inextricably shaped by the people who walk beside us.” The song, he argued, “echoes the teaching that every person you encounter teaches you something, that chevruta (sacred partnership) shapes the soul, and that human connection is one of Judaism’s most powerful agents of transformation.”
No one religion or perspective has a monopoly on interpreting Schwartz’s message. Ali, a friend of mine, and a 31-year-old interior designer from Los Angeles, grew up singing songs from Wicked with her friend Brittany. “She would always be Elphaba and I would always be Glinda, even though I secretly wanted to sing the Elphaba part,” Ali said.
Ali was active in the Catholic church, and the girls were often asked to perform at fundraisers and other events. They reserved “For Good” for the finale. “It’s about connection and sisterhood, and friendship,” Ali said. “It was a tearjerker.”
As 14 year olds, the two girls were summoned to perform in a hotel ballroom for a group of about “200 nuns and other women,” Ali remembered. After the song, the nuns thanked them profusely for lending their voices to their cause. The two girls exited the stage to wild applause, then sat down to eat lunch and when they looked back up, “they were literally showing fetuses on the screen and just spewing anti-abortion rhetoric,” Ali remembered. The shift was shocking, she said. “From sisterhood and friendship to hating other women for having abortions.”
Changed for good? Or just good at singing?
“For Good” is usually performed in the context of honoring another person. No matter how tragic or poignant an event is, though, for a theater kid it’s also an opportunity to perform “For Good.” If that sounds cynical, it comes from personal experience: Your author performed the Elphaba part at her high school graduation. I knew that it was my job to move the audience to tears, but my thoughts were largely about how to achieve vocal clarity and resonance. Also, my ankle was broken, and my secular high school had rented out a synagogue for graduation, so I sang the song on the steps of the bima, mindful of the fact that my cast was wider than the steps and if I gestured emotionally during the “like a comet pulled from orbit” harmony I could roll forward and crash to the ground.
But Victoria, 21, who sang the song just a few years ago at her high school graduation in Port Richey, Florida, begs to differ. “I think that vocally, it is not an extremely challenging song,” she said. The real challenge, she said, is allowing yourself to feel the meaning of the song, and conveying that depth of feeling to the audience. “I couldn’t help but really internalize the lyrics I was singing,” she said.
“I was reflecting on all of the relationships I had made with my fellow students, as well as my teachers,” Victoria said. “And I knew then that they had changed and helped create the person I am today, because I knew them.” Among masses who will see Wicked: For Good in the coming weeks, there will be many who weep throughout the title song, and many who call the song saccharine and sentimental. The second group is missing the point. “For Good” is meant to be saccharine. It takes on the most cringe-inducing, embarrassing topic in the world: human connection. If you love it, it probably came into your life for a reason.
The post For ill and for good, this ‘Wicked’ song has become ubiquitous appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Abdul El-Sayed is courting Jewish voters — without moderating his views on Israel
Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed isn’t toning down his rhetoric to win over Jewish voters.
He’s called Israel’s action in Gaza a genocide, wants to withdraw both offensive and defensive military aid to Israel, called the Israeli government “evil” like Hamas, has rebuffed questions about whether Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, and in an interview with the Forward, doubled down on his decision to campaign with controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and his response to the attack on a Michigan syangogue in March: “Hurt people hurt people.”
Yet at a progressive synagogue and events hosted by Michigan’s Jewish Democratic caucus, El-Sayed, who is Muslim, is finding Jewish voters willing to hear him out — and a constituency of Jews who support his candidacy even when they disagree with him on Israel.
It’s a playbook New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani employed to deflect allegations of antisemitism: Don’t soften on Israel or what rhetoric crosses a line, but speak with the Jewish press, meet with Jewish organizations and demonstrate a cultural fluency with Judaism beyond the politics of the Middle East.
The race, which could determine which party controls the Senate, is also a test of Israel politics in a swing state home to the nation’s highest concentration of Arab Americans.
The three leading candidates occupy distinct positions on the issue: El-Sayed has made criticism of Israel and AIPAC a central plank of his campaign. On the other end of the spectrum, Rep. Haley Stevens describes herself as “proud pro-Israel Democrat” and is backed by AIPAC. And in the middle, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow has won the endorsement of J Street, the liberal Zionist advocacy group that supports a two-state solution.
El-Sayed, who currently leads in the polls, maintains his candor has helped him build a Jewish coalition of his own.
“There’s going to be things that they disagree with, but at least they know I have the courage to say where I stand,” El-Sayed told the Forward. “I say it everywhere to everyone, and my positions are based in principle, not just political calculus.”
Jews for Abdul
While a number of Jewish organizations have expressed alarm at El-Sayed’s campaign, one synagogue welcomed him inside.
Congregation T’chiyah, a Reconstructionist synagogue outside Detroit that describes itself as progressive, hosted El-Sayed for a Passover Seder in April. Many of its congregants support El-Sayed’s campaign and are volunteering with a group dubbed “Jews for Abdul.”
One of those volunteers is Lex Eisenberg, a T’chiyah congregant who also organizes with the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace.
“As progressive Jews, we’re all too familiar with the way that people who speak out for Palestinian freedom are smeared and attacked the way some are smearing Abdul right now,” Eisenberg said. “So the idea is that we want to be outwardly and publicly Jewish and supporting Abdul.”
El-Sayed’s campaign has also attracted some prominent progressive Jewish voices. Former Michigan congressman Andy Levin — who previously served as president of Congregation T’chiyah — endorsed El-Sayed alongside Bernie Sanders, the progressive Jewish senator from Vermont. (El-Sayed has called Sanders his “favorite Jewish uncle.”)
Levin, who identifies as Zionist, sees echoes of his own political battles in El-Sayed’s campaign. He lost his House election against Stevens in 2022 after AIPAC poured millions into defeating him, displeased with his support for a bill that backed a two-state solution and restricted use of U.S. taxpayer funds to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank.
“So many young Jewish people are active in Abdul’s campaign,” Levin told the Forward. “And it’s their Judaism that leads them to that position, because their Judaism teaches them that the way to fight antisemitism isn’t to circle the wagons and shut off the world, but to build alliances with other oppressed people.”
Welcoming leftist politicians is not unusual for Congregation T’chiyah: Its rabbi, Alana Alpert, was the founding director of the progressive political advocacy group Detroit Jews for Justice, and she has been honored by Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-American Michigan congresswoman censured by the House over her comments about Israel. (Alpert did not respond to the Forward’s request for an interview.)
“T’chiyah, of course, is a congregation that is focused on uplifting social justice around the idea of tikkun olam,” El-Sayed said.
Yet El-Sayed’s coalition also extends to those with complicated relationships to the Jewish state.
Roslyn Abt Schindler, a retired professor who taught Holocaust studies at Wayne State University, has been a member of Congregation T’chiyah for 48 of the synagogue’s 49 years. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Schindler plans to vote for El-Sayed and agrees with his characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.
But she also supports a two-state solution — a position El-Sayed has not endorsed, and one she wishes he would.
Schindler said the issues that matter most to her are affordability, campaign finance reform, environmental protection and Medicare for All. El-Sayed’s visit to her synagogue and Levin’s endorsement of him, she said, sealed the deal.
“His outreach to Jewish voters has been genuine and thoughtful,” Schindler said.
Decky Alexander, chair of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus — which endorsed Stevens last week — agreed that El-Sayed has engaged Michigan’s Jewish community. He participated in a candidate forum co-hosted by the Jewish caucus, and he attended the organization’s “Summer Simcha,” the caucus’ annual fundraiser that draws Jewish leaders from across the political spectrum.
Alexander said she doesn’t personally support El-Sayed, but she believes the Jewish caucus could work with him and trusts that he takes antisemitism seriously. After the recent attack on Temple Israel, El-Sayed was the first politician to text her with a message of support.
“He’s present and showing up,” Alexander said. “And not just showing up to really left-leaning communities that are Jewish, but across the board.”
‘Hurt people hurt people’
Other Jews say that outreach has done little to quell concerns about El-Sayed.
“When a public figure is struggling to affirm Israel’s right to exist, many Jews are going to see that as a challenge to Jewish self-determination, not simply a policy disagreement,” said Amy Sapeika, community director of American Jewish Committee Detroit.
The other candidates, meanwhile, have for the most part only hinted at their differences with El-Sayed when it comes to Israel and antisemitism — a polite tenor Alexander partly chalked up to a culture of “Midwest nice.”
Stevens, seen as the Democratic establishment pick, has touted her record of speaking up against antisemitism “in all its forms” and described herself as a lawmaker who is “leading on combating antisemitism in a bipartisan way.”
McMorrow has walked a middle ground, saying that Israel’s military offensive in Gaza meets the critera for genocide while also dismissing definitional debates as semantic. She has also said the Democratic Party has an antisemitism problem, citing an antisemitic slur yelled at her Jewish husband during this year’s Democratic Party convention in Detroit.
The National Jewish Democratic Council of America issued a rare dual endorsement of Stevens and McMorrow — explicitly drawing contrast with El-Sayed.
“There are two candidates who stand with our community on issues of importance to Jewish voters, and there is one who does not,” CEO Halie Soifer said in a statement.
Those tensions came to a head after a man rammed a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield in March with the stated intent of killing as many people as possible. El-Sayed issued a four-minute video condemning the attack, while also noting that the perpetrator had four family members killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, including two children.
“Hurt people hurt people,” he said.
The response drew a public rebuke from Temple Israel’s Rabbi Jen Lader, who wrote in a Free Press op-ed that El-Sayed was “suggesting that violence against a synagogue in suburban Detroit could be understood through the lens of Israeli actions,” which she deemed “offensive.”
El-Sayed rejected the premise that linking the two events amounted to excusing violence.
“It’s unserious when you want to decontextualize violence, and then say you want to stand against violence,” he told the Forward. “I will never be the kind of policymaker who doesn’t want to understand why things happened if I’m serious about stopping them from happening.”
About a month after that attack, El-Sayed hosted a campaign event with Hasan Piker — a Twitch streamer often called the “Joe Rogan of the left” who has likened liberal Zionists to “liberal Nazis,” said he doesn’t have an issue with Hezbollah, and also said that “Hamas is 1,000 times better” than Israel, among a slew of other controversial statements.
The event drew condemnation from Michigan State Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League, which called the decision to campaign with Piker “absolutely shocking.”
It also drew the most direct rebukes to date from both opposing campaigns. Stevens told Jewish Insider Piker is “the exact opposite of someone I’d be campaigning with,” and McMorrow critiqued El-Sayed for hosting the event “at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state.”
“How do you bring everybody together, especially when there are difficult conversations, where there aren’t easy answers? You don’t fan the flames and stoke division just to get attention,” McMorrow said.
El-Sayed told the Forward that he would not defend Piker’s most extreme remarks but argued that politicians should engage with a broad range of people, adding that he wanted to “reach out to the 3 million people who follow him, many of whom feel locked out of our politics.”
More broadly, El-Sayed argues that his critics conflate the Israeli government with the Jewish people. He often points to his experience as a Muslim in helping him understand the experience of a religious minority, framing antisemitism and Islamophobia as related threats.
“I know intimately what it’s like to be discriminated against for how I pray, and I don’t want anybody to experience that, be it because they are Jewish or because they are Muslim, or because they don’t pray at all,” he said.
It’s difficult to gauge how El-Sayed’s messaging is landing with Jewish voters; unlike in New York City, Michigan races do not have polling by religious affiliation. In any case, he may not need Jews’ support to take office: Jewish voters make up just 1.4% percent of the electorate in the state.
Still, El-Sayed said he is looking to connect.
“I’m open to engage with any and all communities,” El-Sayed said. “As I’ve always said, if you invite me, I’m going to come.”
The post Abdul El-Sayed is courting Jewish voters — without moderating his views on Israel appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
My summer plans prove it: The Jewish Catskills are alive and kicking
In the collective memory of a certain generation, the Borscht Belt is synonymous with its gloriously garish excesses: massive resorts where spangled entertainers rivaled the kitchen in the production of schmaltz; a frenzy of activities that attracted crowds who reveled in the fruits of upward mobility, including more food than they could possibly ever eat.
I only had a brief encounter with that era of the Catskills. Judging from the photo in the tiny souvenir slide viewer/keychain that I still have from the Tamarack Lodge near Ellenville, New York, I was about 7. There I stand in between my grandparents, who are seated at, where else, the dining hall table. Tamarack me is tanned, suited in shiny print polyester and repulsed by the bitter breakfast offering, which set me off on four decades of avoiding grapefruit. I am smiling, and probably swam a lot, but all I remember beyond the frame of the photo is boredom.
Now the Tamarack, like its entire genre of bombastic resorts, is gone, the clubhouse and tennis courts succeeded by a yeshiva, a shul and grids of vacation homes referred to by one fan as “clean, beautiful, friendly and torahdig.” And I’m back.
For the last 15 years, I’ve been spending weeks every summer a short drive from there at a remnant of another Borscht Belt hotel. Unlike the Tamarack, never mind such behemoths as the Concord and Grossinger’s, Sunny Oaks always stayed small. To this day it has remained in the same family that has operated it since it was a farmhouse near the Woodridge stop on the O&W railroad.
In its hotel heyday, Sunny Oaks’ attractions included fresh air, community, copious food, card games, a talent show and a swimming pool, attracting a clientele heavy on public school teachers and residents of southeast Queens. Some were Holocaust survivors. Folk dancing was popular. Bernie Madoff’s in-laws were regulars, and his Ponzi scheme ripped through like a fire.
I missed all of that. My connection came through friendship with the Arenson family, whose generations devoted their summers and then some to keeping the hotel welcoming, staffed, stocked and standing before making the difficult decision to shut it down in the late 1990s.
They demolished most of the dozens of rooms and cabins, leaving just six standing along with the social hall, which they turned into their own residence. My family rents the Lake House, a bungalow that once hosted the day camp on the “lake” formed in 1950 when Myles Levinson, the son-in-law of Abe Pendrus, an immigrant from Belarus, brought in a bulldozer to excavate a new amenity. Abe and his wife, Ida, had tried to make a go at farming after retiring from running a candy store in Brooklyn, only to find better fortune bringing in boarders from the city.
My friend Julia Arenson has become the legacy keeper, digitizing photos and ephemera, hosting a Facebook group for alumni and presenting at the nearby Borscht Belt Museum. But Juila is never more the embodiment of Sunny Oaks as she is when she regales guests with stories about growing up right where we’re sitting, reenacting the Yiddish accents, eccentricities and talent show shticks of especially memorable hotel regulars. Her mother, Cynthia still runs the joint with steady hosting reflexes and an eye for finds at yard sales, which she hits every weekend to outfit the place. Julia’s dad, Ted, married into the Sunny Oaks universe and was all in. He kept the books and tamed the fields on his riding lawn mower until he died in late 2024.
Cynthia still maintains the swimming pool and does laps in it daily in season, scrubbing muck from the bottom as part of her routine, and invites female friends from the frum bungalow colony down the road to use it. Neighboring us in the other direction is a Satmar summer community whose loudspeaker blares recorded announcements in Yiddish that open with a rooster’s crow.
With abundant kosher grocery stores, minyans and pizza joints, the Jewish Catskills is thriving alongside a few towns on the old train line that have gone the route of bourgeois gentrification, offering cafes and bars, yoga and yarn and, sometimes, live music — a gentle echo of the entertainers of yore. At Sunny Oaks, organized activities are long gone. Rather than consume vacation experiences facilitated by tummlers and tennis coaches — as exhausted, striving immigrant city-dwellers with a few days to get away had every reason to do — we spontaneously, actively share in music, movement, cooking, conversation and the outdoors.
Even then, the outside world presses in. The pandemic brought broadband to our quiet road, utterly altering the experience and enabling new possibilities for work and play (including allowing me to edit the Forward from there for a spell this summer).
The O&W, which went defunct in the 1950s, is now a rail trail where construction is underway to span the Neversink River with a bridge, connecting paths used by pedestrians and cyclists. It opens fresh possibilities for Shabbat strolls and for the new Jewish Catskills to mingle. Crews hoisted the span into place in late May, and I am excited to see what comes of the renewed community connections, even as it bodes badly for my birthday ritual of slipping into the river in the suit befitting the day. The religious and secular Catskills, as everywhere, exist as parallel societies that share space, uncomfortably so when genders mix and modesty collides with summer abandon.
The classic Borscht Belt found ways to meld the worlds: The Tamarack accommodated both my Orthodox, kosher-keeping grandfather and, just a few years before my visit, a concert by The Who. Today, my child takes a bus home to Brooklyn where $40 in cash buys a seat in the back, on a sex-segregated coach where only men may sit in front and no choice of personal pronouns will change that. The artist who created the Church of the Little Green Man nearby displays a billboard on his property that declares “God Loves Fags” in Yiddish and English.
So please do make sure to visit the Borscht Belt Museum in Ellenville, which is doing a beautiful job preserving artifacts, telling the stories (so many stories!) and showcasing a new generation of performance talent. Just also make sure to roll down the windows or, better yet, step outside, to experience the Jewish Catskills that are still very much alive.
The post My summer plans prove it: The Jewish Catskills are alive and kicking appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
A ‘deficit of courage’ killed the free press in Germany. Will American journalists find the courage to thwart Trump?
Paul Reusch was managing director of a major German industrial conglomerate known as GHH, whose holdings included Bavaria’s largest newspaper, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten.
After two meetings with Adolf Hitler early in 1932, Reusch signed an agreement that the Munich broadsheet would refrain from “all unwarranted and personal attacks against Hitler and individual National Socialist leaders.”
One year later, Hitler lackeys were calling the shots in the newsroom, Jewish journalists had been forced out, and the newspaper was spewing hate propaganda.
The Third Reich brutally smashed free speech. Nearly a century later, it’s America’s Fourth Estate that is getting battered — by Donald Trump’s drive to muzzle his critics by exploiting the greed and hunger for power of corporate media executives.
Scott Pelley’s firing and the turmoil at CBS News are the freshest manifestations of this threat. But it’s been going on since the start of Trump’s second term — witness the craven settlements by ABC News and CBS News of frivolous lawsuits brought by Trump last year, his favored treatment of MAGA-aligned outlets, and his dehumanization of actual journalists.
“The news executives are acting as though, (if) we just placate Donald Trump we’ll get through this,” veteran TV journalist Jim Acosta said the other day in an interview on MS Now. “We have a deficit of courage and honor in this country right now and we need to get back to it.”
It was a deficit of courage that killed the free press in Weimar Germany. And like Paul Reusch, German media baron Alfred Hugenberg is a case study in corporate submission to authoritarianism.
Hugenberg was a steel executive, ultra-nationalist politician, and owner of some 50 provincial newspapers, of the Telegraph-Union wire service, as well as Ufa, the Third Reich’s largest producer of movies and newsreels. The Great Depression hollowed out Germany’s newspaper market, allowing Hugenberg to use his considerable capital to buy distressed papers and blanket the market with articles calling for an end to democracy.
Hitler’s Nazis and Hugenberg’s German National Peoples’ Party joined forces in 1931 in the Harzburg Front, an attempt to topple Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. Although the alliance ultimately unraveled, it brought huge financial contributions to the Nazis from German industrialists.
After Hitler came to power he struck rapidly to muzzle any dissent, either shutting down newspapers or taking them over to serve as cogs in the Nazis’ propaganda apparatus.
As America nears its 250th birthday, media turmoil is playing into the hands of Donald Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.
Trump’s obsession with silencing truth-writing journalists kicked into overdrive early in his second term, with his banning of The Associated Press, my former employer, from the Oval Office and from Air Force One, the Trump administration dictating who gets to be in the White House press pool, and giving preferential treatment to journalists who ask softball questions or can be relied on to make fawning statements about Trump’s grandiose ideas, as Trump’s personal insults toward journalists — mainly women — pile up in number and in viciousness.
What’s been happening at CBS News and Scott Pelley’s firing are warning signs of moves by Trump to take control of news media and suppress criticism of him. The drama started last summer with CBS’ parent company — Paramount — agreeing to pay Trump $16 million to settle a toothless lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. And then came approval by the FCC — led by Trump loyalist Brendan Carr — of Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. No quid pro quo here!
David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, hired Bari Weiss to lead CBS News. After firing a half-dozen top people at 60 Minutes, Weiss was accused by Pelley of “murdering” the vaunted TV news program and doing Trump’s bidding.
“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president,” Pelley said in an interview with The New York Times published this past Sunday.
Weiss and CBS News have denied Pelley’s allegations.
There’s more turmoil on the horizon — and more reason to fear the Trump administration will seek to deepen its influence on news operations.
This past February, Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery signed an agreement for Paramount to acquire WBD for $110.9 billion, and WBD shareholders approved the merger. Whether the deal goes through is up to regulators. The Trump administration is eager to see Ellison, the son of Oracle CEO and Trump buddy Larry Ellison, calling the shots for CNN. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a few months ago: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Ellison has said “editorial independence will absolutely be maintained” at CNN. But the purges at 60 Minutes are hardly reassuring. Jim Acosta maintains that the media conglomerate resulting from the merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery “will essentially act like a state media organization in support of Donald Trump.”
There are calls among journalists to show more support for each other, and to stand up to Trump when he personally attacks them. The optics at this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner weren’t great, with journalists giving a warm welcome to a man who regularly calls them “stupid,” “fake news,” “horrible,” “terrible,” among other insults. I wonder how they would have responded had a gunman not interrupted the proceedings and Trump gave a scathing speech about the assembled members of the Fourth Estate.
Acosta and other journalists are urging their colleagues — as well as news executives — to show more backbone.
“They (the Trump administration) are trying to put together a state-dominated media system in this country. And it has to be stopped,” Acosta said.
“There are a lot of journalists who can do something about it, and a lot of corporate executives who can do something about it. “
Acosta is not wrong.
Journalists working in the Third Reich were a mixed bag of Nazi fanatics, sycophants, opportunists, and career professionals who may have felt queasy about collaborating with the Nazis but kept quiet about it.
Resistance could have fatal consequences. Fritz Gerlich, editor of the Munich-based newspaper Der gerade Weg (The Straight Path), was murdered at Dachau. Erwein von Aretin, political editor at the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, was also hauled off to Dachau, but survived. Editors and reporters at the Münchener Post, a pro-democracy newspaper owned by the Social Democrats, were rounded up, jailed, and after their release ostracized and forced to live in penury, a story I tell in my book Enemy of The People: The Munich Post and The Journalists Who Opposed Hitler.
German journalists never put up any serious resistance to Hitler’s suppression of the free press at least partly because most of the populace had turned against democracy.
American journalists are in a different situation, one far less perilous than that of their German colleagues. They might lose access to administration officials by standing up to Trump, perhaps forfeit their seat at press conferences to MAGA media, be banished from Air Force One, suffer juvenile insults from Trump, or anger their corporate bosses.
But today’s journalists need to ask themselves this: Isn’t standing up for democracy worth more than a seat in the briefing room?
While interviewing Trump on Meet The Press this past Sunday, Kristen Welker showed how it should be done, persisting in holding Trump to account. When Welker challenged Trump’s claims of election rigging by Democrats, he exploded.
“We’re like a Third World country,” he yelled at Welker. “Your elections are crooked. And you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked, and so is ABC and CBS and CNN.” Red-faced, Trump stood up and stormed out
The post A ‘deficit of courage’ killed the free press in Germany. Will American journalists find the courage to thwart Trump? appeared first on The Forward.
